Bol - Bol - ero - ero.

Ravel’s Bolero is, - what? A famous piece. An infamous piece. A notorious piece. All of these and, deceptively, much more. Ravel himself famously said that it contained “no music”, which was a tad on the self-deprecating side. But you can see what he meant - it is tedious, popular, redundant, exciting, infuriating, but it contains no counterpoint, no contrast of mood, no modulation. It is one of those pieces that lives right on the cusp between music and non-music:- like the opposite extreme from Schoenberg’s early atonal works.

But whereas Schoenberg almost fell off the precipice in his groping for ultimate seriousness, Ravel almost became catatonic in his flirtation with banality and empty-headedness.

Bolero is a member of a little clutch of pieces that fed my enthusiasm for classical music as a small child. I had a collection of 12 inch 78 rpm discs of my favorite pieces, culled from my father’s library. Bolero took up two full discs - four sides of music that had to be manually placed on the turntable, flipped, and changed when the time came. Four full sides it took up, but for the life of me I could never really figure out why. As rendered, acoustically, through my lovingly filed fiber needles, all four sides sounded pretty much identical to me, except that Side One seemed a bit tentative, and Side Four was the only one with a proper ending. I suppose stopping for a disc turn hampered the flow quite a bit, but so it did for all pieces. Poor old Beethoven’s Eroica occupied a fairly hefty suitcase, and was effectively dismembered into a chain of sound-bites.

Even so, from the beginning I was aware that there was something about Bolero that was distinctly odd. Hypnotically, inhumanly so.

The piece consists, as everyone knows, of the same tune played over and over again until it eventually stops. That is all that happens. So why is it so famous, notorious, well-known, adored? And since it is so successful, and its construction so simple, why isn’t it merely one amongst a whole crowd of imitations, of me-too pieces, mining the same paralyzing seam? Why does it stand out so? Exasperating as it is, wherein lies it’s undeniable brilliance?

Usually, in music as in other things, it is the smaller details that are most easily grasped, and the big picture that is elusive. For instance, we all know the tune of the last movement of Beethoven’s 9th, and can hum along with it easily. But can you describe, succinctly and accurately, the shape and structure of that finale? (And a chronological account of the type found in most program notes: “This happens, then that happens, then, surprisingly, we are suddenly plunged into the other, before all is resolved by that” - this sort of thing won’t do, as it is merely a list, not a grasping of the whole entity.) With most pieces of normal music, it is easy to latch onto the tune, but hard to grasp the overall structure and plot, which probably exploits surprise and deception anyway.

Now in Ravel’s Bolero, exactly the opposite is true. It is unbelievably easy to grasp everything that is to be grasped about the structure and drama on a single hearing. A tune is played over and over again, each time by different instruments, getting louder as it goes along, until it gets very loud, and then stops. That’s it.

But can you actually hum the tune? The tune that you have heard so many times, can you actually recall it accurately? I’ll bet that you can’t. Try putting a recording on and humming along with it and I am sure you will go wrong within seconds. Again it is the reverse of the Beethoven. This melody is completely unmemorable. Instantly recognizable, but impossible to remember correctly. The way Ravel achieves this is simple - it stems from the lack of any relationship between the melody and the accompaniment. The accompaniment is ruthlessly in 3/4 time, with the drum going

“Tum-ticketty-Tum-ticketty-tum-tum
"Tum-ticketty-Tum-ticketty-ticketty-ticketty”

over and over without exception. The harmony is static too. But the tune isn’t in 3/4, except by accident sometimes. It isn’t in anything really, as regards being in 2 or 3 or 4, it is just meandering and chaotic. It isn’t in any particular key either. It just wanders around the scale, pretty much without direction, until it eventually makes it to the home note. So even as the work drones on and on and on, it never gets to be as infuriatingly predictable as, say, “twinkle twinkle little star” 30 times over, since at the end of each stage, you still feel you haven’t quite “got it” yet.

There are other irregularities that slip past the censor, too. It isn’t really one tune going around, but two half-tunes, not played alternately, as would make sense, but the first half gets played twice, each time as if it were a complete tune, then the second half is played twice. So although it sounds elusive but repetitious, it takes four verses of the “tune” before the cycle actually comes round again. This also means that whichever part of the tune you are hearing now, part A or part B, there is always a 50/50 chance about which bit you will hear next. Doubt at every turn.

