Yet More Syndication, Day 5 – Suite for Piano and Strings by Erich Wolfgang Korngold

This week’s theme is…Yet More Syndication!  I’m hard at work on more great content for the weeks ahead.  Until then, enjoy just a few more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

Yet More Syndication, Day 5 – Suite for Piano and Strings by Erich Wolfgang Korngold

Here’s something you may find a little stilted…

Prince John: “Have your men close in.”

Sir Guy has his men close in.

Little John: “They’re closing in!  I hope Robin sees them…”

Cut to a very alert-looking Robin Hood, who obviously sees them.

Bishop of the Black Canons: “I must commend your highness for the subtlety of your scheme!”

Well, I like to think that since that production script writers, and filmmakers in general, have honed their subtlety just a touch.  But it’s fun to watch, isn’t it?  This is from a very colorful 1938 film by Warner Brothers based on a story that everyone knows, Robin of Loxley.  What’s your favorite Robin Hood film?  Is it Disney’s?  Or Kevin Costner’s gritty “Prince of Thieves”?  How about Mel Brooks’ bawdy and hilarious “Men in Tights”?  Fortunately for us we can choose whichever style fits our mood, and I have met some people who prefer the 1938 Errol Flynn swashbuckling classic to all the rest.  Its official title is “The Adventures of Robin Hood”.

The film is gorgeous – a feast for the eyes.  It was created just as the Technicolor process was finding its legs and Warner Brothers’ costume and set designers were clearly only too happy to take advantage of the bold new medium, just as the designers of Oz were also keen to do for similar reasons (for more about the Wizard of Oz, see this post).  Another point of interest in this version of Robin Hood, one that fascinates me and many of my music-loving friends, is the score.  Listen to it again and see if you can follow the underscoring.  Do you notice how rich and, yet, nuanced it is?  Whatever the dialogue and acting may lack in understatement the music more than compensates for.

If you had played me the score and told me it was taken from a Wagner opera, I may very well have believed it (for more about Wagner see this post and this one).  The composer of this score, Eric Wolfgang Korngold, is one of a number of Austrian musicians who eventually settled in the United States and contributed their considerable talents to entertaining Americans.  Other musicians who follow that pattern include Max Steiner, who arranged music for Broadway shows and then contributed music for hundreds of Hollywood films (most notably Gone With the Wind), and Frederick Loewe who, in collaboration with librettist Alan Jay Lerner, created Broadway shows like My Fair Lady that endure in popularity to this day.  Incidentally, all three of these musicians with Viennese roots were child prodigies of some degree or another and all three came from Jewish backgrounds.

Steiner and Korngold have both gone down in history as incredibly formative to the art of film music scoring, inspiring countless film composers and setting a very strong precedent for lush, late-Romantic orchestral music in American films.  But in spite of these similarities, their professional aims were rather different.  Steiner seemed content to be a “work-a-day” composer for major studios, churning out hundreds of well-wrought scores.  Korngold on the other hand was able to be quite selective about the projects he accepted, scoring only 13 over the course of his career.  But, they are fantastic and distinctive scores, written at such a level of quality that their influence transcends their relatively scant quantity.  Korngold was not content to settle into a long, steady career as a film composer as Steiner was.  It seems that Korngold accepted film scoring as a unique and formidable challenge, but was still mostly focused on creating music for the concert hall in a way that Steiner was not.

Film scoring may have been a detour for Korngold too, encouraged simply by serendipity, or lack thereof.  Shortly after Korngold travelled to the United States at the invitation Warner Brothers to score The Adventures of Robin Hood, for which he won an Oscar (the first film composer ever to do so), the Anschluss imperiled the Jews of his native Austria and he remained in Los Angeles, becoming a naturalized American citizen in 1943.  He would never return to his native Austria.  He sought to resume his writing for the concert hall and stage in America with several notable concert works written after he left film scoring.

Before his travels to America to become involved with Hollywood, Korngold was having a ball (so to speak – see this post) working the scenes of musical Vienna, crafting operas, ballets and concert works.  He scored major early critical successes with a ballet composed at age 11, and two operas composed shortly after that.  Early admirers of Korngold included Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss, and Giacomo Puccini.  In addition to these stage works he was also at the same time creating chamber music and short orchestral works.  And he seems to have enjoyed a fruitful collaboration with Paul Wittgenstein, having written three pieces for his masterful left hand: a concerto, a piano quintet, and a concert suite for piano and strings.  The young and flourishing Korngold was in fact one of the first composers Wittgenstein approached about creating works tailored especially for him.

The suite for piano, two violins and cello, opus 23 (for more about the opus system, see this post) was the latest of the three works Korngold composed for Wittgenstein.  It is for the fewest forces and arguably the most elegant and direct in its communicative power.  Its collection of five movements could only have been assembled by an ambitious German or Austrian composer writing between the World Wars, so peculiar is its selection of movements to the sensibility of the musicians inhabiting that time and place.  In opus 23 Korngold creates a pastiche of musical procedures which seem to pay homage to the finest and most prominent figures of the German and Viennese persuasion.  But if I had to compare it the work of one composer, I would probably describe it as a Mahler symphony cast for a crisp and transparent chamber group.  There is a significant scale and sweep to many of the movements, five in number as was often the case with Mahler’s symphonies, exploring incredibly varied areas of the human experience, sometimes sincere (as in the beautiful Song fourth movement), sometimes biting and cynical (as in the sarcastic Groteske third movement), and always with an inspired and engaging melodic invention.  The opening Prelude and Fugue is a nod to pure German rigor.  The Waltz appeals to the Viennese, however Second Viennese (see this post) the disjointed and angular melody may be, and the Rondo Finale once again evokes the influence of Mahler who crafted similar finales himself (see this post).  That Mahler pervades Korngold’s Suite is unsurprising – Mahler served as an important champion for Korngold, having pronounced him a genius early in the prodigy’s career.  The Song is the shortest movement, the most direct, and the easiest to digest.  It is also sublimely moving and beautiful:

While Korngold is known to many music lovers as one of the greatest film composers in history, a reputation that is richly deserved, his heart never left the concert hall.  After his string of remarkable film scores Korngold returned to writing concert works even as he remained in the United States, sharing the invention and craftsmanship that shaped this early work, designed to showcase Wittgenstein’s ambitions, with American concertgoers.

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Yet More Syndication, Day 2 – Bebop by Charlie Parker

This week’s theme is…Yet More Syndication!  I’m hard at work on more great content for the weeks ahead.  Until then, enjoy just a few more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

Yet More Syndication, Day 2 – Bebop by Charlie Parker

Listen to this:

Does anything strike you about it, or does it just sound like jazz to you?  I have to admit that jazz is not exactly my cup of tea, not as much as other things (just being honest!  To each their own), but I certainly have respect for it, those who appreciate it, and those who perform it well.

There is an interesting and, many would agree, sad story around this recording.  First, let’s point out some details.  You can hear that it features a small combo playing a very rapid and intricate chart.  The rhythm section of drums, bass and piano supports two highly virtuosic soloists playing trumpet and alto saxophone.  They are both blazing in their technique, weaving convoluted and intricate melodic lines around the rapid chord changes laid out by the rhythm section.  All of these elements – the small combo, the fast and complicated harmonic rhythm, and the emphasis on a fiercely intelligent and intensely refined virtuosity – are marks of a style of jazz music called bebop, and these musicians were among the most important innovators and early champions of the style which has demonstrated remarkable staying power, essentially transforming jazz music into an artform appreciated by sophisticated aficionados, in contrast to the big band swing of the 1930s and 1940s, a genre of very entertaining music that has such popular appeal.  Today the solos of bebop are the subject of intense analysis and academic scrutiny, and its major figures are heroes to jazz musicians in all ranks of the study and profession.

The trumpeter’s name is Howard McGhee, and the alto saxophonist’s is Charlie Parker.  Howard McGhee was an influential trumpeter during the early days of bebop and inspired the next generation of trumpeters, but has not become the household that Parker has (well, more so anyway).  Charlie Parker was really a visionary, an unbelievable talent of the highest order, a melder of technique and artistry, practically an idol to students and fans of jazz music, and was, it seems, all of this in spite of his best efforts to destroy himself.

