The Direction Question

One of my friends reminded me of a Master Class we had attended at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music conducted by Robert Mann. She recalled Mann telling a first violin in a string quartet that she had a very polished sound but that her playing was "without direction." I realized that his observation resonated closely with my tendency to invoke a metaphorical use of the noun "journey," applying it to either an individual composition or the structure of a program for an entire concert. One property of Western music that seems almost universal is the presence of a well-defined beginning and ending, between which there is this continuous span of elapsed time. Is there anything more to the journey than this passing of time; and, if so, what is that "more?"

The best way to deal with this question is to look for counterexamples. The most obvious of these are those works by John Cage in which the composition is the passing of some specified duration of time. Anything that happens over that duration is part of the composition. One might be hard pressed to call this a journey, but one cannot call the composition static either. Alternatively, one may say that it is a journey that advances on the basis of "environmental conditions," rather than according to a path set by the composer (or, for that matter, the performer). In other words the music is a journey. However, any account of that journey cannot be predetermined; nor is it likely to be reproduced.

I am thinking about this while listening to tracks from my Miles Davis Columbia box of The Complete Bitches Brew Sessions. On the first CD in the box, "Bitches Brew" is preceded by "Pharaoh's Dance;" and there may be some clues in how these two pieces (the first by Davis and the second by Joe Zawinul) differ. Both build on a very steady beat; but in "Bitches Brew" Davis punctuates that beat with almost violent declamations that evoke the rhetoric of a hellfire-and-brimstone sermon (although his own image probably comes closer to a witch casting a spell). The rest of the group works with rhetorical responses of their own. However, the exchange seems to be one in which Miles is up on the pulpit and everyone else is in the dutiful congregation. There is clearly a journey progressing here (although, given the artwork produced for the original release, the noun "trip" would probably be more appropriate).

In "Pharaoh's Dance," on the other hand, the beat seems to be more of a foreground phenomenon. The same instruments (including Miles' trumpet) get to speak; but it is almost as if they are mumbling in the background while the beat goes on (and on and on …)! This may just be my own irritability speaking; but I find that this approach to performance makes for a far more impoverished journey than the experience of letting the environment set the journey in one of Cage's "duration" compositions. Perhaps I am willing to grant that Cage has taken the trouble to lay down some rules, however unorthodox those rules may be, while there is too much of that do-your-own-thing self-absorbed (and drug-induced?) muddling in "Pharaoh's Dance." After all, once one becomes familiar with Cage's work, one can reflect on the journeys that emerged and perhaps even on some of the roads not taken. In "Pharaoh's Dance," on the other hand, it seems as if no one ever bothers to get up and go!

Adventures in New Listening

Considering the scope of my listening experience, it is very rare that I come across a program that covers a period from the early nineteenth century to the late twentieth century in which I am familiar with only one composition. Even more curious is when that one composition is one with which I have become only recently acquainted, Amy Beach's Opus 67 piano quintet in F sharp minor. However, this particular program came from last night's Graduate Viola Recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music; and my entire knowledge of the Beach quintet comes from two performances (one professional, one student) that I previously heard at the Conservatory. Furthermore, some of the oddity of the evening was blunted by the fact that the Beach performance was actually a repeat of the student performance I heard last November. There is little I can add to my past writing about both the composition and the students who performed it, other than the obvious observation that this is a work that deserves to be performed more frequently. The only thing that may bear repeating is that, probably only by virtue of my own listening experience, performances of this quintet continue to tweak my memories of Edward Elgar's piano quintet. However, Elgar wrote his quintet in 1919, about a dozen years after Beach completed hers; and it is hard to imagine his having been influenced by it. Had he, for example, visited the Panama Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, we would have known about this from some biographical account; but there does not appear to be any evidence of his having been in North America. Indeed, Elgar's most serious connection to the United States probably came from Yehudi Menuhin, who recorded Elgar's violin concerto with Elgar conducting. However, Menuhin was born in 1916; and, for all his reputation as a child prodigy, it is hard to imagine his having influenced Elgar's composition work in 1919, even in the extremely unlikely event that he had heard Beach's music while still in utero! (For the record, while Menuhin was raised in San Francisco, he was born in New York.)

Returning from this digression, however, the most important aspect of last night's recital was the framing of the entire program. It began with two miniatures for viola and piano by a composer sitting in the audience (Sahba Aminikia) and concluded with the Opus 1 (a string quartet in D major) by a composer (Josif Andriasov) who died in 2000 but was represented by a thorough set of program notes by his musicologist widow (Marta Andriasova-Kudryashova). Both of these composers received their initial music education in Russia, Aminikia at the St. Petersburg State Conservatory and Andriasov at the Peter I. Tchaikovsky Moscow Conservatory. Andriasov was born in Moscow to an Armenian family, while Aminikia was born in Tehran. While the two composers were separated by half a century, they both vividly illustrated Robert Mann's precept that a composer is best understood in terms of the music to which he has been exposed; and, in this case, there could well have been a common exposure that could be traced back to origins along the banks of the Caspian Sea. Both compositions captured a certain "Armenian spirit," which is probably best associated with Aram Khachaturian but was displayed in a more "earthy" rendering than Khachaturian ever delivered. Indeed, Aminikia seemed more interested in capturing the sound qualities of these folk sources, rather than the tunes themselves, which would put him closer to Béla Bartók than to Khachaturian. Furthermore, Aminikia is currently a graduate student in composition at the Conservatory; and this was the first performance of his miniatures. So this was probably a case of one student composing for another and probably working closely together on this emphasis on the nature of the sound itself.

The "other end of the time-line," so to speak, was represented by the Opus 94 of Johann Nepomuk Hummel. What the program listed as a fantasy for viola and orchestra is probably what (according to Wikipedia) the British Library Integrated Catalogue calls his "Potpourri for Viola and Orchestra," based on "Il mio tesoro." Many of us gave our first serious listening to Hummel when Wynton Marsalis recorded his trumpet concerto, and this work made it clear that Hummel was a great admirer of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Its first movement seemed to take the first movement of the K. 385 ("Haffner") symphony and turn it on its head, while its second movement came off as a fantasy on the second movement of the K. 467 piano concerto. Thus, it was no surprise that Hummel would have also turned to Don Giovanni for inspiration; and, since the viola is the "tenor" of a string quartet, what better source than the most famous tenor aria from the opera? In many respects this work can be heard as a harbinger of the sort of salon music that would flourish throughout the nineteenth century, much of which involved such homages to the spirit of the preceding century.

Similarly, Max Bruch's Opus 85 romance for viola and orchestra may be heard as a reflection on Ludwig van Beethoven's two similarly-titled works for violin and orchestra (Opera 40 and 50); but Bruch's work is anything but a mere homage. Rather, it is likely the work of a composer who, like Johannes Brahms, had to live with the influence of Beethoven without succumbing to that influence. Bruch's result certainly exhibited a unique voice, which served the voice of the viola as well as his more popular works for violin and cello served those respective instruments.

Finally, after the Andriasov quartet the evening concluded with an encore. The string quartet returned to perform Astor Piazzolla's "Four for Tango," which he had composed for the Kronos Quartet in 1987. Piazzolla provided a sharp contrast to that "Caspian" sound that began and ended the formal program; but it also ended the evening with a playful gesture, which always makes for good programming!

In Praise of Naumburg

I may have found a data point that runs contrary to my generally dismal view of music competitions and judges whose interests seem to conflict with what I have called "accountability to the music itself." The source of the data is the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation; and, because San Francisco Performances has an association with the Naumburg Foundation through which they present a recital by each year's Naumburg Competition winner, I have now been able to enjoy two thoroughly "music-based" performances. The first was in 2005 by soprano Sari Gruber; and the second was last night, when I heard 23-year-old cellist David Requiro at Herbst Theatre. I probably should not be surprised that I seem to enjoy Naumburg winners better than those who have won other prizes. Last night I learned that Robert Mann is the current Director of the Naumburg Foundation, the same Robert Mann whom I was extolling on Saturday for his communicative skills in a pedagogical setting. Most important among those skills is his ability to communicate about music, rather than just technique, assuming that technique can only be mastered once one understands the music to which it is being applied.

Requiro is a model example of an up-and-coming musician who appreciates the value of such understanding of the music he plays. Thus, while I often try to look for a unifying theme in a concert program, the primary asset of Requiro's selections was the breadth of repertoire over which he is willing to apply his understanding skills. On the historical time scale the program ranged from Ludwig can Beethoven in the past to William Bolcom in the present, with "stops along the way" for Johannes Brahms, Claude Debussy, and Gaspar Cassadó. This scope also demonstrated an ability to work with a variety of time scales, from the relatively brief and distinct Beethoven WoO 46 variations (on the "Bei Männern" duet from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Zauberflöte) and the comparatively short movements of Bolcom's capriccio through the "unified" three movements of the Debussy sonata to the symphonic-scale Brahms F major (Opus 99) sonata. In other words each of the works on the program required its own characteristic approach to execution. Not only did Requiro find that approach in each case; but also his rapport with his accompanist, Elizabeth DeMio, was so thorough that the results always constituted a well-conceived and shared vision.