Regarding the crescendo: there isn’t one. Each version of the tune, over time, is louder, bolder, than previous ones, but nothing builds a crescendo. It just goes up in little steps that result inevitably from the changes in orchestration. Nonetheless, by the end it is much louder than it was when it started. Similarly with the climax: again, there isn’t one. When the piece is really near to the end, Ravel just steps aside into a different key for about four measures, so that when he immediately steps back again, it feels like the resolution after a climax that wasn’t ever really there. Just the cigarette, you might say.

We all think it is dumb, redundant, and a bit low class. But it is cunning beyond belief. Think of this piece as empty if you like, but it is far more sophisticated than it sounds. You think you know exactly what is happening, but you really don’t.

©ajm 2006

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Mahler's Poem of Ecstasy

The dangerous power of Words. Mahler’s 6th Symphony has come to be known as “Tragic” for reasons that are neither clear nor important. Artists and commentators tend to like “tragic” things because it makes them seem “deep.” Mahler almost always used programmatic ideas as part of his method of composing, as a way of getting the juices flowing, yet he usually wanted those crutches thrown away once the piece existed. He often asked that explanations of the “meaning” of movements be jettisoned, suppressed, or rejected. The titles for the movements of the third symphony are always spelled out in program books, even though Mahler asked that they should not be. It is all part of the word-mining in scores I was just arguing against.

In the case of the 6th Symphony, the misconception, I humbly submit, has misled people terribly. Since it is called “Tragic” (which, by Mahler it usually wasn’t) it is interpreted as being simply and consistently that; tragic. Writers and conductors speak of it as a deeply pessimistic work.

Well, to my ears, this just isn’t a tragic symphony at all. Not if by tragic we mean pessimistic, defeatist, melancholy, grief-filled. Sure, it ends badly, but we all do. Death awaits us all, and eventually snuffs us out. This symphony certainly confronts that fact. And some people spend their lives in misery because of it. But most of us don’t, and even the most admired, envied, and desired lives still end in death. All optimism, aspiration, striving, and, yes, ecstasy, occurs in the context of eventual extinction. That, in a sense, is the true tragedy of life, and we don’t have to make everything miserable to make the point.

The final stroke at the end of the 6th Symphony is a stunning, stunningly loud, bleak A minor chord with drumbeats. It means death and it means the end. There can be no doubt of that. But that is only the last few seconds of a magnificent piece lasting well over an hour, and all the music leading up to that moment is a striving to avoid it, to get close to that particularly intense joy we call ecstasy. Realize that, and then the final chord is an astounding shock, not just an “I told you so” from the conductor.

In fact, a bizarre circular argument has compounded the damage. The order of the middle movements is a famous riddle. Mahler always performed First- Andante- Scherzo- Finale, but over the last few decades almost everyone has performed First- Scherzo- Andante- Finale, just because the critical edition says you should. The reasons for this have recently been revealed as fraudulent, by the way.

One of the rationalizations most often used for putting the scherzo as the second movement (which, you will recall, is something Mahler never did in performance) is that it makes the symphony more tragic. The argument goes like this. The first movement seems to end optimistically, but the scherzo begins as a sarcastic, negative parody of the first movement, so by putting the scherzo immediately after it, the optimism of the first movement is cancelled out. Putting the scherzo second makes the symphony more tragic. And why should we want to do that? Why, because it is a “tragic” symphony. The argument is circular and worthless. And it isn’t what Mahler did.

But I am not even trying to make an argument from authority here, I am just asking people to open their ears. This is a joyous, wonderful, life-affirming, ecstatic symphony, in which the many approaches to joy are, in the end, defeated.

Mahler famously said “My sixth will propound riddles the solution of which may be attempted only by a generation which has absorbed and truly digested my first five symphonies.” Perhaps there is a fairly simple point behind this gnomic remark, which is that this is the first symphony of Mahler’s which contains not just alternating moods and qualities, but moods and destinies which are fighting it out simultaneously.

A quick over-simplistic review of his symphonies:

1 Nature – morphing into – bombastic triumphalism.
2 A re-write of Beethoven’s 9th
3 Simple moods: joyous, gentle, mysterious, loving.
4 Beauty, innocence and calm, with an undercurrent of doubt.
5 This is the tragic symphony, disguised by having a joyous ending.
6 The Poem of Ecstasy, that ends fatalistically.