Listen to the first minute of Bebop (the track) once again.  You may be struck by the density of musical events which fills that brief amount time – again, the bebop style is incredibly virtuosic, requiring its performers to control countless notes over short spans of time, and all bebop performed by competent practitioners of the style will exhibit this feature.  But, did a certain event stand out to you?  An event that didn’t quite fit into the expected orchestration?  Go to 0:38.  Do you hear it now?  A one-syllable vocalization that pops out of the instrumental texture?  That is the trumpeter, Howard McGhee, exhorting Charlie Parker to “blow!” because he is not confident that Parker will continue his solo, or at least not with any coherence.  What does this mean?  Here’s the story…

During the late 1930s, a very driven and focused, teenage Charlie Parker was mastering the art of jazz improvisation as it then existed and beginning to work out his innovative technique of effortlessly modulating between distantly related keys using chromatic transitions and altered chords.  During this time Parker reported practicing 15 hours per day for a stretch of several years; no wonder he developed such facility.  And around this time, the 17 year old Parker was also in an automobile accident, which left him with painful injuries.  During his recovery in the hospital he was treated with morphine to manage his pain and he became addicted.  From there, it was a short jump to an all-consuming heroin habit, which he sustained, for better or worse (mostly for worse, probably), for the rest of his tragically short but very creative life.  Parker died, largely due to the stress of his lifestyle, at the age of 35, just as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had a century and a half earlier (for more about Mozart’s colorful and unconventional life and upbringing see this post).  Because of the toll taken by Parker’s abuse of narcotics, alcohol, and food, the coroner who tended to his body at the time of death estimated that he was between 50 and 60 years old.  By his time of death he had suffered cirrhosis of the liver, bleeding ulcers, and a heart attack, all at age 35.

His habit made him professionally unreliable and must have caused his personal finances to be incredibly volatile.  But other musicians still looked up to him and regarded him highly for his unrivaled contributions to the advancement of jazz artistry.  Toward the end of 1945 he and Dizzy Gillespie, a famous jazz trumpeter and fellow bebop innovator, traveled from New York to Southern California to give performances showcasing their new style.  They received a lukewarm reception (due to its dense and intellectual nature, bebop was slow to catch on with audiences – some might say it still hasn’t entirely; Glenn Miller is always an easier sell) and while everyone else hopped planes back East, Parker, in a characteristically short-sighted stroke, sold his return ticket for cash to procure heroin, forcing him to remain in California for a while.

But heroin was generally more difficult to come by there, and so Parker ended up using copious amounts of liquor for his highs when he couldn’t find his drug of choice.  Just before the 1946 recording session in which Parker and Howard McGee laid down Bebop and a few other tracks, he had consumed an entire quart of whiskey.  He was so drunk that he had to be physically supported during certain tracks, and his disjointed solos bordered on unintelligibility at times.  McGhee, apparently concerned that Parker would simply stop playing during Bebop, urged him on, and that is the reason for his exclamation.

But, amazingly, even hampered his alcoholic incapacitation, the tracks recorded during that session do exhibit Charlie Parker’s musical brilliance, in spite of their inconsistency.  Some fans consider them to be among his greatest recordings, and they are fascinating to listen to.

Charlie Parker was incredibly influential to his contemporary boppers, with regard to both music and lifestyle.  Many jazz musicians thought that his intoxication must be inextricably fused with his musical inspiration and so, largely because of his prominence, heroin addiction afflicted a disproportionately high number of jazz musicians during the 1940s and 1950s.  Just look at this list:

http://rateyourmusic.com/list/headphonian/jazz_artists_who_were_heroin_addicts/3/

There was a sense that Parker’s incredible spontaneity was a result of the narcotics sweeping away his inhibitions, and helping him to find his zone of comfort and inspiration on stage, helping him to overcome the intimidation and discomfort he would have experienced travelling so much and playing for different people every night, and so many of his fellow musicians figured it could help them to do the same.

But not everyone was taken in.  The aforementioned Dizzy Gillespie managed to contribute as brilliantly as Parker and stay clean.  He took a no-nonsense approach, firing any musicians in his employment if he caught them using heroin.  He also became quite practiced at dealing with the police, who tended to pick on his black musicians whether they deserved it or not.  Instinctively he must have known that succumbing to the ravages of addiction himself would have shattered his credibility with structures of authority, depriving the musicians in his care of an important protector and advocate.  Gillespie, who lived twice as long as Charlie Parker, used his full, rich life to promote jazz music and musicians, producing in numerous styles, and becoming what is often described as an “elder statesman” for the cause.  It is difficult to imagine a musician of Parker’s personality and appetites fillings such a role with the dignity that Gillespie did.

Other musicians, most notably Miles Davis and John Coltrane, went through episodes of addiction only to clean up after they realized it was not at all helpful to their artistry.  Indeed, musicians reacted all sorts of different ways to intoxication; some could perform that way, and some could not.  If you are interested to read a detailed account of heroin and the bebop jazz scene, see this very interesting panel discussion between jazz musicians, a lawyer, and a doctor, and a moderator from Playboy magazine conducted in 1960.  It is an article that corroborates Playboy’s literary quality, beyond the pictures, and touches upon many themes that are still most topical including racial inequality in the treatment by police, the ineffective nature of the American penal system, and the counterproductivity of what is today known as the “war on drugs”, among others:

http://www.cannonball-adderley.com/article/lapin01.htm
The heroin epidemic which swept through jazz culture in the middle of the 20th century is a testament to Charlie Parker’s role as an artistic reformer.  Everything about him was imitated, however much it related to the music he made.  Parker would probably have told you that the heroin was one thing, just something that happened after that car accident that he could never shake, and that his music was another.  And we’ll probably never know how inextricable they were.  People are complex, after all.  But, we shouldn’t forget how much he practiced, how driven and focused he was even before his fateful car accident, and just how keen his intellect and artistic vision were, whether or not narcotics were flowing through his brain.

 

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More Syndication, Day 1 – “Ombra mai fu” from Serse by George Frideric Handel

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 1 – “Ombra mai fu” from Serse by George Frideric Handel

 

Do you recognize these guys?

You may have seen them like this…

…or, this…

I’m positive that almost anyone reading this will have come across Tweedledee and Tweedledum, most likely in one of Lewis Carroll’s stories about Alice.  But these characters in Carroll’s stories are references, derived from nursery rhymes and other epigrams that circulated through the British culture of his time.  Here’s a common version of one of their rhymes:

“Tweedledum and Tweedledee

   Agreed to have a battle;

For Tweedledum said Tweedledee

   Had spoiled his nice new rattle.

Just then flew down a monstrous crow,

   As black as a tar-barrel;

Which frightened both the heroes so,

   They quite forgot their quarrel.”

Carroll, with his penchant for the absurd and whimsical, took great delight in incorporating such ridiculous and quasi-nonsensical characters and situations into his stories and poems.  And I suspect that he usually had some kind of good reason or commentary behind his sublimely strange choices.  Have you ever felt like Tweedledum or Tweedledee, so fixated on your agitation and itch for a fight that you may have forgotten to think straight?  Or maybe you know someone else like that…  It seems to me that Carroll was probably commenting on people who so love to perpetuate drama that they will fight and argue about the silliest things.  That’s more or less what Tweedledee and Tweedledum represent, isn’t it?

Here’s another, most fascinating poem about the silly, cantankerous twins:

“Some say, compar’d to Bononcini

That Mynheer Handel’s but a Ninny

Others aver, that he to Handel

Is scarcely fit to hold a Candle

Strange all this Difference should be

‘Twixt Tweedle-dum and Tweedle-dee!”

Unexpected, no?  Some people just love to have something to argue about (but not me!).  And if you are fortunate enough to currently be occupied with the middle or upper levels of Maslow’s insightful hierarchy, then you may see fit to use your abundant free time to argue about books, movies, music, or some other accouterments of comfy life.  And so, the London opera-going folk of the eighteenth century just couldn’t let you go without expressing their allegiance.  Some preferred Handel’s art, and others, that of Giovanni Bononcini.

I probably don’t have to tell you which of those composers posterity has come to favor.  Simply ask yourself which of those names you have heard before, or most often if the answer is both.  And of course history is lived in the moment; you never see the future until it happens, so the Handelian Tweedle-dees never got their chance to gloat!  Too bad.  But not knowing how things turn out is part of the fun of life.  Well, you are probably happier if you think so anyway.

