A very sad day for art music...

Oliver Knussen and Elliott Carter in 2008

Just found out that Oliver Knussen died yesterday aged 66.

No other conductor gave such lightness, sparkle, and forward momentum to the music of Elliott Carter; and these qualities also characterize Knussen's own delightfully playful compositions.

What a loss...

A friend of a friend II

... for me a Webern bagatelle is much more subversive and politically significant than all those requiems, cantatas and oratorios dedicated to the Holocaust, to 9/11 or to oppression in the Third World using depressive clusters, aggressive noises, threatening percussion orgies and sad nostalgic quotations.
HELMUT LACHENMANN,
"Sound Structures, Transformations, and Broken Magic: An Interview with Helmut Lachenmann", Contemporary Music: Theoretical and Philosophical Perspectives, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, 2010, p.341.
____________________________

Back in 2011 I already voiced my contempt for mediocre composers who desperately try to mask the stale musical odor of their compositions with nauseatingly 'topical' titles, dedications, and program notes.  Little man that I am, I was certainly gratified to discover a similar attitude expressed by a composer whose music I greatly admire.

Not that I think it makes much sense to attribute, as Lachenmann does, "political significance" to (non-vocal) art music, if only because the relations between art music and politics have nothing to do with intrinsically musical values.  After all, in Nazi Germany the radical, cerebral Webern had the same 'political significance' as the jazzy Krenek, the derivative Shostakovich, and the bourgeois Mendelssohn, while in Stalin's USSR the 'political significance' of Webern's music was no different from that of Rachmaninov's sappy traditionalism and Stravinsky's acidic modernism (all were banned).  And in today's America all art music has the same 'political significance' - which is to say none whatsoever - since neither the government nor the people give a fuck about about it (except for a relatively very small number of 'faggots', 'weirdos' and 'eggheads' like myself).

A fifteen-year-long wait for the "Aha!" moment...

This is how long it seems to have taken Paul Griffiths - a very experienced music critic and a perceptive writer on modernist music in the 20th century - to change his mind about one of Helmut Lachenmann's most often performed orchestral works: 

Mouvement (vor der Erstarrung) for eighteen-piece ensemble is quite successful in the avoidance [of anything pleasant to listen to].  [It is] a landscape of rustlings, scrapes, electric bells and pointless percussion toccatas. (The Times, July 8, 1986)

[In] Mouvement (vor der Erstarrung) ... there are a lot of whirrings, scrapings, knocks and breathings. But not only are these noises beautifully made in themselves, they also add up to a bracing musical design. ... This omnipresence of sheer sound contributes to the poetry of Mouvement...  It comes as if from nowhere, takes you firmly by the hand and will not let go until it has shown you things you could not have suspected.  (New York Times, November 4, 2001)

For lack of better things to do, I briefly wondered about Griffiths' long delayed epiphany.[1]  After all, Lachenmann's Mouvement is neither intimidatingly complex (compared to, say, Carter's Double Concerto or Concerto for Orchestra) nor aggressively abrasive (unlike, e.g., the music of Xenakis or even Beethoven's Grosse Fuge).  For the most part Lachenmann's piece speaks quietly and delicately, and its large-scale structure is essentially that of three superimposed arcs representing gradual changes in pitch content, dynamic levels, and the density of texture.  In the manner of Hollywood screenwriters pitching an idea for a movie, one could simplistically describe Mouvement as Ravel's Bolero re-composed by Webern and performed on ingeniously adapted objects from the inventory of a hardware store.

When musical America sided with Hitler and Stalin

LIFE Magazine, Nov. 22, 1943, reporting on the fee for first performance rights paid by Columbia Broadcasting Corporation for Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony

The first performance rights fee of $10,000 [1] paid in 1943 for Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony may not seem impressive in relation to a single concert fee of $3,000-4,000 commanded in the 1940s by top performers like Vladimir Horowitz and Jascha Heifetz [2].  However, when compared to the typical first performance fee of $100 paid at that time for the music of American composers [3], the Shostakovich fee seems downright astronomical.