Six therefore seems to be the inverse of five. The difference is that the 6th, particularly in the last movement, shows aspiration and doom struggling while bound together. There are the three famous hammer blows of course, but there are several more places where a “hammer-blow” seems to hit the music, whether or not an actual hammer is hit.

The first hammer blow with a real hammer strikes while the music is riding high, and hardly has much effect. The “hero” freaks a little, but soon is energized into an almost military counter-attack. The second hammer blow is more damaging. The hero is already weaker now, and this blow causes him to struggle mightily, quickly to collapse. Near the very end of the symphony, the hero tries to gain a little bit of strength once more, but collapses from his own frailty. It is just after this uncaused collapse that the third hammer blow strikes. He is already on the floor, and so it seems less effective, less necessary. Finally, even in the funereal aspirations of the brass choir, the music seems to want to aspire, and is finally cut off by the closing chord – the ultimate hammer-blow.

These three hammer blows, and the final coup de grace, are all the more shocking and effective if we realize that everything else about this symphony is striving for, and expecting, ecstatic fulfillment. In this sense, it is indeed quite close to the Aristotelian idea of tragedy. But this is no “poor me” symphony.

How people can think this whole Symphony bears a message of doom is puzzling to me. Apart from anything else, whenever I have had a chance to conduct it, the players and I always seem to have terrific fun. It is a great piece that we all love. That may seem like an irrelevant and superficial piece of reportage, but we don’t usually feel that way about the Mozart Requiem or the War Requiem, the St. John Passion or the Tchaikowsky 6th, or the Sibelius 4th. Now there is a tragic, afflicted, symphony. For the Mahler, just rip off that word “tragic” and throw it away, forget about it. Then listen to his Poem of Ecstasy, and be blindsided by the stunning finality of its closing seconds.

©ajm 2005

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Faithful to the Score? Bah! Humbug.

Gunther Schuller is not alone in considering the highest role of the conductor to be that of faithful guardian of the score. He declares the score to be a “sacred document” (please see my earlier complaint about sacred texts.)

I beg to differ, not because I think we should not be faithful to the score, but because the aspiration is trivial. That’s no more than the starting point. Of course we must be faithful to the score, because, usually, that is all that we have. We have, for the most part, no further information, so while we are performing a work like, say, a Beethoven Symphony, that is what we are doing – enacting the score. Our goal is to realize the piece that Beethoven wrote down in the score, and to start messing with it and changing or ignoring details is to be doing something else entirely, and probably something that most people will not be very interested in.

Pointing this out, and complaining about conductors who do not do it, is hardly a deep and profound insight, anymore than it would be to suggest that people who crash their cars are not good drivers. So I reiterate, even though being faithful to the score may be difficult beyond human capability, and none of us may ever fully achieve it, the elevation of this as a holy goal is trivial. The danger comes from using this as a cloak to silence dissent and justify exhortations that are entirely a matter of Schuller's personal opinion. I am not knocking Schuller's personal opinions. He must use these when he performs. We all must. We have no option.

Yes, we must be faithful to the score. But there is no logical path that leads from this to the assumption that the composer would not want to change things if he were here, that the composer felt he had solved all his problems perfectly, that the composer was not dissatisfied by some passages and embarrassed by others, that, after listening even to our performance, he might not change his mind both about notational details, and maybe about major things like tempo and even structure.

As long as the composer is still alive, (consider the habits of Rachmaninoff and Mahler) constant revisions and tinkering seem to be the norm. The ontological nature of composition and the score do not change just because the composer happens to snuff it. The practical situation changes totally and irrevocably, because you can no longer ask the composer questions, and get feedback. We are not justified, after the composer dies, in thereafter pretending to be the composer and starting to rant along the lines of “If Bach were alive today, he would be writing for Britney Spears.”

But neither is there any point in pretending that, just because the composer is dead, all of a sudden the score has become like a Papal Pronouncement Ex Cathedra, guaranteed free of error and worthy of self-abasing idolatry, suppressing not just our critical faculties, but also our artistic instincts, without which we have no right to be on stage at all.

It’s a pity we cannot go back to the source, consult, and keep the music part of an evolving, inventive, musical tradition, but we can’t, and we just have to get over it. When there is a better way of finding out what really happened, we should take it. You don’t look at sheet music to learn about the music of Charlie Parker, you listen to the recordings, as we also do with Stravinsky, Elgar, Britten, Strauss. What a terrible shame that recording and penicillin were not developed just a few years earlier, so that we could actually hear Mahler conducting his 13th Symphony, and his 6th Symphony with the Andante as the second movement. How many doubts and opinions would disappear! To have an actual acoustic record of this most famed and idiosyncratic of conductors and composers! Ah me!