The reasons for Handel’s dominance in posterity over Bononcini are both historical and artistic.  Handel and Bononcini were similarly cosmopolitan, moving between major cities in Europe to make their careers, albeit different ones.  But once Handel made it to London in the 1710s he was able to stay there, becoming the darling of the British, and pivoting from Italian opera to English oratorio, which the English ADORED after the imported art form fell out of favor.  For more about that process see this post and this one.  Bononcini was a very accomplished opera composer, and met with similar success as Handel in London (he even has the dubious distinction of having written the opera during which a long-standing rivalry between competing superstar sopranos, Francesca Cuzzoni and Faustina Bordoni came to blows on stage, a cat fight of cat fights, in 1727).  But his Catholicism and resulting Jacobite acquaintances somewhat stigmatized him from the London public and he eventually found it difficult to be hired to write operas, even by companies with which he had earlier scored major financial and critical successes.  Handel’s uncomplicated and uncontroversial Protestantism certainly helped to facilitate his social cohesion with the British and allowed him to more sensitively tailor the oratorios to their national and religious tastes.

But most historians acknowledge Handel to be the stronger composer also, more capable of filling the lengthening arias of their day with complex and propulsive musical textures.  Fortunately for us, we have the opportunity to compare the artistry of Handel and Bononcini in a very direct way.  There survive from both composers settings of a libretto called Xerxes, or Serse or Xerse at is is also sometimes spelled.  It was written by Nicolo Minato and first set by the Venetian opera composer Francesco Cavalli, Claudio Monteverdi’s most notable pupil, in 1654.  Through the magic of YouTube we can compare all three versions: Cavalli, Bononcini, and Handel:

Here is Cavalli:

What really impresses me about Cavalli’s setting is the superhuman grace and lyricism that pervades the texture.  It just flows and never stops.  You can hear the proto-tonality, almost fully developed in Cavalli’s language, but still with some remnants of the Renaissance harmonic language, which is almost a little exotic at times.  It does not quite fit our musical grammatical expectations, calibrated by the music of more than three intervening centuries, but it is lovely, isn’t it?  You can read about a contemporary of Cavalli’s with a similar style here. Cavalli is earlier than both Bononcini and Handel, is therefor a little hard to compare with either of them.  

So, on to Bononcini:

Also lovely, and fully tonal.  This one completely satisfies our musical grammatical expectations.  It is charming and melodic, and fits the language quite well.

And here is Handel:

And that’s one of classical music’s greatest hits, famous as “Handel’s Largo”, played in countless instrumental combinations, even though the actual tempo marking is “Larghetto”.  But whatever.  Do you hear how much depth, propulsion and focus Handel’s setting brings?  It’s qualities like this, in addition to his historical serendipity, that have helped his music endure through history, overtaking composers like Bononcini, and so many of their now lesser-known contemporaries.

And Handel’s Serse was not well-received at the time of its premiere.  It is often surprising to modern day listeners, but that glowing, lyrical aria is actually a comic statement.  It features the noble, practically immortal Persian emperor in a moment of personal reflection, singing a heroic love song to a tree that has sheltered him after a wearisome battle.  It’s a bizarre, almost surreal image, and it fit better into Cavalli’s style of opera, in which comedy and tragedy were more or less equally mixed.  For more on another opera in which that was true, see this post.  By Handel’s time, the practice was to separate comedy and drama into completely different channels.  Touches like this, which happen often in Handel’s Serse, made the opera confusing and difficult for its first audiences to comprehend, even though most modern listeners acknowledge it for the masterwork of operatic characterization and pacing that it is.
It’s just another example of our human difficulty in comprehending the sweep of history while we are wrapped up in it, the same difficulty that caused a wry wit to write a few lines of satirical verse about the absurd nature of the argument between supporters of Handel and Bononcini, comparing them to ridiculous and childish characters in equally ridiculous and childish contemporary nursery rhymes.  The author probably thought the argument was just silly, but from our historically advantaged perspective we can see that fashion often obscures our perception of true artistic quality.  And so we’ll always have arguments like Tweedledee and Tweedledum and necessarily defer to future historians to see the truth clearly.

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Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Day 2 – Second Sontata by Pierre Boulez

This week’s theme is…Pin the Tail on the Donkey!  Like many music lovers I boast an extensive and comprehensive record collection.  For this week, I closed my eyes and selected 5 different albums.  Here’s what I picked…

Pin the Tail on the Donkey, Day 2 – Second Sontata by Pierre Boulez

What does the word progress mean to you?  In all to which it is applied, there must be assumed some kind of teleology, a fancy word for an ultimate purpose.  Any action or influence which moves in the direction of that purpose is called progress, anything which moves against is called regress, and anything which does neither (moving laterally or not at all) could be called neutral.  In many situations the notion of progress is self-evident.  Of course we have to know what is good or desirable but, again, most of us can agree that this is self-evident most of the time.  So, if you have a troubled relationship of some kind and you seek harmony, anything that seeks to mend the underlying cause of the turmoil creates progress, and anything that adds to the turmoil is regress.  If you have a goal, anything that gets you closer to achieving it is progress, and anything that holds you back is regression.  Concerning goals I daresay it is difficult to find a neutral action: you are either working toward it or not; even if you are doing something else that does not necessarily sabotage your goal you are still delaying its achievement, which can be seen as a kind of regression, especially considering that goals are usually time-bound.  But we don’t have to get into that.

Many narratives of the human experience are described in terms of progress, as though there is an assumed good or goal at the heart of our collective striving and reflection.  We speak of progress in science and technology, the unspoken assumption being that any act which strengthens our level of knowledge and predictive power of the forces of nature and the application of that knowledge in order making our lives easier and more enjoyable is good.  We speak of progress in medicine, the assumption being that anything which prolongs life, repairs biological systems or reduces pain is a good thing.  We speak of societal progress in which peaceful coexistence, beautification of habitat, security and prosperity are good.  Sometimes the good of progress is a little more difficult to discern or causes contradictions.  For example, we may speak of progress concerning tactics and weaponry of war, but our moral sense ought to cause hesitation as we are tempted to call armaments and strategies which cause greater and swifter destruction good.  Still, if we grant that complete and decisive victory (which all human societies ultimately crave in battle) is good, then it makes more sense.  There is one area of human experience in which progress is sometimes described, but becomes confusing when truly considered, and that area is art.  Different people at different times have spoken of progress in art.  But what does this mean?  How does one progress in art?

In order to define progress in art, we first need to define what it means for art to be or to do good.  Have you ever thought about this?  What does it mean for a piece of art to be good?  There are so many possible answers, all motivated by a different estimation of music’s function and goal.  Typically creators of music are working from some such assumption, even if it is a subconscious one.  In tracing the history of music, Western music especially, it is easy to begin to regard the development of musical style through time in a teleological manner.  Indeed, I caught myself typing “progression” in that last sentence and made the conscious choice to replace it with “development”, itself not entirely free of teleological connotations :-O  Western music begins with Gregorian Chant, beautiful but simple, and lacking in harmonic dimension.  But is it?  Maybe it was perfect for its intended context, the ultimate good.  But then we imply that it was sure a good thing that organum, and later polyphony (see this post) came along so that we could get all that beautiful Baroque music and the masterpieces of Handel and Bach.  But, again, maybe they were just responding to the aesthetic needs of their times, no more or less advanced than Gregorian Chant.  But again we “advance” and Beethoven brings us to new expressive levels, after which Wagner deepens harmony, and finally Schoenberg dissolves it.  So, would that be progression or regression?  Or, does it depend on how you look at it, and what Schoenberg was responding to with his music?

Artistry is artistry, no matter when it happens, or in what style.  Still, it easy to fall into the trap of overlaying teleological sense upon the history of Western music, and the history of harmonic materials can easily play into that trap, especially the way it is presented in contemporary music history curricula.  According to a quick and dirty survey of music theory, harmony starts modally, becomes largely diatonic, then increasingly chromatic, finally dissolves altogether, finally becoming systematically controlled in its dissolution.  This “final” step, known as total serialization, prevailed in European music during 1940s, 1950s and 1960s, the primary harmonic language of Western art music following the Second World War.  Its technique, which treats musical elements like data to be rigorously ordered through mathematical processes that baffles many listeners as extremely unmusical, inevitably yields a style of music that can seem harsh, unyielding and almost entirely lacking in human sensitivity by those not initiated.  One masterpiece of serialism is the Second Piano Sonata by the French composer Pierre Boulez.  Though it may strike you as harsh and barbaric, the work invites comparisons to Beethoven for connoisseurs of this style:

 

Why did Boulez write in this way?  Amazingly, it seems to be for 2 reasons which paradoxically sought to connect with and dissociate from the past.  The path of harmony had become knottier and knottier, accumulating more and more chromatic inflections.  In the music of Wagner and his followers harmony became so chromatic as to almost lose its tonal center.  From there it was a short trip to losing it altogether, and eventually systematizing pitch choice with a technique that departed from traditional tonal grammar.  That is part of what made Boulez and the serialists tick.  But the other is that the lushness of late Romanticism, the style that directly preceded serialism, came to be associated with the horrors of European totalitarianism, conscripted as it often was by the Nazi propaganda machine.  Boulez and his fellow serialists sought to create a music that bore as little resemblance to the ecstasy-inducing lushness of Wagner, Strauss and their ilk as possible.  If this seems ascetic, you would not be the only one to have that thought.  Boulez himself seemed to view this as a teleologic progression.  I wonder if it ever struck his as coincidental that tonality dissolved right in time with the ancient European social order.