I have never encountered an explanation of this shocking disparity, but I am sure it cannot be explained by supposing that the princely sum paid for Shostakovich's symphony was a deliberately over-generous show of support for the music's role as a symbol of  struggle against Nazism.  Such an explanation would be doubtful for at least two reasons.

Diversity at work

... Stravinsky, Hindemith ... I have issues with them, but they’re not the same issues that I would find with the so-called contemporary composers of the late 20th century.  Elliott Carter, it was kind of pathetic what he was doing after 80 or 90 years.
The American composer George Walker speaking about his musical contemporaries, "In the life's coda, master composer George Walker has a symphony in mind", Geoff Edgers, The Washington Post, August 22, 2015.
____________

I congratulate The Washington Post for allowing a black composer of serious music to prove to the world that, in America, one can be a certified asshole without being an uneducated white Republican voter.

Psychopathology in the score

Imagine a situation in which I observe the suffering of an innocent human being.  Imagine also that, while I'm at it, there is a dreamy smile on my face, my eyelids are half closed, my lips are slightly parted, my fingers gently caress the armrests of my chair, and my breathing becomes progressively heavier and more rapid.  I think it would be perfectly reasonable for you to infer that the emotional (mental) states behind my behavioral responses are those of a full-fledged psychopath whose neural circuitry for empathy is either badly miswired or entirely missing.

When smart people say stupid things ...

Imagine you are a composer who is a pioneer of non-tonal music.  You already know from  violently scandalous premieres of your works that the general concert-going public is not receptive to significant doses of dissonance (at least outside opera) because it associates dissonance with psychological and physical discomfort as well as with ugliness in general.  You are convinced, however, that the public's attitude toward non-tonal music can change as a result of greater familiarity with and deeper aesthetic understanding of your compositional idiom.  So you decide that one way to promote your creative direction in composition is to come up with a catchy slogan which will sum up your aesthetic goals in a concise and attractively positive way.  And the slogan you finally settle upon is ... emancipation of dissonance. [1]

Now lets put this slogan in perspective.  You know that most people hate a certain thing with which they have a variety of strongly negative associations.  And you propose to emancipate the very thing that they hate?  As a public relations strategy this is no less doltish than it would be for gay rights advocates to employ 'emancipation of felonious sin' as the slogan which sums up the political, social, and moral aims of the gay rights movement!

How to recognize a major composer...

There are few ways to kill time that are more entertaining for me than exploring the Zeitgeist of our (relatively) recent past.  The sense of the surreal I get from brief archeological excursions into books and various archival databases is often stronger than what one could get from looking at Magritte's paintings, smoking dope, or reading Victor Pelevin's novels.  Here is one example:

Listening to Elliott Carter's ASKO Concerto

There is something faintly sad about music lovers who know the relative merits of countless recordings of a Beethoven symphony, from multiple remasterings of some dimly recorded wartime concert by the Berlin Philharmonic to the last week's BBC broadcast from Manchester or Glasgow.  It is not comparative listening per se that is sad, of course, but that it usually limits one's musical explorations to well-established (and much recorded) "masterpieces" of the standard repertoire.  Life, after all, is short, and most of it is eaten up by activities incompatible with serious music listening: sleeping, working, drag racing, or teaching your kid how to shoot that new 9-mm Glock of yours.  So if you've spent enough time on getting intimately acquainted with all those  recordings of the Eroica symphony and the Brahms D-minor concerto, chances are you missed out on a great deal of contemporary music.   

    
Or perhaps it works the other way around.  When repeated exposure to established masterpieces eventually strips away their novelty, folks with firmly conservative tastes in music try to fight off boredom by immersing themselves in the potentially endless supply of different "interpretations" of these masterpieces (with progressively less significant differences among such interpretations being the principal object of interest).

    
Either way it seems that, in the end, a hyper-concentrated exploration of the standard repertoire is like a life dedicated exclusively to fucking every cousin in one's large extended family.  The reward amounts to little more than a long list of predictably similar experiences.