I also appreciated that the program honored both "abstract" and "representational" approaches to composition. Thus, the symphonic plan of the Brahms sonata was nicely balanced by not only the explicit depictions of Cassadó and Bolcom but also the possibly "hidden program" of the Debussy sonata. (The program notes by Eric Bromberger neglected to mention that Debussy had considered titling this sonata "Pierrot fâché avec la lune" [Pierrot annoyed with the moon]. One has to wonder if this choice of title had anything to do with a reaction of Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, which had been composed about three years earlier. Debussy fâché avec Schoenberg?) Consequently, the wide diversity of performance challenges also made for an equally wide diversity of listening experiences. One could not ask for more of any concert program.

Communicating about Music

In the course of my trying to approach a theory of listening to music in terms of a common ground shared by George Herbert Mead and Donald Schön, I have reread my copy of Schön's The Reflective Practitioner and moved on to Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions. While much of the theory behind this latter book is little more than a rehash of a case study from the first book, I was particularly drawn to the second book by a "practice" chapter entitled "A Master Class in Musical Performance." The case study of this chapter is supplemented by anecdotal accounts of other classes, one of which involves Bernard Greenhouse (formerly of the Beaux Arts Trio) recalling his cello studies with Pablo Casals. Following the theoretical foundations of the first book, the second explores educational strategies for cultivating the practice of knowing-in-action and then evolving that practice into reflection-in-action. I agree with Schön's premise that this approach is relevant to the study of musical performance, but I believe it is also appropriate to how we learn to be better listeners. Indeed Greenhouse's anecdote about Casals was about learning "how to improvise in Bach;" and it struck me that Casals' method was concerned as much with cultivating Greenhouse's listening skills as his execution skills with his instrument. From this point of view, much (if not most) of the communication that takes place between teacher and student involves the description of musical experiences, either as-heard or as-made. It also stands to reason that such communication involves far more than verbal exchanges, which is one of the paths through which Mead's social behaviorism comes into the picture.

This raises an interesting broader question, which is how we communicate descriptions of anything. Description is one of the fundamental categories of text type theory; but the only thorough account of it that I have encountered has been Philippe Hamon's Du Descriptif (which, to the best of my knowledge, has not been translated into English). I have had one round with this book, and the going was pretty rough. I owe myself another try, but I suspect that my current reading is warming me up for that next bout.

Accepting that description can be a tough nut to crack, there is still the Mead-based behavioral path through which we can examine our communicative actions; and this is basically the agenda behind The Theory of Communicative Action by Jürgen Habermas. What Habermas calls "communicative action" is actually the fourth (and most refined) of four "sociological concepts of action" that he examines in his book. These deserve a brief summary:

1. The teleological concept is based on the formalist principle that an action effects a state transition. We thus understand actions in terms of the states they are intended to achieve, either directly or as part of a more extensive plan; and actions are described through rules that map a state and an action to a resulting state. The major flaw in Herbert Simon's naive approach to a theory of design is his assumption that all actions are teleological.
2. The normative concept assumes that actions are regulated by socially determined norms. In other words the "goal state" of an action is less important than whether or not that action is acceptable in the social setting in which it is taken. Because that setting is rarely (if ever) static, this concept is more firmly grounded in the dynamics of behavior than is the state-based teleological concept.
3. The dramaturgical concept views the acting subject as "playing a role" in a social setting that provides an "audience." It is perhaps best captured by the title of Erving Goffman’s pioneering analysis, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. This concept, again, is grounded in the dynamics of behavior.
4. The communicative concept refers to both the dynamic and state-based properties of the interpersonal relations of at least two subjects who seek a shared understanding of a given situation "in order to coordinate their actions by way of agreement" (as Habermas put it in his book). These are precisely the personal interactions that take place in the most effective of educational settings, not to mention over work practices in offices concerned with "knowledge work." It is in this concept of action that Habermas drew upon Mead as his primary source.

This classification draws upon a Habermas theme that I continue to emphasize, particularly when I am exercising my critical chops over some egregiously technocentric thinking. This is the theme that we all live (and communicate) in three worlds: objective, subjective, and social:

1. The teleological concept of action is strictly a product of the objective world and can only function in that world.
2. The normative concept of action is grounded in the conventions of the social world.
3. The dramaturgical concept of action deals with "performance" as behavior in the subjective world.
4. The communicative concept of action transcends the other three by synthesizing behaviors grounded in all three of these worlds.

From this point of view, is there a "world" in which we learn about performing and listening to music? Schön's examples actually cover two of the concepts of action. One teacher (pseudonymously named "Rosemary") works with her student from the teleological stance of problem solving. Performing a composition (in this case the first movement of Johannes Brahms' Opus 108 violin sonata) is a problem, which may then be decomposed into subproblems, each of which may be addressed independently. After all the subproblems (which may need to be further decomposed) have been solved, they may be assembled back into a coherent whole. On the other hand the (also pseudonymous) "Franz," who is coaching a student in the first two sections of Franz Schubert's Opus 15 "Wanderer Fantasy," takes an overtly dramaturgical approach, using a rich repertoire of both musical and bodily performance to make his points to his student.

I have seen both of these concepts in action, so to speak, at Master Classes I have attended at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. I would also suggest that Robert Mann has explored the normative concept, particularly in his belief that a composer is best understood in terms of the music to which that composer was exposed. However, this might be selling Mann short. He may be one of the best examples of the synthesis necessary for communicative action that I have encountered. His own dramaturgical approach has certainly been similar to that of "Franz" in Schön's account; but he was at his most interesting when I saw him coaching a performance of the music of Elliott Carter. While Mann was clearly subjective is talking about his experiences in performing Carter's music with the Julliard Quartet, he was not shy about addressing the need from some nuts-and-bolts objective problem solving that was necessary to the process of preparing for performance. It thus seems that, in his own efforts in teaching the performance of music, Mann appreciates (even if only intuitively) the necessity for the full scope of communicative action and does not do a bad job in satisfying this ideal.

Does this approach also apply to how we learn how to listen to music? Since this is not treated as a discipline to the same extent that performing is, even in a conservatory setting, there is no conclusive answer to this question. Personally, I believe that the richness of communicative action may be necessary for any effort of description; but I cannot support my conviction with anything more than scattered anecdotes, most of which are personal. In another setting I might be able to pursue this as a serious research project, but for now I can content myself with the realm of idle speculation!

An Abundance of Birthdays

Much has been made of the fact that last week saw two centennial birthdays. Olivier Messiaen was born on December 10, 1908 and died on April 27, 1992. Elliott Carter was born the following day (December 11, 1908) and was in good enough health to attend the concert honoring his birthday at Carnegie Hall. Indeed, at that concert it seemed as if he was the one giving the major present, his most recent composition, "Interventions," in which he broke with the usual concerto form to give "equal time" to the piano soloist (Daniel Barenboim) and the orchestra (the Boston Symphony Orchestra, conducted by James Levine). Carter also made a video appearance at a subsequent event at the Barbican in London, where Oliver Knussen conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra in a full evening of Carter's music.

Ironically, the day on which the San Francisco Conservatory of Music chose to honor both of these composers was yesterday, which, as all Peanuts readers must know by now, was the birthday of Ludwig van Beethoven. If Carter knew about this, I suspect he would have been pleased, since, as Anthony Tommasini put it in his review of the Carnegie Hall event, Carter "is a lifelong devotee of Beethoven," which is probably why that concert also included a performance of Beethoven's third piano concerto. The evening then concluded with Levine conducting Igor Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps, which a fifteen-year-old Carter had heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra perform under Pierre Monteux when it was premiered in New York in 1924. (I often wonder to what extent the 1951 recording that Monteux made for RCA differed from this New York premiere. There are stories floating around that Monteux knew the score of Le Sacre better than Stravinsky. I suspect that, as performers became more familiar with the language of this score over the course of those 25 years, Monteux was in a position to explore new approaches to the music when he finally entered the recording studio.)

Personally, I appreciate Levine's wisdom in assembling this "context-based" approach to the presentation of Carter's music and probably would have preferred it to Knussen's selection of a Carter-only program. My guess is that the bean counters would have agreed with me. According to Geoffrey Norris' account for the Telegraph, the Barbican was "half-full rather than half-empty," while the Carnegie Hall event sold out the house. The Conservatory event, on the other hand, was a coupling of Carter with Messiaen in a free concert in the much smaller Recital Hall; but, within those limitations, the event attracted one of the largest audiences I have seen (including, to the best of my ability to observe, the upstairs seats for students).