Can we call this music good?  Boulez was certainly a craftsman – this is difficult to deny.  Again, we must ask for the objective in order to evaluate it.  Is it progress?  Again, that implies some kind of aim.  Boulez seemed to think so given unambiguous statements he made to that effect.  For him, it seemed that the history of music, and perhaps the history of Europe too, was pointing to what must have felt inevitable to him and his fellow serialists: society needed to start over, and now that tonality had finally dissolved, reaching beyond its point of culmination in the music that would come to represent the lowest depths to which a people could sink, they could pick up the pieces of the shattered tonal system and begin to make a new manner of art which could accompany the rebuilding of shattered societies and peoples.  Framed in this way, the teleology becomes inordinately depressing, and Boulez’ artistic outlook paradoxically less so.  Still, it is difficult to escape thinking this way as we trace the music of Europe from its origins to its ultimate “destination”, wherever that may be.

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Music About Fireworks, Day 2 – Fireworks from the Second Book of Preludes by Claude Debussy

This week’s theme is…Music About Fireworks!  Is there anything more festive than colorful, explosive fireworks?  For centuries we have been celebrating with fireworks, and for just as long they have been inspiring equally colorful and explosive music.  This week we learn about some examples of this.

Music About Fireworks, Day 2 – Fireworks from the Second Book of Preludes by Claude Debussy

The keyboard family of instruments all share a common method of input, but their acoustical mechanics and consequent idioms could not be more different.  With all of these instruments the player uses his digits to select the pitches he desires the instruments to speak, and the motion and finger shape are essentially the same.  But, if you look inside, the processes by which the sound is stimulated, amplified, and ceased unfold in very different manners, inviting comparisons with other instruments that do not have keyboards.

If you hear an organ, the player’s fingers are controlling valves which permit or prevent the flow of air through pipes which resonate like flutes, trumpets, or other wind instruments.  So the organ is essentially like a great wind ensemble controlled by a keyboard.  Consequently, organs require an air supply, which is facilitated either by a human pumping a bellows, as it was during Bach’s day, or an electric machine as is typically done today – insert commentary about machines doing the job of men!).

 

If you hear a harpsichord, the keys are used to play what is essentially a guitar, lute or harp within the instrument’s cabinet.  The keys trigger what are very much like miniature guitar picks called plectra (singular plectrum) and the resulting texture, alive with countless points of sound, is akin to some wicked finger work upon a plucked string instrument:

 

And if you hear a piano the mechanism is yet different.  When one strikes a key upon a piano he sets into motion an intricate lever which brings the felt-covered head of a small hammer into contact with a string, much thicker and more powerful than those of the harpsichord.  For this reason the piano is often classified as a percussion instrument, even though we don’t tend to think of it in these terms.

 

 

The action of the piano proved to be the most flexible of all keyboard instruments, affording performers unprecedented control over the color and volume of their sound.  As a result it quickly eclipsed its other keyboard instrument cousins during eighteenth century, emerging as the preferred medium for the keyboard composers in Europe at this time.  Bach didn’t like them, although he may have been too conditioned by his considerable experience with the harpsichord and organ to keep an open mind as he tried some of the early models.  Also, the piano underwent rapid and dramatic changes during its early years which vastly improved upon its already impressive flexibility and versatility.  But Europe went piano crazy, and the Western world is still piano crazy.  Every new generation finds a new way to speak upon the piano which is simultaneously well-suited for the instrument and distinct from its ancestors (see this post).

This trend goes back to the very beginning.  The piano’s capabilities allowed composers to speak upon it in a song-like legato quite distinct from the lively pins and needles of the harpsichord.  The piano of the classical era sung like a human voice with smooth lines and dynamic shapes.  The Romantics who followed split into two directions – there was the percussiveness of Beethoven’s school and the soft, velvety textures of Chopin (see this post).  This is not necessarily a binary distinction – Beethoven could be quite lyrical and Chopin could be quite turbulent.  But it is more or less and apt distinction.  Beethoven went on to inform the German manner of playing, percussive and dramatic, and Chopin the French, elegant and mellifluous.  They are both still quite popular, although Beethoven is sometimes spoken of in near-religious terms that Chopin is not.  This may very well be a German thing, as the they have been apt to spiritualize their music and musical experiences.  Hans von Bulow once said that Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier is the Old Testament (see this post) and Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas the New.

It may have seemed at the time that Beethoven and Chopin had collectively managed to exhaust the piano’s potential for color and expressive possibilities, but in the early twentieth century a French composer seemed to know there was territory yet to be uncovered.  By the turn of the century Claude Debussy, something of a maverick, had already demonstrated his penchant for blazing ahead without the baggage of traditional forms and harmonies.  He had found colors and gestures within the symphony orchestra that most had not known to exist (see this post).  A gifted and virtuosic pianist, he had written steadily for that instrument also.  Accounts of his playing indicate that it was mesmerizing, almost as though his fingers melted through the keys and delicately touched the strings themselves, transcending the mechanical realities of the instrument.  Just as magical was his use of the sustain pedal, about which he seemed to have some kind of special, miraculous insight.  And he had strong words for the hallowed names of the German piano tradition:

“I heartily detest the piano concertos of Mozart, but less than those of Beethoven.  I became finally and completely convinced that Beethoven definitely wrote badly for the piano.”

Words like this seem audacious, even arrogant to us.  Beethoven is such a sacred cow.  But perhaps in order to create something new Debussy needed to break, and even disparage the giants of the past in order to break free and breathe anew.  And breathe anew he did.  In the two books of Preludes for solo piano composed in the early 1910s Debussy shows us colors and textures within the piano that were not known to exist, just as he had done with the symphony orchestra.

Each of the Preludes evokes an image through some kind of texture or harmonic scheme, colorful, novel images alive with cloudy mist.  Sometimes gentle, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes kinetic, sometimes calm, always novel and with a most imaginative dimension.  Each Prelude is subtitled, but Debussy placed the title at the end of the movement so as not to prejudice the performer with an unwarranted image during performance (of course this could only be short-lived – everyone knows the titles now!).  Debussy ended the whole collection of Preludes with a fantastic, frenetic movement called Fireworks.  From the very beginning the colors and shapes captivate us, illustrating clouds of smoke, smoldering fuses, and whizzing rockets:

 

 
The piano still dominates the world’s keyboard instruments.  Shortly after its invention, even in its early, imperfect state, its near limitless expressive potential was evident to all who played and heard it.  Every generation seems to find its own way to relate to the keys of the piano, forming its own distinctive palette of colors and shapes.  Perhaps none have been as colorful or evocative as the colors and shapes of Claude Debussy’s pianism, his stunning impressionist palette revealing what no one could ever have expected within the strings and hammers of the instrument.  Indeed, it seems to have been necessary for him to evaluate and ultimately judge some of the greatest music for the piano as inadequate, as strangely as that strikes so many of us, to hear and to ultimately liberate his vision from the strings of the piano.

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More Syndication, Day 4 – Transcendental Etude No. 12 “Snow Drift” by Franz Liszt

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

This post is dedicated to my friend Leigh-Ann Balthazor who loved Liszt (“Franzie”) as long as I knew her.  Leigh-Ann passed away before her time in September of 2015.

More Syndication, Day 4 – Transcendental Etude No. 12 “Snow Drift” by Franz Liszt

One of my favorite authors of recent years is Malcolm Gladwell, a journalist who wrote three great non-fiction books in the 2000s, The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers.

Gladwell has a knack for presenting theories about how the world works and developing them through statistics and anecdotes over the course of a couple hundred pages.  His stories are always intriguing and easy to read, and any of these books will have you looking at the world just a bit differently after you finish reading them.  And what I find in reflecting on the experience of reading Gladwell after a few years is that, while I don’t remember everything in those books, each of them has at least one major idea or observation about the world that has really stuck with me and continues to resonate with me as I make my way through life.  For Outliers it is the 10,000 hours theory, which states that anyone who masters any discipline ends up putting in around 10,000 hours of practice at some point.  For Blink it is the way that many of our decisions are made quickly and below the threshold of conscious awareness.  And for The Tipping Point it is the idea of the connector.