Who would not want to hear how Beethoven sounded in performance? We are not entitled to pretend that we know what it would have sounded like, but neither should we adopt the bizarre doctrine of maintaining that the score contains complete information, everything we would wish to know, faultlessly, (except for misprints) to an infinite degree of detail. This is simply silly, a case of over-reading (post on that coming up), and an unjustified defensive posture adopted so that conductors, with only the score to go by and therefore profoundly ignorant about a great deal, can nonetheless take charge of an orchestra with an air of wisdom and hieratic authority, - their implied job description nothing less than to inspire highly skilled yet subservient musicians to follow their tiniest requests with an enthusiasm amounting to awe.

This does not happen, as is so often asserted, because conductors are egomaniacal narcissistic megalomaniacs wearing plastic humility cloaks. The reason is much more mundane. Somebody has to take charge and accept the responsibility for the emotional integration of all the notes. Accept that situation, add normal psychology and human frailty, and all the rest follows: conductors who believe in their own special inspiration, resentful players, and the idolization of the score as a miracle-working sacred relic. It is all perfectly normal, and perfect nonsense.

Unfortunately, when we try to correct these problems as if they had something to do with reality, as is so fashionable at the moment, terrible pitfalls open before us. Sure, many conductors are arrogant and conceited, but that does not mean you get an inspired result when no one is in charge. Sure, musicians are frustrated by arbitrary violations of what their music says. But no music can live unless the performers, alive today, are truly musical, and bring their own musical instincts to bear on the written blobs of ink on paper. Musicians can imagine, (and I include conductors in that category!) rhythmical subtleties and emphases in vastly greater variety than the crude basic numerical ratios that notation seems to force upon us. Notation is poor at explaining ambiguities of phrasing, and the comparative strength of climaxes - the precise emotional cumulation of the music.

My point is simply this. Elevating the score as a sacred document will not do. It doesn’t help and leads to nonsense. We have to accept the central role of our own instincts and appetites, and thus the provisional, conjectural nature of our performances. It is inescapable. And then we have to take responsibility for them.

©ajm 2005

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Beethoven 5! How about 6?

continuing Beethoven's finales,

In the search for a finale that binds a whole monumental work together rather than merely saying, “that’s it!”, ending with a bang seems promising, especially if you have real substance to offer. Mozart understood the options. His 38th Symphony, (Prague) ends with a nice confection of froth, 39 and 40 are both elaborate versions of the “showing-off” solution, but the 41st (Jupiter) is quite new. The Jupiter’s finale is a monument all by itself, owing not a little to Bach in the combination of slow and fast ideas. Even at the very end, in the coda, the music is again suddenly unveiling levels of complexity and intensity not even hinted at before.

And here lies the secret – the need to reveal something unanticipated, relevant, and new. It’s not enough simply to reassert your opening idea louder, faster, and three times over. A big choral dance number with all the cast on stage, all the loose ends tied up, and the dash for the cloakrooms and parking lots launched – ritual only; no guarantee of substance.

Beethoven’s first prototype whole-work finales were based on the “triumphant” strategy, what Michael Steinberg calls the “victory symphony.” In #3, the Eroica, his finale begins with a rush and a dash, and ends with total assertiveness. But these bookends have nothing much to do with the meat of the movement. The fifth symphony is more organic, with a finale emerging seamlessly, and ending generously enough to engulf the entire symphony. It even reverts back and quotes the third movement for a bit, which is a great idea, a gesture informing us that success is not yet complete. Good move. Mahler caught on and did that too, ineptly in the 1st, powerfully in the 5th, to the point of genius in the 6th, vacuously in the 7th.

But a triumphant ending is only one option, not necessarily the most convincing. Isn’t magnificence rather a cheap trick? One of the most startlingly original and influential of finale-inventions was Tchaikowsky’s – the utter despair of the slow ending to his Pathétique Symphony. But that still lies in the future.