Carter was represented by two compositions, his 1943 elegy for viola and piano and his second string quartet, completed in 1959. We probably do not have many opportunities to hear Carter's music because of his reputation for complexity; but the elegy is, in many ways, a product of his studies with Nadia Boulanger (who, for better or worse, was a primary force in shaping "American music" for much of the middle of the twentieth century) in the 1930s. Even if the more serious students of music would argue that Carter had not yet found his own voice in this work, it reveals his keen sense of listening, not only in terms of a command of expressive sonorities over a relatively short span of time but also in awareness of the voices he was hearing at the time the work was being composed. Thus, the occasional gestures towards Paul Hindemith cannot, in my opinion, be mere coincidence when we recall that Hindemith not only played the viola but also composed some of his best work for that instrument.

The second quartet is far more representative of the music that the general concert-going public tends to fear more than love, even if they have never heard it performed. The basic structure runs the risk of intimidating even before the performance has begun. There is a core of four movements (with tempo markings that one could easily find in any other string quartet), separated by solo cadenzas and framed with an Introduction and a Conclusion. All of these structural elements are joined together in a seamless unit; and I have to confess that, when I first heard the Julliard Quartet recording of this work in my student days, I found it absolutely impenetrable. (Following it with a score helped me recognize where the structural boundaries were; but even that did not get my ears around the performance, so to speak.) I was thus particularly interested when Robert Mann reflected on his experiences in playing with the Julliard when he coached Conservatory students working on Carter's first quartet last February. Since this was a Master Class event open to the public, Mann felt it necessary to address those of us in the audience before the students started playing for him. Here is what I wrote at the time of that event, in which I tried to synthesize Mann's impressions with those I had formed from the lectures that Carter had given when I was an undergraduate at MIT:

He talked about Carter's reputation for complexity (and how it was justified); but he also talked about how emotional Carter's music could be if properly approached. Later on, in his comments to the students, he revealed that the primary emotion he seemed to have in mind was anger; but I wonder if this was an accurate interpretation, because the one thing I did seem to take away from Carter's visit to MIT was his appreciation of the enormous legacy of music history that confronted him and the frustration of feeling obliged to do something other than tread the same paths of that legacy.

Last night one of the students (the violist) followed Mann's lead with some introductory remarks that also invoked the idea of an underlying anger; but, in my efforts to be a good student of listening (the title of the post in which I wrote about Mann was "Learning to Listen to Elliott Carter"), I find myself returning more to the theme of frustration. In my own search for an orienting framework, I started to think of a Platonic dialogue involving four characters, all of whom were as assertive as Socrates, each trying to hold forth with a distinct perspective (without the nature of the topic itself being particularly relevant). Thus, while in Plato any character who is not Socrates never gets much further than an odd interjection, in this setting all the characters are in the spotlight (as it were), frequently interrupting each other and often speaking at the same time with only peripheral awareness of each other. Needless to say, this is a far more frustrating experience than the far more orderly voice-of-the-master conduct that takes place in Plato's texts!

However, the second quartet is not only "about" (to the extent that it is about anything) frustration. If anything, it is "about" the sort of arguments that I used to have with colleagues back when we were trying to figure out what to do with the "knowledge management movement." Even though it has nothing to do with music, let me reproduce what I once wrote about these arguments:

Back when I was active in the debates over knowledge management, trying to tease out fundamental questions of what it should be and how it should be implemented, many of my colleagues liked to talk about the goal of "shared understanding." This usually meant agreement over such matters as how we see the world, how we collect data from the world, and how we interpret those data. However, "understanding" and "agreement" are not necessarily synonymous nouns; and, in my own effort to avoid the confusion of that synonymy, I tried to change my own language. Rather than echoing that phrase "shared understanding," I start to speak of "negotiated understanding." The point I tried to make was that we could still strive to agree about how to act, even if we disagreed passionately over what things mean. In Kantian terms our actions are grounded in "pure reason," "practical reason," and "judgment;" and, particularly when we are in critical decision-making situations, we cannot afford to short-change any of those foundations.

My point is that, to the extent to which frustration figures in the second quartet, Carter still brings it to resolution; and that resolution is best understood in terms of that negotiated understanding that is distinct from shared understanding. It's a bit like the way in which Plato's "Theaetetus" is resolved. It begins with the quest for a definition of knowledge. Each time Theaetetus proposes a definition, Socrates elegantly unravels it. Thus, in the final paragraphs of the dialogue Socrates as much as says that, while they did not achieve their goal, the journey towards that goal was still worth making. Whatever the challenges to logic, grammar, and rhetoric in Carter's second quartet may have been, the Conservatory students were able to impose their own logic, grammar, and rhetoric of performance on it in such a way that the journey was not only worth making but also a true pleasure to make.

If this journey through Carter's music was ultimately guided by logic, grammar, and rhetoric, then, as I have previously argued, a journey through Messiaen's music is best served when both composition and performance can be "properly examined through faith-based lenses." Indeed, I first introduced this proposition after attending a Master Class in which Anthony Marwood coached two of the movements from the Quartet for the End of Time; so I very much appreciated the opportunity to hear what these students would do with the work in its entirety. As I observed at the time, the very title of this work may be misconceived; but, if one accepts the faith-based foundation, such an error of logic should not detract from the spirit of either the music itself or how it is performed. (Some of Martha Graham's best choreography grew out of her own misconceptions of classic Greek drama!) As is the case with his monumental piano suite, Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jésus, Messiaen prefaces the score with texts for each of the movements of the Quartet; and each text is a combination of descriptive language and mystical meditation. At this performance the introductory remarks were given by the pianist, who had probably made the decision to attach a copy of an English translation (probably from the Wikipedia entry for this composition) of this preface to the program. He suggested that we, as listeners, could benefit from keeping these remarks in mind while listening to the individual movements; and I think this was an excellent decision on his part.

As I suggested in writing about the Master Class, I tend to feel that the best way to honor Messiaen in performance is to follow his instructions to the letter (what I have called the "stare decisis approach to performance"). This approach frees the listener to "give in" to the sounds that Messiaen has summoned, guided by the "visions" invoked by his texts. One does not have to accept the New Testament to do this; indeed, if one's faith has already fixed a particular impression of the Apocalypse, that impression could well obscure Messiaen's. Thus, the primary virtue of last night's performance was its accuracy and its willingness to leave all else to the mind of the listener, a mind that was best guided by cortical regions quite different from those stimulated by Carter's quartet.

Taken as a whole, then, the evening was more than the sum of its parts. It involved more than Carter's Socratic logic and Messiaen's faith. The relationship between Carter and Messiaen may be better appreciated through the complementarity of the Yin-Yang philosophy introduced by Tsou Yen around 265 B.C.E. It is less a matter of synthesis from dialectical opposition as it is one of the balance of equally opposing forces, each with roots in the other (Carter with his roots in American poetry; Messiaen with his roots in the discipline of serial techniques). Last night's event was the only one I have encountered in the arts news I have read in which the yin and the yang of these two "birthday forces" were brought together in a single program. The result was as exciting as it was informative, and my only regret is that these two momentous centennials were not similarly celebrated elsewhere.

Listening to "Nationalist" Music

From time to time I write about my good fortune in living in a building in which I have neighbors who take listening to music as seriously as I do, some of them out of professional commitment but some just out of personal feelings about the performance of music. Today's post owes a great debt to two of them. The first is one with whom I have been exploring the four-hand piano repertoire for several months. Over the last few weeks we have begun work on the Opus 59 of Antonín Dvořák, his set of ten Legends. Before our last session this past Friday afternoon, she happened to remark that there seemed to be a revived interest in "nationalist" composers, who had tended to be out of favor for much of the latter half of the twentieth century. This is where my other neighbor enters the picture, because she has provided me with the benefit of pointers to useful Internet-based resources to compensate for the way I tend to use the Internet in highly focused ways. Recently she directed my attention to the "Art & Music" section of the Articles and Databases page on the Web site for the San Francisco Public Library. This is the perfect example of the shortcomings of my own tunnel vision. I visit this page frequently, but only when I am trying to get a copy of a reprint of some scholarly publication. So I have never really browsed it and needed someone else to encourage that browsing. While my neighbor was interested in the abundance of classical music she could now hear online, after checking out the site she had encouraged me to visit, I discovered that there was a link to Oxford Music Online, to which the Library was a subscriber. Thus, by using my library card number for authentication, I could pass through a gateway to read the text of the 2002 edition of The Oxford Companion to Music, along with Web sites for Grove Music Online and The Oxford Dictionary of Music.

This is where the influences of my two neighbors came to converge. I was more than a little curious about what this wealth of resources would have to say about the influence of nationalism, if not about recent prevailing attitudes towards so-called nationalist composers and their works. All three sources had appropriate subject entries; but I decided that the best place to start would be with the Dictionary, where the entry was entitled "Nationalism in Music." The basic "dictionary definition" was given as follows:

A mus. movement which began during the 19th cent. and was marked by emphasis on nat. elements in mus. such as folksongs, folk dances, folk rhythms or on subjects for operas and symphonic poems which reflected nat. life or history.