A connector is a kind of person.  By their very nature, it is almost assured that you know at least one of them.  They serve a very important role in society.  A connector is a person who, in a sense, “collects” acquaintances.  They have a way of making lots of somewhat shallow relationships with many, many people.  Do you know anyone who has in the neighborhood of 2,000 Facebook friends?  They just might be a connector.

Understand that when I say “shallow”, it’s not in a negative or judgemental way.  Connectors are simply operating out of their nature, which is to get to know a lot of people.  I love the connectors I know, and I think it’s just really neat the way they naturally become acquainted with so many different people.  I understand that my connector friends will never be the kind of people I get to know on a truly intimate level, and that’s okay.  They serve in important roles, bringing people together, catalyzing social progress, and encouraging everyone to do what they do best.  And part of what makes connectors what they are is a sense of affection and appreciation for all the people in their extensive networks.

I’ve come to suspect that the renowned Hungarian pianist and composer of the eighteenth century, Franz Liszt, was one of music history’s most important connectors.  I think Antonio Salieri may have been another, but that’s a story for another day (interestingly, Liszt and Salieri did know each other and worked together at a certain point in time).  Liszt was coming into his own just when the Romantic era of music history could have used a charismatic figure to link its early creators to its later ones, and he, with his tendency to want to meet people, appreciate them, and champion their music, seemed to fit that bill.

Often, when I read about Romantic musicians, I find that Franz Liszt was either a friend, an admirer, or both.  It really seems like he made a great and natural effort to get to know every prominent musician in Europe while he was alive and I hardly ever find accounts of him criticizing fellow composers.  I think everyone else must have done it at some time, but Liszt really seemed to love everyone, performing and programming musicians of the past, befriending musicians of the present, and encouraging musicians of the future.  He was just that kind of guy, and I wish I could have met him for the affection and encouragement!

One of his most important roles was as a conduit of the virtuoso tradition.  While he is known for his compositions that added significantly to symphonic repertoire, and even looked ahead to the unsettling harmonic languages of the twentieth century, he was best known during his lifetime as a pianist of astounding virtuosity.  In his 20s he had witnessed a performance by the great Italian violin virtuoso, Niccolo Paganini (for more on Paganini, see this post), and at that point resolved to become his equal on the piano, which he did.  Liszt and his contemporary piano virtuosi, headquartered in Paris during the 1830s, brought piano technique to unprecedented heights.

His compositions for the piano are an outgrowth of this new pianistic virtuosity.  The Transcendental Etudes were published in 1852 after having gone through a long period of development that had started in the 1820s.  What came to be known as the Transcendental Etudes were actually based on earlier, more difficult pieces, so perhaps Liszt was reducing their complexity in the interest of opening them up to a wider pool of performers.  Still, they are, as the title implies, transcendently challenging, sort of a cross between Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, with its systematic scheme of keys, and Paganini’s 24 Caprices (see this post) with their encyclopedic catalog of difficult violin techniques, applied to Liszt’s new pianism.  They constantly push the piano to its limits, and often paint highly poetic pictures in the while doing so.  

The last of the 12 Transcendental Etudes is nicknamed “Snow Drift” and its constant tremolos and sweeping scalar melodies, which constantly switch from hand to hand, and from within the tremolo texture to without, seem to depict a landscape being progressively covered in drifts of snow.  Toward the end a new element is added; the tremolos continue, but chromatic scales of very short note values begin to sweep through the texture like swirling winds upsetting the snowbanks.  The frenzied climax that follows takes the piece to even more dizzying heights of virtuosity as the wind grows stronger and finally abates.

From what I have heard this is among the most difficult, and also the most stunning of the Transcendental Etudes.  Like Paganini’s Caprices, these works that once seemed unplayable (and still do to many people) eventually came to be mastered by many subsequent virtuosos.  I have to imagine that Liszt would have taught and encouraged many of them himself, being the connector that he was.  Romantic musical Europe would have been a much different place without him in the mix, for his virtuosity, his creative mind, and his magnanimous sense of camaraderie, which he dispensed generously to the other musicians he encountered.  He was not content to keep the prestige to himself and clearly understood that the world of music would be a better place with him supporting his fellow musicians rather than suppressing them.  For this laudable quality, and others, I am thankful for the life and work of Franz Liszt.

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More Syndication, Day 2 – Ludus Tonalis by Paul Hindemith

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 2 – Ludus Tonalis by Paul Hindemith

Listen to this:

Now listen to this:

Does anything strike you about the two?  They are actually the same.  The two pieces were written by the German composer Paul Hindemith in 1942 and they represent a deliberate choice which reflects a certain way of thinking about musical composition.  But to understand how we got here, it would be good to go back a couple hundred years.

It was impossible for any musician working within the German legacy (a legacy which still informs the classical training of today very deeply) to escape the incredible gravity of Johann Sebastian Bach.  You hear his name all the time in musical studies, don’t you?  You’re never that far away from hearing Bach’s name if you are involved with music in any way.  I find his admirers far-flung across diverse musical styles and modes of expression.  It seems that musicians simply cannot help but to admire Bach’s musicianship.  Why is this?  The answer is deep and complex, but I’m going to try to sum it up for you.

Like any young musician, as a child I had known of Bach.  I had even listened to much of his music.  I knew his name was regarded with an almost sacred reverence by my musical mentors, but I couldn’t have exactly told you why.  Once I started college and began to mature a little more, the attitudes I had encountered, and continued to, regarding the musical contributions of the great Bach began to come a bit more clearly into focus.  I started to have the experience I understood my mentors to have in listening to Bach.  It’s hard to explain, probably impossible, but the more you study, listen, and appreciate, the deeper you are drawn into his mystical world.  Events are…charged, and with a kind of energy that seems to draw its momentum from the fabric of the universe.  The decisions that placed the abundant notes in those pieces seem at once inevitable and astounding, as if there’s only one route to perfection and a human actually found it.  The music is constantly alive with a potency you would expect from that combination.  So much of Bach’s music feels this way, and shortly after his death other musicians began to sense this superhuman aura that was somehow largely neglected during his lifetime (see this post for a story about that).

In studying his life and personality one is struck with the sense that, while on one level Bach was a very practical and successful professional, on another, parallel, level he truly sensed he was writing for the source of all universal ideals, and that he knew it.  I think it’s the only way to explain his sensibility that guided his life, which exudes the quality of never needing to justify himself.  However the people he encountered reacted to him and his artistry, he always seemed so supremely convicted of his proper path, but never boastful.  And what results from this sensibility is a body of aural work that is always flawless in principle, never needlessly flamboyant, and frequently clever to an astonishing degree.  Bach is almost supreme in his powers of summation, like a god (but a recreative one, not a creator) who is able to see inside the entire flawed universe, warts and all, and reorder it to resonate with utter divine harmony.  He absorbed everything around him, spake it fresh, and then proceeded to catalog every possible chemical reaction in the universe through his encyclopedic contrapuntal works which are still peerless in their completion and craftsmanship.  Does that seem lofty?  Many musicians find themselves contending with Bach’s legacy, and that’s my best attempt at summing it up in 2015.  Try me again in a decade and it will probably be a bit clearer.

All subsequent musicians within the German legacy, and many outside of it, had no choice but to recon with the force of Bach’s will, and they did it in various ways.  But in Paul Hindemith I see a German musician who exhibited a sensibility with many points of confluence to Bach’s.  His language was rather different, owing to the stylistic development of two intervening centuries and the curious, perhaps prophetic place, he and some of his like-minded contemporaries found themselves during a most turbulent and menacing time in history.  But so much of what I described in Bach’s legacy seems to fit Hindemith as well, although we are still too close to his lifetime to judge his legacy.  Additionally, Hindemith’s output is…plagued…by the departure from pure tonal grammar which makes so much modern music difficult to evaluate as objectively as Common Practice music often is.

Hindemith, like Bach, seemed to be aware of all the musical currents around him, was able to quickly digest them, and then created theories to unify them.  He saw inside music in a way that was acutely insightful, and in his prolific works he reordered the musical universe as he saw fit, and unapologetically.  I sense it was difficult to keep up with him, so fluent was he in his analytical and creative technique.  But you feel that his composition choices were always guided by some deep conviction, much like Bach’s, in that you always sense a deep integrity underwriting everything and determining the best possible order for all of it, even if it doesn’t always make sense on the surface (which is probably a result of the style as much as anything).  Do his theories hold water?  Are his orderings of the chromatic scale and intervals really based on anything real and true beyond his own opinion?  It’s hard to say, but his strong principles and unwavering integrity will always convince me that it is worth another look, even if I may not quite see it yet.  