With his 6th Symphony, Beethoven moved away from simple victory, and took a step towards what might be called the “text-symphony”. There is a static, masque-like story behind the Pastoral, a series of tableaux. Not yet an organic psychological unfolding in the manner of Wagner or Mahler, but at least an added dimension of emotional propositions underlying the music. By means of his simple sequence of static moods – happiness on arriving in the country – soothingly contemplating the brook – simple rustic company – the exhilaration of a storm, - Beethoven is able to set up an agenda for the finale which has not even been embarked upon yet. The movement is called the Thanksgiving after the Storm, but it is much more than that. After all, there was nothing very terrible about the storm; it interrupted a dance in mid-jump (memories of the disruption of the scherzo in the 5th symphony) and gave us the most energetic fun so far, but otherwise seems to have done little harm. So the thanksgiving called for isn’t like the gut-wrenching panic/relief of having survived a tornado or a hurricane. Rather is the finale an integration of the whole disparate rural experience; the initial relaxation, the more intense entry into the mood of peace, the frivolity, the exhilaration, and all these leading to a new mood, a mood of gratitude and contentment and confidence – a sense of having had a truly life-changing experience which needs time to consolidate precisely because it is not “in your face” as it starts out. It is, in fact, somewhat unconvincing initially, and needs time to earn our trust. By this means, the finale of the Pastoral is able gradually to get under our skin, and finally become so persuasive that it can risk falling almost silent before closing quietly with a sort of “QED.”

I may add, as a footnote, that this is a particularly difficult movement to conduct, since it is harmonically vague to start with, giving you no clear spot to nail the tempo, and the whole thing tends to slow down anyway – all too realistic a musical representation of falling asleep!

Despite being so different in effect, this literary, philosophically sustained music points directly to the finale of the 9th symphony – the true, undeniable birth of the text-symphony.

©ajm 2005

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Bruckner's 9th - less is more

I am so glad that Bruckner did not ruin his 9th symphony by adding a last movement, a finale, to it. Finales were never Bruckner’s strong point, and the 9th benefits greatly from not having one. After all, does anyone feel short-changed after the Schubert “unfinished.”?

The reason Bruckner’s finales are so poor harks back to his desire to live up to Beethoven’s example, and ties in with what Wagner did as a composer of Symphonic Operas, and Mahler as a composer of Operatic Symphonies. Brahms was rather different.

The problem, simply put, is this: How do you finish a long piece of abstract music, with no story to it, and no words, and make the ending really feel like the end of the whole thing, as opposed to just the end of the last part? Before Beethoven, this didn't really arise, since a symphony was essentially a set of pieces, like a set at a jazz club, where you would make sure the ending made a good ending, period. What you did half an hour before was beside the point. But Beethoven tried something more ambitious: pieces of music that might last up to an hour, and that felt like a giant single thing. How could you make that work, when you didn’t have a story as you would in a Shakespeare play? Let’s take a look at what Beethoven did in his finales.

Symphonies 1, 2, 4, and 8 don’t really count. In 1 and 2, he had hardly got going. The 4th is a wonderful old-fashioned Mozartian effort, in which the finale is a flashy pops number for the first fiddles. A sort of Viennese Hoe-down. Symphony 8 is odd. It gets very silly from time to time, the sort of silliness that comes in handy in opera, thus becoming a useful warm up for the 9th.

But suddenly, in the first movement of the 3rd, the Eroica, POWEE!! Never mind Schoenberg’s 2nd string quartet, THIS is the piece where music suddenly “breathes the air of a different planet.” Who knew that an abstract piece of music could be erected into such a huge, single-span arch without falling over? The second movement, the Funeral March, is heavy-duty stuff too, with a mind-crunching climax unnervingly similar to that of the first movement. The scherzo is peppy, fun, has no climax, and is generally inoffensive. A lesser matter. We can see where Beethoven is going now. The scherzo presents itself effectively as a lead-in to the very necessary, much looked forward to, deeply needed, cathartic climax: the Crowning Finale - worthy of balancing that epoch-shattering first movement. Unfortunately, there isn’t one. The finale of the Eroica is a patch-work affair of no real substance. For conductors it is irritating and unrewarding, as you have to keep memorizing those awkward bits of fugue that really contribute very little. It suffers from the affliction we shall find often in Bruckner: To make a worthy finale for a big work, it has to have a certain heft, as Aristotle pointed out. It’s got to be big enough to do the job. It mustn’t be trivial. But what do you do if you don’t really have anything to say, because all the important stuff has already been laid out in the early movements?