Ironically, the first example given in the entry was the eighteenth-century composer Joseph Haydn, who often drew upon folk sources. The remaining examples represent both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and are sorted geographically as follows:

• Poland: Frédéric Chopin
• Russian: Mikhail Glinka, listed as the "founder" of the movement in Russia, followed by César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Mily Balakirev, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and an "etc.," which presumably accounts for Alexander Borodin as the remaining member of the Russian "Five."
• Hungary: Franz Liszt, Béla Bartók, and Zoltán Kodály
• Bohemia (which I am not sure was ever, strictly speaking, a nation): Bedřich Smetana, Antonín Dvořák, and Leoš Janáček
• Norway: Edvard Grieg
• Finland: Jean Sibelius
• Spain: Manuel de Falla, Isaac Albéniz, and Enrique Granados
• England: Gustav Holst and Ralph Vaughan Williams
• United States: Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, Charles Ives, and Leonard Bernstein
• Brazil: Heitor Villa-Lobos

I take some comfort in having enough experience to be familiar with all of the names on this list, not to mention the background to pick that nit over the Russian "Five." However, while I would not dispute the composition of this list, it leads me to wonder to what extent nationalism actually constitutes what I like to call a "perceptual category."

For example, when my four-hand partner and I were running through different examples of "national bases," we thought of Russia more in terms of the twentieth-century Soviet Union than in terms of the nineteenth-century "Five." My own bias was probably the result of my exposure to Robert Mann through a Master Class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, which I had invoked in a review I wrote last March:

Nevertheless, last night's Annual Subscriber Gift Concert, organized by San Francisco Performances, could be listened to as a reflection on Robert Mann's comment at the end of his San Francisco Conservatory Master Class to the effect that the best way to get to know a composer is through the music to which that composer was exposed. (Mann actually said "folk music;" but I have used Ives as an example of an "experience base" that extends far beyond what we would call folk music.)

The specific composer Mann had in mind was Dmitri Shostakovich, who, regardless of the political climate, was probably exposed to the same basic source material as "The Five," but, by virtue of a radical change in his "social[ist?] environment," probably heard that material in equally radically different ways. Thus, what was sentimental for Glinka became ironic (if not sardonic) for Shostakovich; but both were clearly drawing upon a social "experience base." More important, however, is that, as I have tried to demonstrate with Ives, the experience base encompasses more than the "folk" sources.

The underlying truism is that, except for that period of the middle of the twentieth century when composers seemed more occupied with "systems" than with music (which was also the time when "nationalist" composers were taking the greatest rap from the academics who had become enamored of such "systems"), composition has always been grounded in personal listening experience. Put another way, while most of us struggle to describe the experience of listening to music with words, composers summon their own powers of description through music itself. This is why I feel it is so important to develop that "theory of listening to music." Such a theory should, by all rights, inform us not only with respect to what we hear (thus, following Igor Stravinsky's admonition, turning the experience of hearing into one of listening) but it should also inform our understanding of the composers to whom we listen in terms of their motives for composing in the first place. After all, composition is not only an action (to be understood in terms of the dynamics of the process, rather than just the outcome) but also a motivated action (meaning that those dynamics have less to do with the objectivity of physics and more to do with the subjectivity of the composer as a "social animal"); and, as a result, listening is influenced by not only the music itself but also the social network in which its composer is embedded.

Beyond the Long Shadow of History

Once again I find myself addressing the question of whether Johannes Brahms deserves to be stuck in the long shadow of the history of the music that preceded him, particularly that of Ludwig van Beethoven (and possibly others, as I shall try to explore in this post). This question is usually challenged on the basis of Arnold Schoenberg's "Brahms the Progressive" essay; but I think it may be better approach through dialectical synthesis. Dying in Vienna on April 3, 1897, much of Brahms work may best be viewed as both retrospective and prospective at the same time, recognizing, as Abraham Lincoln did, that we cannot escape history while facing the future with neither fear nor defiance. This afternoon's San Francisco Symphony concert (along with the pre-concert chamber music) at Davies Symphony Hall provided an excellent opportunity to appreciate this synthetic nature of Brahms' compositional technique. I shall also try to approach what the synthesis entails by once again trying to invoke the medieval trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric. The last time I attempted to do this, I was writing about Elliott Carter, who is generally regarded as progressive unto an extreme but who, nevertheless, does, have a retrospective side, as I learned from the master class that Robert Mann taught last February at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. By way of a disclaimer, however, I should begin by recognizing that, every time I attempt a trivium-based exercise, my "musical interpretations" of logic, grammar, and rhetoric tend to shift. Remember, this is a "rehearsal studio;" so my ideas in this direction are still progressing without necessarily converging.

In considering the music of Brahms, the issue of logic is probably best grounded in the ways in which he deals with overall structure. In is interesting to observe that his first string quartet (the pre-concert offering) appears relatively late in his catalog (Opus 51, Number 1), which means it was preceded by both of his string sextets (Opera 18 and 36). This may have much to do with the fact that the string quartet, itself, cast a very long shadow, not just from Beethoven and the experiments he was pursuing with his "late" quartets but also from Franz Schubert. The Opus 51 quartets were published in 1873, about 45 years after Schubert had died; and even the most enthusiastic concert-goers do not hear very much from the string quartet repertoire between Schubert's last quartet and Brahms' first. From a structural point of view, however, Opus 51, Number 1, does not advance much beyond the structural legacy of the Schubert quartets.

The same cannot be said of the two works on the program of the concert, itself, the second piano concerto in B-flat major, Opus 83, and the fourth symphony, Opus 98. In this case the retrospective view of the Beethoven piano concertos has been advanced by Robert Schumann's experiments in a more integrated approach; but Brahms breaks with both Beethoven and Schumann in a variety of interesting ways. The work is four movements long, none of the movements provide an opportunity for an improvised cadenza, there is no unifying thematic thread, and the ordering of the movements borders on anticlimactic. The first movement is monumental in temporal scale and in the sounds elicited from both piano and orchestra, followed by a highly-charged but shorter scherzo, followed by an Andante that continues to explore beyond conventional forms, and concluding with an Allegretto grazioso, so "grazioso" as to leave the listener wondering what all the preceding bombast had been about. My personal view of this strategy is that Brahms was having a bit of a joke with his audience, particularly those who had found his first piano concerto to be more that a bit "too much." He claimed that this concerto would be on a bit more modest scale, but he did not really make good on his promise until the final movement!

The retrospective view of the symphony, on the other hand, encompasses Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann, not to mention other nineteenth-century symphonists, such as Felix Mendelssohn. Indeed, much of nineteenth-century music history can be cast in terms of experimentation with symphonic form; but in this case Brahms' retrospective view reaches further in the past. As a subscriber to the first publication of the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach, he chose to complete his symphony with a passacaglia, particularly the final movement of the BWV cantata (Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich). Needless to say, Brahms approach to his passacaglia is less an homage to Bach and more an indication of the progressive tendencies that so interested Schoenberg; but this takes us out of the domain of logic.

I continue to approach grammar, as I did when I was trying to apply the trivium to Elliott Carter, as a model of syntactic structure through which one can "sort out" the embellishing and the embellished. When I first proposed this approach, I wrote the following:

In just about any domain there is usually considerable argument over just what constitutes an appropriate structural representation. My own musical background is one that honors the spirit (if not always the letter) of Heinrich Schenker: A structural explanation is one that sorts out the embellishing from the embellished. This is a tradition that goes all the way back to (at least) C. P. E. Bach's systematic study of ornamentation; and Schenker's greatest insight was that ornaments could, themselves, be ornamented (which also happens to be the fundamental precept behind bebop). In Schenker's language the greatest obligation that a performer has to a listener is to make it clear where the background is and what sets the foreground off from the background.

Schenker introduced the terms "prolongation" to denote his generalization of the process of ornamentation; and he had a very high opinion of Brahms as a master of prolongation (so high that he as much as believed that, in a somewhat Hegelian manner, the music of Brahms would constitute "the end of music history," which is my phrase, not Schenker's). In this respect the passacaglia of the fourth symphony amounts to a new experiment in prolongation in symphonic form, but most of the second piano concerto constitutes a similar experiment with the formal foundations of a concerto. Personally, I find less such experimentation with prolongation in the Opus 51 string quartets (both of them); but I also feel that Brahms first began to hit his stride with prolongation several years later when he was putting his finishing touches on his first (Opus 68) symphony. Both the first and last movements of this symphony have a slow introduction (Un poco sostenuto and Adagio), very much an acknowledgement of symphonic structural tradition; but that tradition is shattered when the ear discovers that, in both movements, the Allegro that follows the introduction is basically a vastly extended prolongation of the material "introduced" by the introduction! Brahms does not repeat this trick in his later symphonies but instead explores other ways to shape large structure through prolongation, as he did in the second piano concerto. On the other hand I have long entertained the hypothesis that the eighth symphony of Gustav Mahler, which dwarfs the scale of any of Brahms' symphonies, is structured in such a way that the second movement amounts to a Schenkerian prolongation of the first. (The durational ratio of these two movements is such that the second movement is approximately three times longer than the first.)