Hindemith ordered the tones of the chromatic scale and and all the intervals in his own way as he felt their gravity

And, also like Bach, he never felt the need to justify his sensibility.  Richard Strauss said to him: “Why do you write like that?  You have talent!” to which the young Hindemith replied “You write your music, maestro, and I’ll write mine!”  To Hindemith there were no sacred cows, and he exhibited a brusque confidence in the face of stuffy decorum.  But if he admired something it was undoubtedly genuine admiration.  His music is often filled with the digested fragments of other styles, from Debussy to ragtime, but always refracted through the his musically-cubist prism.  He took it all in, and perhaps, like Bach, whether he liked it is not the right question, but rather whether he found it worthy of his study.

I’m sure the music of Bach played prominently into shaping Hindemith’s aesthetics and philosophy.  He probably would have acknowledged this.  And sometimes his music does so explicitly.  Very famous is Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, which arranges crafty preludes and fugues in every single key.  Less well-known is Hindemith’s equivalent work, composed two centuries later, according to a similar scheme, Ludus Tonalis, which translates roughly to “Play of Tones”.  Written for solo keyboard, like Bach’s monumental collection, Ludus Tonalis arranges fugues and interludes according to Hindemith’s version of the chromatic scale.  It’s not a precise analogue to the Well-Tempered Clavier, but it shouldn’t be, because it is Hindemith’s piece, and not Bach’s.  The fugues and interludes traverse a vast array of different styles and characters, an affective and introspective journey over the course of an hour.

And then there’s the prelude and postlude which respectively draw us in and release us from the world of Ludus Tonalis.  As a pair, the prelude and postlude are also a nod to J.S. Bach; a different work, but just as encyclopedic, A Musical Offering, which develops every possible canonic and fugal expression of an angular theme given to Bach as a challenge by Frederick the Great.  In this great contrapuntal game, Bach delights in looking at the theme from all angles, backwards, upside down, inside out, and creates clever music for every arrangement.  See this post for more about that.  Hindemith follows suit, and the prelude and postlude of the Ludus Tonalis are precise retrograde inversions of one another.  What this means is that the postlude is the prelude note for note, but backwards and upside down.  And it makes music spoken by Hindemith’s uncompromising voice in both directions.
With this bold and clever stroke Hindemith secures his inheritance of Bach’s breathtaking intellectual musicianship.  Hindemith is not Bach; they lived in very different times and cultures and so were inevitably shaped by different forces, but their sensibilities clearly resonate with similar aims and outlooks.

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More Syndication, Day 1 – Ablassen by Gottfried Reiche

This week’s theme is…More Syndication!  Enjoy some more of my favorite episodes in rerun 🙂

More Syndication, Day 1 – Ablassen by Gottfried Reiche

Here’s a crisp little number to get you going:

Great singing by Natalie Dessay, tight string playing by l’Concert d’Astree, and terrific trumpeting by Neil Brough in the outer sections.  It’s the peppy opening movement from Bach’s Cantata 51, and here’s what she is singing:

“Exult in God in every land!

Whatever creatures are contained

by heaven and earth

must raise up this praise,

and now we shall likewise

bring an offering to our God,

since He has stood with us

at all times during suffering and necessity.”

It has a very certain character, doesn’t it?  While you will find trumpet parts in every single one of Beethoven’s nine symphonies (though not, perhaps in every single movement), it is something of a rarity to find them in music by Bach.  Of the 250 or so cantatas Bach wrote during his time in Leipzig, a mere handful, probably less than 10, feature trumpet parts.  Of the 6 very colorful concertos known as the Brandenburgs – I’m sure you’ve heard at least one of them, probably this one…

…only the second concerto features a part for trumpet.  In short, Bach didn’t apply the trumpet all that often, only in very special conditions, conditions in which it was just the right affective tool.

Affect, or the German version affekt, refers to the way music makes you feel.  Music has long been renowned for its mysterious ability to transform the psychic states of its listeners, especially given its elusive and invisible nature.  Surely you’ve noticed this.  The next time you hear music, any music at all, sit back and notice the effect it exerts on your state.  Does it make you more content?  Enraged?  Peaceful?  Animated?  Depressed?  While we can often relate to the feelings of the subjects we see in painting and drama, it is only music that can change the feelings of its audience to the degree that it does.  During the time that Bach was working, musicians developed highly rigorous and systematized theories and practical guidelines about how to wield the affects of the music they created.  One common and pervasive guideline was that musical movements should be brief and completely unified in the primary affect they communicated.  For this reason, you will rarely find individual movements from Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, or their contemporaries, that exceed five minutes in length, and many are even shorter.  In addition to that, the feeling of the movement will be more or less the same from beginning to end.  Some movements are longer, but they tend to feature multiple sections with different, contrasting feelings.

Orchestration, too, was subject to the guidelines of affective practice in Baroque music.  Imagine a trumpet.  Would you use it to produce a calm, peaceful feeling?  Probably not.  How about sad or pathetic?  Again, probably not the first choice.  I would probaby opt for a flute to illustrate that.  But how about haughty, strong or confident?  That’s perfect for a trumpet, isn’t it?  Well, Bach would have agreed with you, and the movements in which he employed the trumpet tended to illustrate strong, extroverted feelings like pride, confidence and celebration.  Read the text from Cantata 51 again, and you can see that the trumpet fits that bill.

Whenever Bach had a trumpet part to blare he relied on an extraordinary bugler named Gottfried Reiche, about 20 years Bach’s senior, who had also settled in Leipzig.  He hailed from a smaller town just a few kilometers southwest of Leipzig, Weißenfels, a veritable trumpeter factory.  Reiche became Leipzig’s Stadtpfeifer, “town piper”, and kept busy providing music for all the civic and religious events in the town.  The town piper was a municipal position, which guaranteed an income provided the piper was willing to play whatever was necessary whenever it was necessary, and this required them to keep up with all the latest sacred and social music trends, as well as to accept apprentices and, or course, to stay sharp.  I suspect that Reiche, a most accomplished piper, was one of the few musical equals Bach ever found, judginging by the florid and virtuosic nature of the trumpet parts he wrote.  Reich was Bach’s first choice to realize all his first trumpet parts.

One peculiar kind of concert that German town pipers sometimes gave involved what was called turmmusik, or “tower music”.  This was anything written to be performed, usually by wind and brass bands, by broadcasting from the tower of a church or town hall.  When I visited Munich a little more than ten years ago I ascended one such tower on St. Peter’s Church in Munich:

The view was spectacular and I’m sure it would create a still more spectacular atmosphere to hear a choir of brass piping from above.  Take a look at this, the most famous portrait of Gottfried Reiche:

Do you see the notation he is holding?  It is thought to be a fanfare, and a piece of tower music.  You may have heard it before in association with a certain television show.  Here is its debut episode:

Did you ever watch CBS Sunday morning?  My parents sometimes did as I was growing up and its pervasive sunrise imagery made a strong impression on me.  The opening sequence is so centering and optimistic, and Reiche’s fanfare provides a most uplifting aural counterpoint to the bright, florid imagery, just as it must have done to greet sunrises or announce events from the spires of Leipzig in the early 1700s.

Reiche is said to have died shortly after playing Bach, specifically this cantata:

He collapsed while walking home the night following a performance and is thought to have had a stroke, perhaps from blowing so hard on the natural horn on which he would have played those trumpet parts (the valved models prevalent today were still a century away).

Most of his music is lost, but this particular ablassen is preserved, largely due to the great painting.  It is called an ablassen, which means “exhalation”, indicating that it was meant to be played entirely in one breath.  What a piper Reiche must have been!  It’s a little like an eighteenth century bugle tune, isn’t it?  Like the kind of thing you would hear an army bugler play, but florid with Baroque scales and sequential figuration.  What’s really astounding is that Reich would have played that on a natural trumpet, not much different than a bugle, navigating entirely from overtone to overtone with just his embouchure.
This ablassen is just a molecule of musical life in Leipzig.  While we know the heavier elements that were Bach’s great works, we often miss the full context in which those would have existed.  Reiche must have produced countless of these little pieces, all with pleasing the structure, shape, and proportion of this one, a brilliant way to fill a fraction of a minute.  Bach would have heard these in the morning, resounding from the towers of Leipzig.