Beethoven’s 5th is probably the most influential symphony ever written, therefore justly famous. Yet eminence does not exempt it from difficulties, even though Beethoven worked really hard on the finale-problem in this one. He carefully made all three preceding movements brilliant, substantial, and inconclusive. The first movement has drive (everybody mentions that!) but it also keeps stopping! In fact, the very first thing it does, before you can possibly have a clue what the key, the tempo, or the meter is, is STOP. Then, next, it STOPS again. It keeps on doing it. So its ending, though driven, has a quality of puzzled, unreleased energy. Big question mark. The second movement is ethereal and Apollonian, except for those vacuous trumpet fanfares which sound so lame that I cannot help thinking we must all be playing them the wrong way. Beethoven couldn’t have meant that! But I don’t know what the right way is. And, confusingly, triviality is what ends the movement. So again, a giant question mark. The third movement, the scherzo, is a very clever part of a brilliant strategy. Just as the first movement kept switching from stop to go, this one keeps switching from quiet to loud. As it ends, the quiet takes over and gradually, mysteriously, evolves through a secret passage into the loud finale. Very clever. It makes the finale, without question, the outcome of the previous movements, organically welded to them; a triumphant outcome.

Unfortunately, its reason for existence is completed with its very first chord. The whole symphony became a journey leading to the finale, and a very successful one. But the end result is that the whole thing ends up like New Year’s Eve. We all sit around waiting for that stroke of midnight, and then, when it comes, there really isn’t much to do except pack up and go home to bed. So we kind of hang around for a while so as not to appear rude. Once again, as in the Eroica, the finale is sound and fury, signifying little except Beethoven’s sense of proportion in knowing how long it ought to last. The very end of Beethoven’s 5th is almost a joke. It’s as if Beethoven thought that by banging the home chord often enough, and redundantly enough, the sense of finality would somehow stretch backwards in time and magically encompass everything played since the beginning of the piece. Strategy rather than tactics. It almost works, but still adds nothing that was not spelled out the moment the finale began. Definitely an advance on the finale of the Eroica, but not really a success.

The 6th, the Pastoral, is where he really starts to get somewhere.

©ajm 2005

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Why Did Schoenberg do it?

It seems paradoxical that Arnold Schoenberg was simultaneously the originator of the most relentlessly dissonant style of music, 12-note serialism, and also a person with the most comprehensive mastery and knowledge of every permutation of tonal harmony.

I admire Schoenberg, take every chance I can to perform his music, and love doing so. I am in no way an opponent of his music. But that does not prevent my ears from understanding how Schoenberg’s music is baffling and hateful to most lovers of classical music. Not all; but his admirers are a distinct minority.

For such perceived hostility in artworks to endure for 100 years is a prodigious achievement. Most new music becomes familiar after a while. Sooner or later Stravinsky and Bartok don’t sound so bad; nor do Berio or Ligeti, Berg or Webern. Even Stockhausen has a sort of quaintness, and Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maître is positively yummy. But people in general do not get used to Schoenberg. As Philip Larkin put it, writing of Charlie Parker, it sounds crazy when it is new, and then after you get used to it, it still sounds crazy.

To achieve that, Schoenberg must have hit upon the very taproot of normal musical meaning. The chromatic scale of 12 notes is the universe from which music from Monteverdi through Bach, Beethoven, Mahler, and Schoenberg is drawn. It is a product of nature, derivable entirely from the two intervals of octave and 5th. That is all you need, the ratios 1:2 and 2:3, plus a little practical fudging. The glory that is western harmony, (pre-Schoenberg,) involves selecting from these 12; never having all 12 of them in play at the same time. Chords, scales, modes; all these arise from excluding some of the notes for a while. Hence “wrong notes.” Schoenberg’s inspired depth-charge was to require that all possible “wrong notes” be in play all the time. That very quickly shatters any emerging harmony of a tonal or modal type. Why did he do this? It seems odd, perverse, especially considering his huge harmonic skill, as demonstrated in Verklärte Nacht, Gurrelieder, etc.

The standard explanation is historical determinism: - the argument that musical style inescapably evolves through time, and tonal music was “worn out”, not valid any longer.

A moment’s reflection shows that all this is pure nonsense. If tonality doesn’t work anymore, why do musicians and listeners (and even composers) still adore Mozart and Bach? Is Mozart a clear advance on Bach? Why do Wagner’s Music Dramas leave ever-increasing audiences spellbound and emotionally transported? Why are Schubert’s melodies still so perfect? Why does the three-chord trick still win hearts, and the chain of 7ths, effective in Corelli, still make us swoon in Mahler’s 6th?