Rhetoric remains the most difficult to grasp of the trivium disciplines, perhaps in part because contemporary education does not give it the attention accorded to logic and grammar. I continue to view rhetoric in terms of how the composer communicates with the listener, which means it is also a guide to how the execution of performance can realize that communication. This approach has worked for me for most genres of "serious" music and for much of the jazz repertoire (and most of the jazz that occupies my personal listening time). I have written in the past about "rhetorical devices" applied by Beethoven and Joseph Haydn in terms of the use of melodic figuration; and, since Albert Schweitzer took a similar approach to the music of Bach, I feel pretty comfortably with this method. Melodic figuration is certainly a major feature of Brahms' first string quartet; but I would also claim that both the second piano concerto and the fourth symphony engage techniques of orchestration for rhetorical purposes. Thus, the "forward progress" through the passacaglia in the fourth symphony is as much a matter of the development of orchestral richness as it is one of Schenkerian prolongation applied to the iterated passacaglia "theme." Similarly, there is a high level of orchestral interplay in the second piano concerto on a variety of scales; and the use of a solo cello in the third movement is, in many ways, a rhetorical reflection of the third movement of the Opus 60 piano quartet, which I recently described as "a piano concerto for 'very small orchestra.'" (The solo cello is also a key rhetorical element in the third movement of Robert Schumann's Opus 47 piano quartet.)

It would appear, then, that this one concert covered so much of Brahms' ground that it was practically a festival unto itself! Nevertheless, I plan to come back to hear the Master's German Requiem, which is a "family favorite" in our household. In many ways that is a decidedly different piece of work, but it will be interesting to see how my listening will be affected by today's experience.

A "Debut Recital"

Having seen Sheri Greenawald, Director of the San Francisco Opera Center, "in action" giving a master class at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I suspect she would forgive (if not sympathize with) me for beginning by shamelessly ripping off Jane Austen: It is "a truth universally acknowledged" that any aspiring vocalist (not to mention the seasoned ones) "must be in want of" good recital opportunities. As she explained after yesterday's intermission at Temple Emanu-El, the Schwabacher Debut Recital Series is run (under the auspices of the San Francisco Opera Center) to serve that truth. From my own point of view, this series is particularly important because, where matters of performance are concerned, a vocal recital is a significantly different beast from an opera; and any vocalist serious about making a career must be prepared to excel in both environments.

The difference between the two has less to do with repertoire than with scale. A recital does not belong in the "grand" space of today's large opera houses. If it has been set there, then the motives have more to do with selling lots of tickets than serving the music on the program. The recital is the "moral equivalent" of chamber music for vocalists. In the absence of the proper "chamber," neither music nor performer is well served. The best vocal recitals I can remember were experienced at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, and Greenawald is fortunate that Temple Emanu-El has an auditorium on a comparable scale. All this should be taken as a preface to considering the recital that soprano Heidi Melton gave yesterday afternoon with John Parr as her accompanist.

Melton is a current Adler Fellow at the San Francisco Opera, and she has already made much of her tenure in that position. Most importantly she had the privilege of creating the role of Mary Todd Lincoln last fall in Appomattox, which meant, among other things, that hers was one of the first (and last) voices we heard in this still-memorable premiere. She has also sung the role of Marianne, Sophie's duenna, whom we hear only briefly in the second act of Rosenkavalier but whom we hear negotiating those breathless passages that Richard Strauss composed so well as the two of them anticipate the rose-bearer's arrival; and, during that same spring season she sang the disembodied voice of Diane, who resolves all the plot tensions in Iphigénie en Tauride. (Given the way I felt about the staging of this opera, being disembodied may have had some advantages.) All of these roles demand a strong and clear voice that can establish a well-defined presence in a space like the War Memorial Opera House; and Melton did not fall short in any of them.

However, the reason for my extended preface is that the Temple Emanu-El auditorium is a far cry from the War Memorial Opera House. Having established her "street creds" at the latter, Melton still has a bit more to do with the former. Thus, to stick with the music of Strauss, for all the Sturm und Drang in "Frülingsfeier" (both Strauss' music and the text itself by Heinrich Heine), this is not the final scene from Salome; and its performance requires a more attenuated intensity to deliver the right impact in a chamber setting. Similarly, Melton did not seem to find the right level of intimacy for a Strauss setting as sensitive as "Meinem Kinde," even though I fully believed her introductory remarks about how much this song meant to her at a personal level.

To be fair, Melton set herself some serious challenges in selecting her program. Wrestling with Arne Garborg's Norwegian texts for Edvard Grieg's Haugtussa ("Mountain Maid") song cycle without also having to take on questions of how to approach Grieg at all (which I had been struggling with, in my own modest ways, about a year ago). Particularly in light of the specific texts, it is no easy matter to get beyond Michael Flanders' old "more sherbet than Schubert" quip and tap into the "cultural bedrock" of this music (the motivation behind Robert Mann's advice about understanding a composer by understanding his folk music). As I had written, the films of Carl Theodor Dreyer eventually helped me find that bedrock; and it would not surprise me to learn that Melton may still be prospecting.

Similarly, the Grieg was preceded by beginning the program by skating onto thin ice (an appropriate metaphor for Grieg's Norwegian influence). Johann Sebastian Bach was listed as the composer; but, on the basis of current scholarship, this was true of only the third of the songs performed, "Dir, dir, Jehova, will ich singen." The second, "Bist du bei mir," was by Gottfried Heinrich Stölzel; and both of these songs are included in the 1725 Klavierbüchlein für Anna Magdalena Bach. The first, "Komt, Seelen, dieser Tag," like the third, is from a Pietist hymnal edited by George Christian Schemelli; however, in this case current thinking is that Bach took his melody from some other source, rather than composing his own. The Pietistic movement in German Protestantism involved a very personal and expressive declaration of faith. Putting aside the question of how appropriate this was for the auditorium of a synagogue, they provide a good example of that lack of "attenuated intensity," since, however overtly expressive these hymns may be, their level of expression is definitely not that of the nineteenth-century opera house!

Melton was much more in her comfort zone after the intermission, with art songs by Johannes Brahms and Strauss, as well as a "cabaret assortment," which included Arnold Schoenberg, Kurt Weill, and Benjamin Britten. The Britten, set to a text by Wystan Hugh Auden, was probably the most effective, particularly with a concluding gesture of staging that involved accompanist Parr. I have a personal affection for Weill's setting of Bertolt Brecht's "Barbarasong," composed for Die Dreigroschenoper, since it provides such a sharp-edged reflection on just-say-no morality. Still, that edge requires scrupulous dramatic attention to each successive delivery of "Nein" in the text that I felt was missing in this particular performance.

Having laid my critical cards on the table, I should conclude by observing that this was a Debut Recital Series. As I have already observed, Melton set some major challenges for a "first time out" offering; and, had she not selected the composers she did, I might not have been drawn to her recital in the first place. Thus, while she is far from the student performers about whom I wrote on Saturday, hers is still very much a world of the "lifelong learning" I cited in that post. Therefore, I shall continue to follow her progress at the San Francisco Opera at my same level of enthusiastic appreciation and would be only to happy to hear her next recital to take stock of her personal learning experiences.

From Wit to Weight

In writing about Ludwig van Beethoven, I have had a tendency to dwell on the elements of wit in his compositions (particularly the early ones), simply because that wit is frequently overlooked due to the ways in which our culture turned him into a monument of seriousness not too long after his death. However, wit was not the issue in the chamber music Master Class that pianist Peter Frankl conducted at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music last night. Rather, the issue was the emotional depth that Beethoven discovered through experimenting with a form that had not previously been associated with such depth. The form is that of variations on a theme; and the specific experiment was the third movement of his Opus 97 ("Archduke") piano trio. This is a form that Beethoven pursued pretty much through the entirety of his career as a composer; and, while he had no trouble satisfying traditional expectations, he also always seemed to be thinking about how to push the envelope. Most importantly he became interested in the theme being more than a simple tune, a more elaborate structure unto itself, which could then be mined for variations from many diverse perspectives.

By way of historical context, Opus 97 was completed in 1811. However, the Opus 67 fifth symphony, completed in 1808, had experimented with variations on a "double theme," raising the challenge of starting with two complementary melodies and subjecting them to a single unified strategy of variation. That particular experiment would be pursued at much greater length (and in much greater depth) in the third movement of the Opus 125 ninth ("Choral") symphony, completed in 1824. Between these two "monuments" we have the theme of Opus 97, which is preparing us, as listeners, for a theme so extended in duration that, in earlier times, it might have been taken for a composition unto itself. Such prolonged variations on a prolonged theme would be subsequently explored in the Opus 109 (1820) and Opus 111 (competed in 1822) piano sonatas; and, in many respects, Opus 111 is a "natural" successor to Opus 97, not just for its extended duration but for the serenity that pervades both the theme and many of the variations, which transcends the sense of duration into one of timelessness.