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Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 5 – Sonata in a minor for arpeggione and piano by Franz Schubert

This week’s theme is…Music for Strange and Rare Instruments! If you hear the term “musical instrument”, chances are that examples from a certain list will enter your imagination.   But those are just the ones that made it big.  The fact is, the art of the musical instrument teems with near-infinite possibility and many of them slip through the cracks.  Sometimes, however, they manage to ignite the imaginations of composers before, or even after they do.  This week we explore some of these instruments.

Music for Strange and Rare Instruments, Day 5 – Sonata in a minor for arpeggione and piano by Franz Schubert

The official classification of any musical instrument which relies on one or more vibrating strings to produce its sound in organology, the scholarly study of musical instruments, is called a chordophone.  Organology at times seems built upon the premise of reduction to absurd levels, but it is always trying to get at the essence of what musical instruments ultimately are, which is surprisingly simple.  In the early twentieth century two musicologists, the Austrian Erich von Hornbostel and the German Curt Sachs boiled all of the musical instruments they could think of down to four broad categories of sonic mechanism.  The four categories are:

1. Idiophones, in which sound is created by a hard object struck or shaken
2. Aerophones, in which sound is created by moving air
3. Membranophones, in which sound is created by a vibrating surface
4. The aforementioned chordophones, in which sound is created by a vibrating string, fixed between two points

It’s fun to go through all the musical instruments you can think of and attempt to classify them.  Some take a little bit of thought, and seem to be counterintuitive.  And the presence of a piano-style keyboard can add to this ambiguity.  It’s really just an input system that can cause an instrument to work in any of the 4 categories.  An organ or accordion, for example, is an aerophone.  Whereas a piano is technically a chordophone, even though its manner of playing seems more idiophone-like and it is often classified as a percussion instrument.  Most instruments, however, are pretty straightforward, and their conventional families break down along even lines, percussion and keyboards aside.  Brass instruments are aerophones, as are woodwinds.

Within chordophones, there seem to be two large families within the canon of Western music, which developed respectively over the course of centuries in largely parallel lines, although there is at least one interesting incident of their convergence in nineteenth century Vienna.  The two families are the primarily plucked guitar family and the primarily bowed violin family.  They are all chordophones, relying as they do upon the vibration of strings to make their music, but they have developed distinctive idioms and contexts during their intervening years of development.

As long as humans have kept records, it seems, the families have remained separate.  There are ancient instruments which were plucked and others that were bowed.  Both of these lines flowered into the instruments we know and love around the same time in European cultures.  The violin’s cultural cradle was Italy, and the guitar’s Spain, although we would not have the modern 6-string guitar as it is without important advancements made by guitar makers in Italy and France.  The guitar is actually a much more continental phenomenon than you might expect given its stereotypes.  And don’t get the wrong idea – the guitar has always been a mainstay of Latin cultures, but it was much more popular in the cultural centers of European art music than you often hear.

Everyone knows that the violin was and is a major workhorse in the art music of Europe’s common practice.  But the guitar was there too, just working outside of the canonical tradition somewhat.  Everyone was aware of it, and many composers loved it, but there was a sense that it was somewhat different, and suitable only for composer-performers.  A revealing artifact to this effect is Hector Berlioz’ statement about the guitar from his great treatise on orchestration in which he writes that it is essentially impossible to write effectively for the guitar without knowing how to play it.  He continued on to say that when non-guitarists did attempt to write for the instrument, they ended up yielding music of trivial effect.  This may the reason that it did not serve the classical canon as its bowed cousins did.

But its was present to the European culture of classical music.  Virtuosi of the guitar performed in Paris, Vienna and major centers of Italy.  Luthiers built them and improved upon them.  Publishers released accessible music and method books about the instrument.  The Italian violin virtuoso and composer Niccolo Paganini (see this post) played the guitar as well and wrote prolifically for the instrument.  So Europe certainly loved the guitar, but due to its idiomatic nature it was never quite assimilated into the classical manner.  Interestingly, there is one story in which it almost did, albeit in a somewhat unexpected and unconventional way…

The finest guitar maker in Vienna during the nineteenth century was Johann Georg Stauffer.  He built guitars and improved their design.  He was actually commissioned by the empire to do this, and one of his major innovations is the invention of the “machine head” with which the strings of guitars and double basses are often tuned to this day:

 

 

This, along with a couple other modifications, went into the design of the distinctive headstock that still bears his name, both beautiful and functional, much imitated during his day:

 

Stauffer, like many luthiers, was also something of an inventor and experimenter.  He toyed with new musical instruments related to both the guitar and violin families throughout his career.  One of Stauffer’s best-known inventions, and one that had a considerable, if short-lived, run of success, is a synthesis of both families, the arpeggione.  The arpeggione has some features of the guitar and others of the violin family.  It has six strings tuned in the same manner as the guitar and a fretted fingerboard.  But it is shaped like a cello, held between the legs, and played with a bow.

 

 

For novelty alone, the arpeggione was successful after its creation, but perhaps it was novelty only as they are not made in great quantities anymore.  Still, the instrument managed to capture the attention and adoration of European audiences just long enough to inspire the composition of one masterpiece, a sonata by Franz Schubert.  It is thought to have been commissioned by his friend Vincenz Schuster, a virtuoso of the arpeggione, quite possibly the only one in history.  The work is still performed today, but usually transcribed for cello or viola.  Still, you can catch a performance on its intended instrument here and there and it is fascinating.  You’ve never seen an instrument that looks or sounds quite like this before:

 

Musical instrument makers can be crafty folks.  They are often looking to improve what they have inherited, and sometimes their imaginations dream up interesting things.  Sometimes they just want to have I little fun, I suspect.  Stauffer had his fun, marrying the disparate clans of bowed and plucked.  While the fruit of their union has not stayed with us, life is just a little more colorful for forays of fancy such as these.  Oh, and if you are playing 7 Degrees of Anton Diabelli at home (see this post), here’s another first degree: Diabelli published what is probably the only tutorial on the arpeggione in history, its author, Vincenz Schuster.

 

 

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MORE Music About Animals, Day 5 – Saint Anthony Preaches to the Fishes by Gustav Mahler

This week’s theme is…MORE Music About Animals!  There’s just too much animal fun to contain within a single week…

MORE Music About Animals, Day 5 – Saint Anthony Preaches to the Fishes by Gustav Mahler

A few years ago I was having a deep philosophical discussion with a friend of mine, a fellow composer.  We were debating the respective merits of prospering during one’s lifetime versus leaving an artistic legacy to ensure immortality with future generations.  Naval gazing?  Maybe, but it is a question that hangs around in the minds of many artists and musicians I have known, and one that will probably never really be satisfied or reconciled in any real way.  I think it is helpful in exposing two, often competing (at least it seems that way), drives that artists of all stripes must reckon with – it’s nice to make a living, but it’s also nice to create things that seem meaningful, and it doesn’t always seem possible to find their intersection in one’s life.

There have been enough composers in the Western canon to demonstrate that these desires are not always mutually exclusive; financial security is often so fickle and fleeting anyway, so why not just stick to principle and have all of one’s productivity go into leaving a lasting legacy?  It’s not so simple – a life is made of so many little decisions, and not all of them are worthy of a biography after 100 years.  But on the other hand, perhaps all of those little decisions figure into a legacy at some point, the butterfly effect and all.  It will always be hard to nail down a coherent and consistent philosophy of artistic legacy, and everyone has to deal with the day-to-day demands of life sometimes, although I suppose those things can figure into a legacy also.

Anyway, the conflict between these two priorities plays itself out in all of the choices that artists make.  Is it better to choose a potentially less-meaningful activity that promises a higher degree of material comfort, or better to forgo that kind of opportunity in favor of spending one’s mental and spiritual energy on grand visions and great art akin to those of the past which we revere?  Is it ever all-or-nothing?  Of course it isn’t – composers whom we regard as great spent plenty of time teaching pupils who lacked ability and ambition, and engaged in tasks merely to pay the bills.  Maybe history is a poor judge of such things anyway.

It is also important to note that Western artists’ views on immortality of legacy have changed over the years.  In the days of Bach and Vivaldi, few musicians considered the possibility that their music would be studied or heard even as far as a week past its creation.  Over the course of the next couple centuries that changed, and the Romantic sensibility is much more thoroughly based on the idea of creating for immortality, with at least one eye gazing squarely into the future, trying to discern which choices in the present will result in the greatest adulation on the part of future listeners and historians.  Certainly Bach and Vivaldi achieved a certain measure of this, but it was not their goal as it was more decisively for, say, Beethoven and Wagner.