On the other hand, exploring multiple interpretations of a recent, challenging, and still infrequently performed composition is simply a way of getting an aesthetic grasp on the work that has not yet been taught in music appreciation courses, plagiarized by film composers, quoted in TV commercials, arranged to a disco beat, or sampled by hip-hop bands.  And I cannot think of a better way to get acquainted with Carter's exquisitely tart Asko Concerto than through several live recordings I have been playing almost non-stop for days.  In each of these live performances the music always sounds subtly but interestingly different because the choices of instrumental balances, dynamics, and phrasing are as different from one another as those found in performances of a Brahms symphony by Furtwangler, Mengelberg, and Szell.

Jonathan Leshnoff: "Double Concerto" for Violin and Viola

Now I have a pretty good idea of what it's like for people with Tourette syndrome.  Even with my affection for strong language, I cannot repeat here the long string of obscenities which kept exploding in my mind as I was listening to Leshnoff's Double Concerto (a concert recording by the Columbus SO).  This is not eclecticism, not even pandering.  This is musical grave robbing, pure and simple.  The long-dead but easily identifiable victims of Leshnoff's larcenous efforts include Barber, Shostakovich, and even Khachaturian.  I can't believe I am saying this, but the schlocky Piano Concerto by John Corigliano - which I maligned in an earlier post - sounds like an original and challenging piece by comparison!

In a world ruled by reason, the only reward for such musically felonious activities would consist of a few sharp smacks on the head with a rolled-up score.  But in our music world, the rewards include commissions from (and performances by) major organizations, a series of recordings on a well-known classical label, and a steady flow of saccharine praise from music critics.

John Corigliano's Piano Concerto

Listening to a recent live recording of Corigliano's Piano Concerto (brilliantly played by John Lee with the Cleveland Inst of Music Orchestra under Sasha Makila), it took me only a few minutes to guess the "compositional" recipe behind this piece:

Start with one cup of Prokofiev (for the motoric piano part), add two table spoons of Copland (for a few pseudo-folksy themes), sprinkle with some Stravinskian rhythmic angularity (when you run out of whatever little you had to say thematically and harmonically), and then screw-up a few intervals here and there to create just a little bit of dissonance.
    Of course, the final product will have not one ounce of originality, but we can try to mask that by writing a politically and ideologically tailored program to explain the "inner meaning" of the work - say, as "A concerned artist's response to global warming".
    Alas, many concertgoers do not read programs, so a politically and ideologically appropriate short dedication to go with the work's title - say, "In Memory of the Victims of Nagasaki" -  will add some gravitas, and hopefully also will mask the stale musical odor.  (But never a dedication to the memory of those hundreds of thousands of American boys whose corpses littered the Pacific Rim islands.  That would smack of glorifying American Imperialism!  Nor will we ever dedicate any work to the memory of those many millions of innocent people murdered by the communist regimes - because Gergiev and Lang Lang will never touch a work with this kind of dedication.)

 So get busy with putting ink on paper, or the competition (Danielpour and Higdon) will get their "product" to the Pulitzer committee before you do!

Beethoven's fortes

The word on the street is that Beethoven's pianos didn't last long: snapped strings, broken keys, even a cracked frame now and then...  This kind of keyboard mayhem, we are told, was unavoidable because what Beethoven meant by  fff  called for much greater volume of sound than could be extracted from those Broadwood pianos of his day.  I’m sure this much is true.  I wonder, however, if this is the whole story.  Much of what is known about the man suggests that his idea of  fff  might have included some amount of ugliness and brutality in addition to loudness.  After all, Hummel could play forte on exactly the same pianos without snapping strings or breaking keys.  And even the young Liszt – in his bombastic period – was not known for inflicting serious damage on his pianos.