Frankl was quite right in beginning his assessment of the student performance of this movement by dwelling on how challenging it was to execute. It is not just a question of endurance but of the modulation of energy. Making time stand still is hard work. However, both students and listeners were probably at a disadvantage, since this particular performance was the final one of the evening; and we had already been following Frankl and his insights into the domains of Robert Schumann and Antonín Dvořák. Since these master classes are conducted without an intermission, we never had the opportunity to catch our breaths and regroup the energies needed for this level of serious listening.

Mind you, I'm not sure that an intermission would have been that much help. On the way out I recalled to a friend the experience of hearing piano recitals consisting entirely of Opus 109, Opus 110, and Opus 111, each of which is a demanding piece of serious listening unto itself. Even with an intermission, I discovered that I rarely had the "cognitive energy" necessary for giving the variations movement of Opus 111 the attention it really deserved. In the realm of monuments, you can either "stand and gape" or seek out those qualities that sustain the composition's "reputation," the sorts of qualities that Georg Hegel would call "spirit" and Walter Benjamin would later call "aura;" and that latter approach is all the more demanding if one is already fatigued. Thus, we might all have benefited had the Master Class been held in reverse order, proceeding from Beethoven to Schumann to Dvořák, rather than in reverse chronological order.

Schumann, of course, also demands considerable "cognitive energy." Indeed, there is often so much cognition in his score that the challenge of performing often involves bringing to light the emotional energy that risks being concealed by all that cognition. This was certainly the case with his Opus 47 piano quartet, and Frankl definitely had the performer's instincts required to advise the Conservatory students on how to negotiate such a challenge. However, since Frankl explicitly talked about Beethoven's influence on Schumann, he may well have benefited from having the "Archduke" movement performed first. This was particularly the case for the points he was trying to make on approaching the opening Sostenuto assai measures, whose presence in Schumann's compositional language could well be attributed to such experimental efforts as Beethoven's theme for his "Archduke" variations. Furthermore, since this Sostenuto assai passage recurs in the movement, rather than playing the role of the more "classical" introduction, Frankl was also able to address the challenge of the overall architecture of the movement. For my own listening there is something particularly magical in the recapitulation, which, while it was probably intricately calculated out by Schumann, still rounds an emotional corner in a way that few recapitulations do; and Frankl knew just how to advice the students on properly rounding that corner.

This alternation of moods was also the basic formal architecture of the movements of Dvořák's Opus 90 ("Dumky") trio, whose first two movements began the Master Class. This performance returned us to the realm of Robert Mann's precept that a composer is best understood in terms of the folk music of his "roots." The very name of this piano trio is a celebration of those roots; and for Frankl those roots are best honored with an abundance of emotional energy. He thus took an excellent reading by the Conservatory students and took into over the top into a domain in which the emotions were far richer but still modulated enough that they never overwhelmed the underlying musical substance. Just to make my point one final time, this was the sort of exuberance that should have followed us out the door at the end of the evening, rather than welcomed us into the Recital Hall. Had we been welcomed by Beethoven, our journey would have proceeded forward in time; and Dvořák would have left us relishing the extent of that journey.

The Sound of a Sextet

I sometimes feel at a disadvantage for not being able to play any instrument in the string family. (No, I do not count the washtub bass that I played during my brief engagement with a bluegrass group.) There is something about the rich diversity of sound one can evoke from just one of these instruments that compounds in such remarkable ways as the ensemble grows. One could hear this in the concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music that featured three members of the violin faculty, and one heard it last night in the Chamber Music Masters concert at the Conservatory that featured cellist Joel Krosnick. The first of these concerts progressed from duos to a trio; the second culminated in a sextet.

I have to confess that I am a real sucker for the sound of a string sextet with its equal pairings of violins, violas, and cellos. I think I got "hooked" many years ago, when Jaime Laredo organized a concert at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, which consisted entirely of the two Brahms sextets, each one played on either side of the intermission. I have a similar weakness when Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence" is played in its intended sextet form. However, the ultimate in that sextet sound has to be Arnold Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht." When I wrote about the performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 515 string quintet that took place during Robert Mann's visit to the Conservatory, I described listening to it as being "a bit like eavesdropping on a very intimate and highly amicable social conversation." In "Verklärte Nacht" every instrument also has the personality of a unique voice, but the effect is more one of drama than of social conversation. Nevertheless, Schoenberg's approach to drama is rather unique; and this is what makes the listening experience so interesting.

One way to explain this would be through the terminology of Kenneth Burke, which seems appropriate, since the sextet is based on a highly narrative poem (of the same name) by Richard Dehmel. At its highest level of abstraction, the poem is a dialog between two agents: A woman confesses, and a man forgives. (This is not to reductively oversimplify the poem but, from a narratological point of view, to sort out the story from the discourse.) However, Schoenberg was not interested in the traditional approach of program music to illustrate the core story; and, as a result, he shifted his attention to the scene in which the story takes place. This is the "night" of the title, which is the focus of Dehmel's first stanza, briefly appears in the third stanza (which stands between the woman's confession and the man's reply), and serve to wrap up the final line, which characterizes the "transfiguration." In some ways the listener might to better to put aside the poem (which Schoenberg himself had suggested) and turn (which he had not suggested) instead to some of his landscape paintings (which I had the good fortune to see at the Galerie St. Etienne in Manhattan late in 1984. These canvasses are less interested in objects than in the play of color and light; and Schoenberg's approach to Dehmel's night and the critical role played by the moon (which may or may not anticipate the "moon views" of Pierrot Lunaire). From this point of view, the individuality of the instrumental voices almost constitutes an embodiment of brushwork in auditory form.

Now all this may be a ploy on my part. "Verklärte Nacht" is a rather long piece of uninterrupted music; and, while it may have five large sections corresponding to Dehmel's five stanzas, I still have trouble finding my way around its expanse of time. (This is probably why I leap at any opportunity to hear a concert performance. I can negotiate Gustav Mahler's longest symphony movements, but my ears still need more exposure to "Verklärte Nacht!") In this respect the Conservatory performers (Ian Swenson and student Daniel Jang on violin, Paul Hersh and student Alexa Beattie on viola, and Joel Krosnick and Jennifer Culp on cello) honored the seamlessness of Schoenberg's texture, consistent with his avoidance of sharp object boundaries in his landscape paintings. More importantly, though, they were sensitive to all the gradations of color in the sonorities, which is why I feel that the metaphor of brushwork contributes to the listening experience.

This sextet was sharply contrasted by the worked which preceded it just before the intermission, the Opus 7 duo for violin and cello by Hanns Eisler. Eisler studied with Schoenberg but is probably better known for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. This duo (which paired Krosnick with violinist Axel Strauss) had a much sharper sense of "objects," cast in rather traditional forms but rendered with an extremely free chromaticism.

This Eisler-Schoenberg axis was complemented by the opening of the concert, which was the Opus 1, Number 1 piano trio of Ludwig van Beethoven. It is interesting to compare the Opus 1 trios with the Opus 2 sonatas that opened András Schiff's performance of the complete cycle of piano sonatas last October. They both begin with an energetic ascending arpeggio line, they are both rich in wit, and they both involve what, in writing about the Schiff recital, I called "the rhetorical impact of the rest." Thus, once again the case was made that, even in his Opus 1, Beethoven was exploring how to stray from the beaten path, setting examples that would later be followed by Schoenberg and Eisler. For this performance Strauss and Krosnick were accompanied by piano student Kevin Korth; and as a group they knew exactly how to honor both the impact of the silences and the wit that makes the listening such a treat.

All this set me to thinking back to Krosnick's comments on Tuesday evening about not performing the notes too "factually." Each of these three compositions had much to communicate to the listener; but none of them communicated through "factual" means. To go back to the narratological framework, everything was in the discourse; and the "story" was incidental. Once this was accepted, it was easy to let the music speak for itself.

The Current Marlboro Touring Extension

Musicians from Marlboro is a touring group that basically gives the rest of us an opportunity to sample the offerings from the preceding summer's Marlboro Music Festival from the campus of Marlboro College in Vermont. Most of the performers are at the beginning of their respective careers, although I have been following the career of cellist Marcy Rosen since my days on the East Coast. One of Marlboro's greatest virtues is the environment in which the young rub shoulders, so to speak, with the more mature professionals in a collegial, rather than student-teacher, relationship. Since a Musicians from Marlboro concert tends to be a greatest-hits-from-last-summer affair, the resulting program may not have the unifying theme that so many concert programs now seem to have. Nevertheless, last night's Annual Subscriber Gift Concert, organized by San Francisco Performances, could be listened to as a reflection on Robert Mann's comment at the end of his San Francisco Conservatory Master Class to the effect that the best way to get to know a composer is through the music to which that composer was exposed. (Mann actually said "folk music;" but I have used Ives as an example of an "experience base" that extends far beyond what we would call folk music.)