From the point of view of a composer, however, there are pressures to innovate of quite a different type. It is not because we need to advance the art, but because, on a personal, private level, repeating things we already know everything about is boring. A cook changes the menu, a painter wants to paint new things. We take a walk along a different path. And these impulses are personal; normal needs of any individual. A creative artist is an explorer, and you cannot explore a place you already know too well.

My conjecture is that, although for most of us, tonal music still holds unplumbed mysteries, Schoenberg had, as a result of his unique talent, so internalized and codified virtually every procedure in tonal harmony that it was all, for him, cliché. For him! But he was convinced that his private diagnosis of cliché was a cosmic perception about the entire art of music, and its state in history. Not all that surprising perhaps, mixing in Vienna with Mahler, Zemlinsky, Strauss, at the assumed epicenter of Art Music. And he was a powerful polemicist, author, and teacher.

Historians and critics jumped on the bandwagon since, whatever proletarian audiences may have thought of the new music, it perfectly meshed with the evolutionary theory of music, and soon the standard doctrines of: - this is the music of the future – composers are ahead of their time – Beethoven was hated at first – listen to it more and you’ll grow to love it – music will die if we do not support living composers - : all these tired old propaganda slogans, clichés every one, started to swirl. I humbly submit that all these slogans are patently untrue. I also believe that Schoenberg was a composer of genius.

(first posted Jan 2005)

©ajm 2005

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The Milwaukee Symphony
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A Word please. Any Word!

Classical music is no laughing matter. We treat it, in print as in performance, with respect. Program books offer information and aspire to list the sections of the pieces, the movements, correctly.

But how exactly are we going to do that, in print, in language?

Well, in essence, annotators, critics, and commentators go to the scores and look for words. Any words. Musical notes are useless; give me words! What else can you quote in essays? So any words that can be found are elevated to the status of titles, declarations, pronouncements, the revered names of the components of the composition. Unfortunately this is not why words get into scores. Those that you find in the business section of the music are only there because they came in handy.

Look at an orchestral score. There are really very few words to be found. It isn’t about words, it isn’t about language. For the most part, there are a few words scattered around that say things like ‘slow down’, ‘speed up’, ‘get quieter gradually,’ – that sort of thing. Little administrative details of purely professional concern, not for the audience, that happen to be more easily notated by words than by musical symbols. That’s all. They occupy no privileged position in the unfolding of the work. None.

But: - danger lurks, - they are usually in a foreign language. Mainly Italian, for reasons of historical convenience, much as medieval writings were in Latin, air traffic control is done in English, and we still learn the silly QWERTY keyboard. It makes life simpler if people all over the world all learn the same jargon. There is some German, the French put rather a lot of French in, English speakers tend to avoid putting English words in – doesn’t seem properly “artistic”, perhaps. (There is even an odd fashion for English-speaking composers to give their compositions titles in foreign languages for no apparent reason that I can see, except a little high-brow snobbery. Maybe it gives the illusion of gravitas, but I think it is pandering to set a bunch of poems, some of them in English, and then give the whole set a German name. If it’s going to be played in New York, why?)

Not a great crime, but it is part and parcel of the reification of things that seem to have exotic names. This is what I mean by that: When the music says ‘slow down’, that is just an instruction about how to play a certain bit. But when it says in Italian, ‘ritardando’, it sounds more exotic and like a thing, a name, and pretty soon people are actually talking about “the ritardando” as if it were an independent thing. “I don’t think he achieved the ritandando very well.” How silly that would sound if someone said “I don’t think he achieved the 'slow down a bit' very well.”

The most common danger area, leading to endless nonsense, is the search for the titles, the names, of individual movements in a work, so that the tracks of a CD, and the listing in the program book, can offer up the names we crave. What is the name of this first chunk? Look in the score. Aha! Right at the beginning it says “Allegro vivace, ma non troppo.”

Wonderful! What a great title. And so that goes into the program book as the title of the first movement. All it means is ‘Quick and lively, but not too much so.” This isn’t a name, it is an instruction. Using this as a name is like giving someone driving directions like this: “Start out at “stop”, then drive to “sharp left turn”, enjoy the view at “yield to incoming traffic” and look for “wrong way,” we live at “No outlet.” These are not the names of places. Yet words of that type are the ones we jump at to talk about music. And pretty soon you have learned discussions about Beethoven’s Allegros, and the Romantic Adagio.