Wolfgang Rihm

One reason I like hanging out with mathematicians at work is to hear them "talk shop".  There is so much in it that reminds me of how people talk about sports: there are the superstars, the almost-stars, the burnouts, the unfulfilled promises, the next big things, the rumored moves between universities, the awards and prizes won, the awards and prizes that should have been won but weren't, the eccentricities and hijinks at conferences and in classrooms...
      What I find especially interesting in such talk is its underlaying mixture of emotions and attitudes.  There is the awe of strikingly imaginative proofs and deep, novel concepts, of course, but also the general admiration for the craft involved in producing results of less-than-earth-shaking importance.  The latter, I think, is colored by the gentle melancholy of recognizing that what lies above and beyond craft is simply unreachable to all but the very few, regardless of how much effort one invests in trying to reach that level.
      This admiration for craft seems to exist only in the present.  At the distance of two or more generations into the past all this teaming 'inner life' of the profession is lost to sight.  All that remains visible are the superstars - the immortals whose names are forever attached to theorems and concepts of groundbreaking and lasting importance for the profession.  The mere craftsmen are swallowed by the immense, blurry crowd of their equally non-stellar predecessors - much like in the image at the top of this post.

 I can't resist seeing this as yet another similarity between the world of mathematics and the world of music.  Behind the small constellation of superstar composers, there is the immense and blurry crowd of craftsmen whose output - despite its skill, refinement, technique, and artistic sincerity - is barely noticeable (if at all) through specialized books on music history, or through recordings issued by small labels trying to squeeze themselves into the marketplace dominated by countless releases of Beethoven symphonies and Chopin sonatas.  Perhaps such a star system is justifiable in the training of our future composers (why analyze quartets by Ries and piano sonatas by Hummel when you have Beethoven's works in both genres).  But this star system is doubly unfair to the general music lover: it obscures his access to genuinely enjoyable examples of high musical craft (e.g., Dussek piano sonatas or Erdmann symphonies), while forcing on him uninspired and routine music occasionally (or even regularly) produced by the big-name composers  - e.g., Mozart's utterly dispensable 'Cassations' and early symphonies, the endlessly recycled music in many of Bach's cantatas, the frighteningly numerous and numbingly similar Vivaldi concertos, and more.

Of course, separating the immortals from the mere craftsmen among the living is a notoriously difficult and occasionally embarrassing task.  (Some music writers in the early 19th century expressed doubts as to the longevity of Beethoven's music, but were absolutely certain that Hummel had already established his immortality.)  So I will offer only a speculative bet that Wolfgang Rihm, despite his many honors and prestigious commissions, will eventually join the ranks of the craftsmen. 

What it takes to "get" contemporary music...

Suppose I don't "get" the above painting: no matter how much time I spend viewing it, this painting does not "speak" to me, and the emotional response it elicits from me is no richer than what I feel when looking at a brick wall.  Now lets imagine that one day it is discovered that Rothko secretly studied optics - and not just at the high school level, but all the way down to the most advanced quantum mechanics and electrodynamics of his time.  (He kept his superior mathematical talents in secret from the rest of the world.)  To everyone's astonishment it is revealed that Rothko's paintings (including the one pictured above) exploit previously unknown macroscopic effects of certain quantum mechanical properties of light - the properties which can be understood only with the help of very abstract mathematical constructs.   Fortunately, I happen to know enough about this stuff to dig into Rothko's amazing investigations until I uncover that at the heart of Rothko's discovery lie very clever applications of theorems from operator algebra and non-commutative geometry.
     Upon grasping this deep, abstract truth behind Rothko's Orange and Yellow painting, I lean back in my chair, light up a cigarette, close my eyes, and (with a knowing smile on my lips) whisper "I got it"  ...   And then it dawns on me (and hopefully on you too, if you've read this far) that whatever it is that I "got", I still didn't "get" that painting!

Prokofiev and Schoenberg

The curse of mental associations: When I listen to Prokofiev I always feel sorry for poor Schoenberg. Both were modernists who had scandal-causing premieres in their early days, both composed into the early 1950s (when they died within 2 years of each other), yet Prokofiev departed this world as a composer with a wide public following and many recordings of his works, while Schoenberg remained the rarely performed (and rarely recorded) Bogeyman of serious music long after this death.