When Mann made this comment at the Conservatory, it was in the context of guidance he was giving to a student string quartet preparing Dmitri Shostakovich's second string quartet; but an equally valid context would be the extensive experience of Mann and the Julliard Quartet with the six string quartets of Béla Bartók. This is a remarkable collection, because each of the six is decidedly unique from the others; yet all of them are firmly rooted in the folk music that Bartók had studied so assiduously with his colleague, Zoltán Kodály. It thus seems appropriate to begin with what a string quartet of Marlboro veterans (Lily Francis and Yura Lee, violins, Eric Nowlin, viola, and Rosen on cello) did with the fourth of these quartets. It is also important to recognize the role of the Julliard Quartet in our understanding of Bartók, since their legacy of several recordings of the complete cycle must be as much a burden on a contemporary string quartet as the legacy of Arthur Rubinstein recordings is on any pianist wishing to perform Chopin (who was also heavily influenced by the music he heard around him). Nevertheless, the Marlboro quartet delivered a performance of the Bartók fourth as a conversation entirely of their own devising, rather than a departure from a model previously developed by the Julliard.

In my student days this was the Bartók quartet that received the most attention in the classroom, the presumption being that it was the least "accessible" of the six. Allen Forte even went as far as to suggest that the third movement embodied a Webern-like serialism, rather than simply experimenting with the use of tone clusters to accompany a series of recitative passages by each of the instruments. However, as Mann had demonstrated in coaching a student string quartet working on Elliott Carter, the accessibility of both a composition and its performance often derives from the extent to which performances can perceive and realize the music in the spirit of John Dewey's conversation metaphor. This is why I feel it was important to describe the Marlboro performance as a conversation "of their own devising." The "script for the dialog" may be in the published score; but the actual "conversational technique" of affirmations and challenges is a matter of how the "actors perform the script." As a result, while many of us may have been well-informed by past Julliard performances of Bartók (both recorded and "live"), our state of informedness provided the basis for appreciating the unique Marlboro voices that were engaged in this particular conversation.

The Bartók quartet was flanked by two decidedly different approaches to folk material, both of which involved texts sung by mezzo-soprano Tamara Mumford. First there were four arrangements by Ludwig van Beethoven of folksongs, two of which were Scottish (one with a text by Robert Burns) and the other two Irish. These are rather odd "rough beasts," to invoke the metaphor of that later Irish poet, William Butler Yeats. They were the product of a commission from Scottish publisher George Thomson, who had collected the texts and melodies of the folk material and wanted Beethoven to arrange them for voice accompanied by piano trio. According to Eric Bromberger, who prepared the program notes, Beethoven never saw the texts, only the titles and melodies; so these works are hardly major models of art song. For that matter, as I have previously suggested, most of Beethoven's writing for the human voice is far from his best effort. (As far as I am concerned, he hit the top of his game with the first act quartet in Fidelio, "Mir is so wunderbar;" and the down-slope on either side of that stunning moment is pretty steep!) So these folksong settings are best appreciated for their novelty.

On the other hand the Bartók quartet was followed (after an intermission) by Johannes Brahms' two Opus 91 songs for alto, viola, and piano. In the second of these songs, "Geistliches Wiegenlied," the viola plays a direct quotation of the German folksong, "Joseph, lieber Joseph mein," which comes from the fourteenth-century carol "Resonet in laudibus." References to Christmas are so legion and so hackneyed that this brief meditation on the Nativity is powerfully transcendent in its modesty, and Mumford easily found just the right tone for realizing that modesty. If Brahms felt haunted by Beethoven's ghost whenever he tried to write for orchestra, when it came to German art song, he had nothing to fear! Both of these songs convey the listener to the still center of the universe, where we encounter, of all things, the Nativity scene in all of its childlike simplicity.

The final work on the program was Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 593 D major string quintet. This was composed in December of 1790, exactly one year before his death; and, while there is much to praise in this work, that context may have elevated it on the wrong pedestal. Bromberger quoted Louis Biancolli (compiler of The Mozart Handbook) calling it "full of noble sentiment and great feeling;" but I have trouble buying into that perspective. I prefer to think that, even at the age of 34, Mozart had still not lost touch with his inner-twenty-year-old, responsible for all that ingenuity and wit that make his music so engaging. This is certainly the sort of performance that the Marlboro musicians brought to their audience. The feeling was definitely there; but the tone was not so much one of "noble sentiment" as of the sheer joy of discovery that emerges when conversation at its best is allowed to run its course.

The extent to which this was a conversation among equals was further reinforced by the seating for this quintet. Francis and Lee exchanged positions, so that Lee led the ensemble as first violin. Similarly, Nowlin, having also played the Brahms, drew back to the second viola chair, ceding the lead to Maiya Papach. I really enjoy this kind of practice, seeing it so often in the seating of the San Francisco Symphony. It is the mark of the sort of sensibility that goes into managing a repertoire, where different voices play different roles in different compositions. In other words it adds to the overall diversity of the performance experience, and it is the pleasures of such diversity that play such a strong role in motivating us to go to such performances in the first place.

The Gap that Cable Cannot Seem to Fill

Every time our government proposes "taking a hefty whack out of the federal subsidy for public broadcasting," as Charles McGrath put it in his Television column for today's New York Times, someone raises the question, "Is PBS Still Necessary?," which just happens to be the title of McGrath's column. The hypothesis that McGrath explores is that "the glory days of public television — the days of 'Monty Python,' 'Upstairs Downstairs,' 'The French Chef' — are past recapturing." Nevertheless, McGrath's arguments are about as stale as the state that he claims the Public Broadcasting System is suffering. About the only thing that changes each time the argument is hauled out is the number of warrants for the argument that cite programming on cable television channels.

I certainly do not dispute these warrants. The sad truth is that the only PBS channel I watch with any regularity is KQED World, which is only available in digital format and comes to me through my Comcast box; and the only thing I watch on it is the BBC World Service Television news feed that is provided about four times a day (except on Saturday). I even went as far as to sent a polite message to Comcast, informing them that the BBC feed was available 24/7 to any provider who wanted to pay for it; and I got the expected formal response that there was not viewer demand for this sort of thing. These days I wonder if any viewers have asked why Comcast does not provide Al Jazeera English as an option, but it should not be hard to guess the answer! Nevertheless, I am less interested in adding fuel to McGrath's fire than with exploring one aspect of those "glory days" that he never gets around to discussing.

This aspect was the use of public television to expand the reach of the performing arts, often (but not always) where "live" performance was concerned. Yes, there are still the odd offerings from the Metropolitan Opera; but these have become (if readers will forgive the intended vulgarity) the "sloppy seconds" of content originally intended for distribution as a high-definition signal to selected movie theaters. Programming like Theater in America, Dance in America, Evening at Symphony, and Previn and the Pittsburgh are now so far in the past that the current generation of viewers probably has no idea that they ever existed. (This is an interesting instance of the repetition of history in a curious way. I have a vague recollection of NBC Opera, but it was not until I was living in Singapore that I learned that there was a vault of kinescope recordings of NBC television broadcasts of concerts conducted by Arturo Toscanini. I have yet to see any of these concerts on an American television set.)

I take this as a sign of a shift in mind-set. One of the most important aspects of twentieth-century America was the movement to democratize the arts and the role that broadcasting played in that movement. Even before the rise of television, radio would bring the stage of the Metropolitan Opera into any home that had a radio every Saturday; and NBC not only hired Toscanini but gave him an orchestra for regular radio broadcasts. The basic premise behind the entire movement was that the hunger for quality performance was just as great in Las Cruces, New Mexico (a town I have visited) as it was in the line for spaces in the standing room section of the Metropolitan Opera in midtown Manhattan. Now I have never made a serious study of the ratings numbers for any of these offerings on either radio or television; but I do remember a time when the television columnists were all writing about how PBS was taking a serious bite out of numbers that used to be owned by the "big three" networks.

When cable began to emerge in a big way, many of us expected that things would get better. Now we would be able to watch Isaac Stern without any annoying pledge breaks! As we know, things did not turn out that way; but it was not as if the cable industry did not make some noble efforts. Does the A&E channel have any viewers who remember that those letters stood for "Arts" and "Entertainment," rather than bounty hunters and intervention sessions? (Do they have any viewers at all these days?) When the channel was originally launched, it was serious about those "Arts." It offered theater, concerts, opera, and dance performances and tried to pay for them with discretely-placed commercial breaks (not that different from getting an Irish coffee during an intermission). Heidi Klum probably does not remember that her channel, Bravo, was originally launched on a similar principle; and both of these channels exposed us to arts programming from Europe that we would not otherwise have been able to see. The latest effort in this direction was the short-lived Ovation channel, which did little more than relay video that had been produced elsewhere; but the quality level was still high. These days it is about as hard to find a good orchestral performance on cable as it is to find a half-hour of straight fluff-free news.

My guess is that the burden has now been taken up by the DVD business (the same business that in today's "logic of Hollywood" is about the only factor that makes the production of an independent film economically viable). This has had a major impact on how performing arts offerings are "produced" and "consumed." Several years ago EMI decided that they no longer had the budget to support studio recordings of opera performances and would shift entirely to video recordings of live performances (with soundtracks also sold separately as CDs). This may be good for bringing more attention to live performance, but it also may be the beginning of the end of studio recordings of any performing arts offering.