Another wild card in this equation is the fact that technological innovation has allowed certain skills to leave a legacy that can be experienced much more presently to consumers of the future that they simply could not before.  Follow along with me here…  Imagine that you are a musician before the age of paper, and you come up with a really great tune.  How is it preserved for future generations?  Well, someone has to learn it from you, and then teach it to someone else.  It’s an oral tradition.  But as soon as paper comes along, we can commit our music to notation; granted the notation must be taught, but the legacy is considerably clearer and more solid.  For hundreds of years, musicians have been able to leave their notated music for future generations to discover, learn and perform.  Of course the performance practices change, but I would submit that generally, if the music is good enough, its quality will be evident no matter what kind of practice is used to perform it.

Paper allowed composers to leave their legacy, but performers and conductors weren’t able to do that it until the advent of the next great technological innovation, sound recording.  I’ve heard Arcangelo Corelli (see this post) was an unbelievably engaging violinist.

“I never met with any Man that suffer’d his Passions to hurry him away so much, whilst he was playing on the Violin, as the famous Arcangelo Corelli; whose Eyes will sometimes turn as red as Fire; his Countenance will be distorted, his Eye-Balls roll as in Agony, and he gives in so much to what he is doing that he doth not look like the same Man.”

But we have to take the journalist’s word for it and imagine what it was like; Corelli’s legacy of performance is relegated to verbal description, simply because he lived before the age of audio recording.  But what if you wanted to hear Rachmaninoff play?  Fortunately, you can, because his life coincided with the development of that technology:

 

Audio recording technology is the only reason that we are able to hear the sound of the castrati; the first audio recordings were produced just as the last representatives of this archaic practice were dying out (see this post).

But what about conductors?  How is their legacy best expressed?  I would argue that the legacy of the conductor is most fully expressed by yet another advancement beyond audio recording, video.  It is almost cliche to say that “the conductor is the only musician onstage who doesn’t make a sound”, but it’s true, and extraordinary considering how deeply he can shape performances of those who do make sounds.  Because of this, audio recordings will never entirely capture the complete art of a conductor.  Sure, we can hear how the music is shaped by his command, and at times particularly emphatic conductors will even break their silence and urge on their ensembles, as Thomas Beecham did when he conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in this electrifying performance of Sibelius’ Second Symphony in 1954.  Listen to the beginning of finale to hear that:

 

Beecham did survive long enough to be recorded on video.  But many conductors didn’t.  Fortunately for us, we are able to enjoy the legacies of conductors like Bernstein, Karajan, Reiner, Stokowski, and even Richard Strauss almost as though we are watching them in person since so many of their performances were able to be committed to video during their lifetimes.  But so many other conductors legacies’ are based only on reputation.  Some very great conductors enjoyed careers during their lifetimes which equaled, and in some cases surpassed, their careers as composers, but because of the state of technology their impact is lost to us, their legacy impaired.  One of the most notable examples of this is Gustav Mahler.

Today Mahler is known to most of us a great composer, but had he lived a few decades later, or had the state of the technological art run just a little faster, we may have a much more vivid experience of his primary vocation, conducting.  That was Mahler’s full time job, and he became one of Europe’s best.

But there was no technology to capture this for posterity, only paper, and so our primary, really our only experience of Mahler today, is through his compositions, also some of Europe’s best.  But that is why there are so few them, especially in comparison with other composers who practiced on a full time basis.  As a composer Mahler’s scope was rather limited on account of his limited composition time; he really only left work in two genres, symphonies and songs with orchestral accompaniment.  With very few exceptions, hardly any other composer of his stature (besides composers who primarily wrote operas) left work in such limited genres.  And it is his symphonies that get most of the press, representing as they do the post-Romantic culmination of Beethoven’s vision (see this post).

But his songs are full of transparent beauty, and most rewarding to those who discover them.  His first masterpiece was not a symphony, but a song cycle, Songs of a Wayfarer.  Composed during the late 1880s, just before his First Symphony, the two works share much material, as do later symphonies and song cycles.  Aside from the other notable song cycles, which include Songs for the Death of Children and the monumental Songs of the Earth, there is a collection based on German folk poems published in a volume called The Youth’s Magical Horn.  The wide variety of texts found within this collection emanates the earthy wisdom of the Volk.  One of the most entertaining is the bitingly satirical Sermon of Saint Anthony to the Fishes, based on a legendary incident from the life of St. Anthony of Padua, the thirteenth century Portuguese saint.  In the original story, St. Anthony is fed up with preaching to hypocrites who won’t listen, and in frustration turns to a stream and preaches to the fishes there.  As they gather to listen, onlookers are struck by the numbers he has attracted, and are thus convinced to listen to him.  The poem from The Youth’s Magical Horn puts a different spin on it – each species of fish represents a hypocrite of some kind; they all love the sermon, but leave set in their sinful ways.  Hardly a more pointed exploration of nature versus nurture can be imagined.  Mahler’s music captures the satirical bite:

 

Antonius zur Predigt Die Kirche findt ledig. Er geht zu den Flüssen und predigt den Fischen; Sie schlagen mit den Schwänzen, Im Sonnenschein glänzen. Die Karpfen mit Rogen Sind [allhier gezogen]1, Haben d’Mäuler aufrissen, Sich Zuhörens beflissen; Kein Predigt niemalen Den Karpfen so g’fallen. Spitzgoschete Hechte, Die immerzu fechten, Sind eilend herschwommen, Zu hören den Frommen; [ Kein Predigt niemalen Den Hechten so g’fallen.]2 Auch jene Phantasten, Die immerzu fasten; Die Stockfisch ich meine, Zur Predigt erscheinen; Kein Predigt niemalen Den Stockfisch so g’fallen. Gut Aale und Hausen, Die vornehme schmausen, Die selbst sich bequemen, Die Predigt vernehmen: [Kein Predigt niemalen den Aalen so g’fallen.]2 Auch Krebse, Schildkroten, Sonst langsame Boten, Steigen eilig vom Grund, Zu hören diesen Mund: Kein Predigt niemalen den Krebsen so g’fallen. Fisch große, Fisch kleine, Vornehm und gemeine, Erheben die Köpfe Wie verständge Geschöpfe: Auf Gottes Begehren Die Predigt anhören. Die Predigt geendet, Ein jeder sich wendet, Die Hechte bleiben Diebe, Die Aale viel lieben. Die Predigt hat g’fallen. Sie bleiben wie alle. Die Krebs gehn zurücke, Die Stockfisch bleiben dicke, Die Karpfen viel fressen, die Predigt vergessen. Die Predigt hat g’fallen. Sie bleiben wie alle.

St. Anthony arrives for his Sermon and finds the church empty. He goes to the rivers to preach to the fishes; They flick their tails, which glisten in the sunshine. The carp with roe have all come here, their mouths wide open, listening attentively. No sermon ever pleased the carp so. Sharp-mouthed pike that are always fighting, have come here, swimming hurriedly to hear this pious one; No sermon ever pleased the pike so. Also, those fantastic creatures that are always fasting – the stockfish, I mean – they also appeared for the sermon; No sermon ever pleased the stockfish so. Good eels and sturgens, that banquet so elegantly – even they took the trouble to hear the sermon: No sermon ever pleased the eels so. Crabs too, and turtles, usually such slowpokes, rise quickly from the bottom, to hear this voice. No sermon ever pleased the crabs so. Big fish, little fish, noble fish, common fish, all lift their heads like sentient creatures: At God’s behest they listen to the sermon. The sermon having ended, each turns himself around; the pikes remain thieves, the eels, great lovers. The sermon has pleased them, but they remain the same as before. The crabs still walk backwards, the stockfish stay rotund, the carps still stuff themselves, the sermon is forgotten! The sermon has pleased them, but they remain the same as before.

Like Songs of a Wayfarer, many of which appear in the First Symphony, Saint Anthony appears as a scherzo in Mahler’s mighty Second Symphony, nicknamed the “Resurrection”.
It is Mahler’s lot that the vehicle of his primary occupation was unable to be recorded for posterity due to an accident of timing.  I’m sure it would be wonderfully illuminating and inspiring to behold him as a conductor.  However, he was able to leave a legacy given his compositional prowess.  How many conductors are simply lost to our knowledge of history because they left no other legacy?  And who knows which future technological innovations will present themselves to give us the opportunity to preserve our legacies in ways that are not currently possible?  We are all making choices every day about what to leave behind for future generations.  Some of us, like the conductors of the past, leave little in the way of artifacts which can be rediscovered,.  Some of us leave remnants that are more tangible.  Due to technology, conductors no longer need to rely on their reputations for their legacies, but it might not hurt to diversify one’s portfolio of influence, just to be a little safer.

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