My friends, there are no such things. There are real things that can be talked about and compared in music, but they are not found by just looking at a score and picking out things that happen to be words.

As a child, before I knew any German, I was deeply impressed by the first movement of Schumann’s cello concerto. It seemed to me so bittersweet; tender, not melancholy yet not quite aspiring; aware of the cello’s weakness as well as the intense sincerity of it’s introspective feeling. And the piece, fortunately, had a wonderful title that, intoned in an impeccable German accent, seemed to capture all that complex and contradictory feeling. It was called: “Nicht zu schnell.” Ah! Such poetry.
© AJM 2005

Britten's War Requiem

The War Requiem is getting a lot of performances at the moment, marking the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. It was first performed in the early sixties as part of the inauguration of the new Coventry Cathedral. There is a very good article about it by Tom Strini, of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

I remember that first performance rather well, with Heather Harper singing the soprano part so much better than Vishnevskaya ever did in the recording. But the symbolism of a British Singer, a German Singer, and a Russian Singer was important, I suppose. I wish the Heather Harper version had been recorded too. So much less vibrato in the Lacrymosa, making it much more poignant.

At the time, it seemed to be much more than a dedication work for the new Coventry cathedral. It was essentially a part of the building. Since this was the beginning of what we now look back on as the 60s, there was a certain spirit in the air. A mere 16 years after the end of the War, (as close then as the fall of the Berlin Wall is to us now) the Cathedral was an amazingly confident, forward-looking humanitarian venture. It was, in its very fabric, a confident espousal of the arts and of modernism and a search for a new theology. The fact that the ruins of the old Cathedral are still there, as you mention, and always visible through the clear glass of the Western Door, seemed to emphasize that even the oligarchic church was turning its back on a discredited past. With the Piper Baptistry window, giving the impression of bright sunlight even on the gloomiest of English days, the Sutherland tapestry of an apparently pregnant Christ, the whole iconoclastic architectural scheme of Basil Spence - and with Bonhoeffer a recent protestant martyr, and Tillich a possible new prophet, the restrained cynicism and overt ambiguity of the War Requiem was, as it were, the audible component of a single, huge, integrated statement of commitment to an unknown future.

I think the emblamatic moment in the music is the a cappella cadence, the one that ends the first, and other, movements, and that eventually ends the entire work. Constantly starting with, and returning to, the tritone; then suddenly, completely unexpectedly, granting us the balm of the F major triad. An interrupted cadence indeed. But what a difference! Instead of the hoped-for, expected, resolution being frustrated, (as in, say, the last movement of Mahler 9) here we have given up all hope of true rest or resolution - the tritone is the single central thematic fact of the work - and then, interrupting our acceptance of denial, suddenly, from nowhere, peace is granted. It occurs to me that it is a musical depiction of the doctrine of grace.

That, and the very ambiguous working out of the Latin text, made it all an intrinsic part of this Cathedral. After the War, after the two Wars, there HAD to be a different way forward. And it would have to be something as yet unforeseen. Something that required the inventiveness and originality of artists to lead the way.

Of course, this rather utopian hope didn't quite work out, and nowadays has become parodied to the point of meaninglessness by phrases like "innovative", "thinking outside the box", "mission statement" - but it felt real then; the hope was real.

I was not present at the first performance, I was just a kid in High School, but with my musical friends we sat around an AM radio and heard it, and within days we had all worked out and memorized that awesome a cappella cadence. It amazed us.

It is a difficult work to bring off in the Concert Hall, as the acoustics of Coventry were a central part of the experience. Britten found the acoustics impossible, but they worked wonders for us, the listeners. Understanding the power of monastic chant involves acknowledging the acoustic. The big basilicas, Cathedrals, Duomos, Chapels, are musical instruments, just as big organs are. The acoustics magically enhanced that F major cadence, since, as the choristers sounded the consonance, the preceding dissonance was still echoing, gradually fading and dying to reveal the astonishing consonance. In a concert hall, that generally simply does not happen.

I do not, generally speaking, think that detailed social background information is necessary for understanding music, and that is true of this piece also. It can stand up for itself. But there was so much more to it than that at the time.

© AJM 2005

Restart

After the ghastly experience of being de-computered for a couple of weeks, I start again. I also decided to split into two blogs, one concerned with the comparatively esoteric field of classical music, and the original one for everything else.

The other one is to be found here.

Substance? Soon!