What is missing from this equation, though, is the community-based concept of audience. There used to be a certain excitement in listening to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. You felt part of the same community that included not only those New York swells who could afford tickets to be there but also folks just like yourself in towns across the United States with weird names (like Las Cruces). You did not need to communicate directly with anyone in this community through anything like MySpace (or, for that matter, a long-distance telephone call); but I would be so bold as to suggest that the sense of community around a Met broadcast had more substance to it than anything that a rich-media virtual world can provide.

Furthermore, that communal sense of belonging to an audience is, itself, only a part of the equation. I would further argue that one cannot be a performer, in any genuine sense of the semantics of that word, without having an audience. (Robert Mann made a similar point in his recent master class at the San Francisco Conservatory, reminding the members of a student string quartet that what they heard was far less important than what the audience heard). Yes, there are those who now "perform for YouTube." (I found it ironic that, when I went backstage in Berkeley after Richard Goode's recital there, the security guard was watching YouTube recordings of piano performances.) However, as we know from all-too-many studio recordings, abstracting away the audience leaves a major gap in the overall experience (yes, I have been reading John Dewey lately) that encompasses both being audience and performing for audience.

So, taking all of this into account, "Is PBS Still Necessary?" Well, if it is just going to be another source of dreck (which is actually McGrath's word choice), then it is probably not satisfying any need. For all the innovations that have transformed the media business, the wasteland is vaster than it has ever been. What needs to be satisfied is a national hunger in wake of that neglect of democratizing the arts. It is painfully clear that our government is not interested in satisfying that hunger and may even see the deprivation as yet another one of their many fronts in that "war against the poor." From that point of view, we cannot expect the problem to be addressed by "public" means, particularly if those means are federally subsidized. So perhaps PBS really is no longer necessary. I only wish there were some way to keep their channel allocations protected from being absorbed into the media conglomerates who continue to make big bucks out of dumbing down the content the feed us. Unfortunately, the robber barons of the Gilded Age (without whom there would never have been a Metropolitan Opera or a Carnegie Hall) seemed to have more conscientiousness about satisfying such a public hunger than today's media emperors do.

Chamber Music Masters: A Unique Perspective

Following up on last night's master class, Robert Mann's "Chamber Music Masters" recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music was unique for several interesting reasons. For one thing this was the first time that the featured performer also appeared as a composer. In that capacity Mann further introduced his work with an oral recitation of an autobiographical sketch. The third reason, on the other hand, had nothing at all to do with Mann but involved the way these programs are structured to allow the students to "take over" the middle portion. In this case that middle portion was the Charles Ives piano trio, performed by pianist Kevin Korth, violinist Leonie Bot, and cellist Megan Koch, whom (hopefully) some readers will recall were coached in the second movement when Menahem Pressler gave his Master Class last October. Since Mann had concluded last night's Master Class with the observation that the best way to get to know a composer is through the folk music to which that composer was exposed, this Ives trio was an excellent "demonstration piece" for the middle of the program; so I shall begin by considering it.

First of all to say that Ives had an encyclopedic knowledge of all the music that constituted his own "cultural context" would almost be an understatement; and I think it would be deceptive to lump all of that in the category of "folk music." I would prefer to go with the categories that Clayton W. Henderson used in compiling his Charles Ives Tunebook:

1. Hymns
2. Patriotic Songs and Military Music
3. Popular Songs
4. College Music
5. Popular Instrumental Tunes
6. "Classical" Music

The composers Henderson enumerates in that final category are Bach, Handel, Haydn, Beethoven, Donizetti, Gottschalk, Wagner, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Ethelbert Nevin, and Debussy. I suspect that Nevin is the primary reason for his using scare quotes (although my wife would probably make the same case for Gottschalk). Within all of the other categories, you have music with known composers and music that could be considered as being of "folk" origin. I doubt that there is any other composer whose source material requires as complex an ontology as this one; but, in light of these data points, I suspect that, given the opportunity, Mann would correct last night's observation to accommodate that broader concept of "cultural context."

My second point about this source material is that, as always, the performance is as important as the music itself, if not more so. This is best illustrated by a few sentences in the Program Notes for this trio about what Ives learned from his father:

One of his father's most resonant pieces of wisdom came when he said of a stonemason's off-key hymn singing: "Look into his face and hear the music of the ages. Don't pay too much attention to the sounds—for if you do, you may miss the music. You won't get a wild, heroic ride to heaven on pretty little sounds."

Ives' music is, indeed, the closest we (even the atheists among us) may get to that "wild, heroic ride to heaven," because "the music of the ages" is not what we find on the printed page but in what we hear in performances that, more often than not, honor the heart of the performer more than they do the text of that printed page.

In this light it makes sense to begin by returning to the movement that the performers had prepared for Pressler: "TSIAJ" (which stands for "This scherzo is a joke"). Last October I suggested that this title was Ives' "reply" to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (not in Henderson's list of composers, by the way), who chose to document the bad habits of Austrian village musicians in his Musikalischer Spass. I now think I need to revise this position, because, in Ives' case these were not only not bad habits but were actually source material to be faithfully documented. If we then laugh at his "joke," it is with a warm understanding of the human comedy, rather than the kind of derision that seems to underlie Mozart's exercise. To some extent this reflects the sincerity that underlies that opening scene from The Jerk that I cited in October. The black parents know that the white Steve Martin will never be able to stamp his foot in time to their singing, but they still love him. Similarly, we still love that poor pianist who never seems to come down on the rhythmic beats that the violin and cello are following, because he (in this case) is our conductor on that "wild, heroic ride to heaven."

This brings us to the movements on either side of TSIAJ, which frame the scherzo with more fundamental convictions of faith. Ives employs open fourths and fifths (and sometimes wider intervals) as if they were transcendental declarations from a Unitarian pulpit. We accept them as the bridge between our mortal coil and the heaven to which we shall eventually be conducted. So it is that the third movement concludes with a relatively sober and sincere "singing" of "Rock of Ages," leaving us with a clear vision of that bridge. Now, to be honest, I have no idea to what extent such nineteenth-century philosophical preoccupations actually concerned the members of this particular trio. They certainly were not playing it as if it were an "American Musikalischer Spass," preferring, as far as I could tell, to let Ives be Ives in his convictions, just as Myung-Whun Chung figured out how to let Messiaen be Messiaen when he conducted the San Francisco Symphony performance of "L'Ascension," which had its own philosophical preoccupations. Without dismissing what Mann brought to last night's recital, I still feel that hearing this performance of the Ives trio was enough to make my evening worth while.

So, to the extent that both the composition and performance of music are closely tied to that "cultural context," I would now like to write a bit about Mann's decision to precede the performance of his own music with some autobiographical remarks. This is the sort of thing that tends to drive the academic purists up the wall. They point to Igor Stravinsky who, asked to say a few words on television when "The Flood" was first broadcast, came out with "I don't vant to talk you more; I only vant to play you more!" Even when the English got polished up, though, Stravinsky's texts are always at a relatively high level of abstraction, almost in denial of having any such thing as a "cultural context."

Mann knows better, and I can hardly complain. Didn't I engage in my own "autobiographical exercise" in order to communicate what Mann had taught me last night about Elliott Carter? Besides, I have to give Mann credit for being far more self-effacing than I was and for creating the context of his compositions through a selection of humorous episodes. Furthermore, the three pieces he introduced were all brief; and he had a good sense of the right scale of brevity for the remarks that preceded them. Also, because the pieces themselves covered the time from 1941 to the very recent past (the middle of the three pieces having been composed in 1981), they wove together comfortably with the chronology of the autobiography.

As to the music itself, it is hard to comment on pieces that short after only a single exposure. Besides, when you consider the full scope of the repertoire that the Julliard Quartet has covered under Mann's leadership, I feel that I have barely scratched the surface of his own "cultural context;" and that does not even account for his contact with theater works through his wife. However, I suspect I felt most detached from that middle piece, which was an "Invocation" written for a wedding ceremony, because I found myself just too ill-equipped to get beyond the notes. As I have said of other "first exposure" performances, I came away interested enough to want to here these works performed again.

The evening concluded with "real" Mozart, the K. 515 string quintet. This was certainly a radical departure from what had been presented prior to the intermission, and I suppose there was some risk of anticlimax. However, to draw upon a metaphor that I invoked in writing about Carter, this performance was a bit like eavesdropping on a very intimate and highly amicable social conversation; and, from that point of view, it was very much in the same spirit (if not style) as the first half of the evening. There was a particular intimacy between Mann's first violin and Paul Hersh's first viola in the Andante movement, which sent me back to my Mozart Handbook to compare the date of this work with that of the K. 364 sinfonia concertante. The difference in the catalog numbers offers a clue: the works are separated by eight years. Nevertheless, I could not help but think that Mozart (who tended to play the viola for such chamber music) was reflecting back on his earlier violin-viola conversations. After all, Mozart brought along his own "cultural context" to each new composition!