Storyville Panders to the Audiophiles

The Storyville album of the Teddy Wilson Trio entitled Revisits the Goodman Years has been available on compact disc for almost a decade. Nevertheless, the Copenhagen-based label decided, about a month ago, to revive the album with a vinyl release. As far as I can tell, most of the information that appeals to serious jazz listeners has been omitted from the product. Furthermore, because of the limits of vinyl, six of the tracks that concluded the CD release are not available on the vinyl version.

The most important elision is the membership of the trio. Over the course of his career as a jazz pianist, Wilson had a wide number of trio partners, resulting in any number of different approaches to interplay. Revisits the Goodman Years was recorded at a studio in Copenhagen in 1980. Wilson was joined by drummer Ed Thigpen, who had made Denmark his home. The bass player was Jesper Lundgaard, better known in Europe than on this side of the pond; but definitely a talent not to be ignored.

This makes for a stimulating account of tunes that were popular in the thirties. However, the stimulation comes from the polished technique and inventiveness of all three of the players. All that really matters is a basic sense of what the instrumentalists are doing and whether the piano was satisfactorily tuned for the occasion. More accurately, the substance of listening has more to do with what the mind does with the auditory stimuli than how well those stimuli compare against the ones that first went into the recording microphones.

In that context I have little sympathy for Storyville deciding to “go vinyl.” While most of us around the world continue to shelter-in-place, all that matters is that the loudspeakers, headphones, or earbuds give sufficient account of what the performers are trying to do. That is all anyone needs for serious music appreciation, and I shall leave audiophilia for those too shallow to think of better things to do with their money!

Bach in the Time of COVID-19

This afternoon public media organization PRX joined forces with Boston Public Television station WGBH to present a streamed performance by cellist Yo-Yo Ma. The program, which lasted about two and one-quarter hours and was “live-only,” was devoted entirely to the six solo cello suites of Johann Sebastian Bach, BWV 1007–1012, played in the order of their catalog numbers. This is one of Bach’s most systematically organized collections. Each suite consists of a Prelude movement followed by five dance movements. Four of the dance forms are identical in all of the suites, the second through fourth movements (Allemande, Courante, and Sarabande) and the conclusion (Gigue). The fifth movement is always in ternary (ABA) form; but there are three different styles, each of which appears in two of the suites. The overall ordering is two Minuets, two Bourrées, and two Gavottes.

Most likely Bach composed these when he was at Köthen as part of his duties as Kapellmeister. (This would have been between 1717 and 1723.) It is not unreasonable to guess that the suites were written for pedagogical purposes, rather than for an audience of listeners. Indeed, they received almost no attention in concert halls until Pablo Casals not only included them in his recitals but also recorded them. Whether or not Casals had any influence on Ma’s approach to playing these pieces, we do know that Ma played in the Marlboro Festival Orchestra when Casals was its conductor.

Casals’ decision to “publicize” the suites may have motivated a remark attributed to Wanda Landowska, regardless of whether or not she actually said it:

You play Bach your way, Pablo; and I’ll play it his!

Actually, Casals seemed to be as aware of Bach’s pedagogical intentions as anyone familiar with even the most casual biography of the composer. Indeed, Bernard Greenhouse (formerly of the Beaux Arts Trio) documented his experiences in studying with Casals with particular emphasis on playing the cello suites. (Those experiences were documented in Donald Schön’s book Educating the Reflective Practitioner: Toward a New Design for Teaching and Learning in the Professions, and they prompted a relatively early article on this site.) It is clear that Casals was as much a stickler for expressiveness and underlying technique in equal measure. His approaches to interpretation may have differed from those taken by Landowska, but they were still true to Bach’s spirit.

Ma’s own approach to technique was certainly not weak. Nevertheless, it was inconsistent, particularly when linked to his capacity for expressiveness. Most importantly Ma never found convincing ways to express the spirit of dance behind all those movements cutting across the six suites. For that matter he also had trouble bringing expressiveness to the opening movement, even when Bach used that movement to “play around” with the conventional coupling of prelude and fugue.

As a result I suspect that most listeners, whether well informed or only modestly experienced, are likely to have experienced fatigue over the course of this broadcast, possibly even before the halfway mark. One can certainly appreciate the good intentions behind this project. Sadly, however, Bach was not well served by those intentions. No one seemed to care very much that Bach was being treated as a monument, rather than a working musician; and this misconceived approach to video media may be one of the reasons why I almost never watch PBS offerings any more.

Belder Concludes(?) “Fitzwilliam” Project

At the beginning of this month, Brilliant Classics released the seventh volume in the project of Dutch harpsichordist Pieter-Jan Belder to record the 297 compositions collected in The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Unlike its six predecessors, this album consists of three, rather than two, CDs. A little bit of arithmetic reveals that, collectively, these seven volumes consist of 295 tracks. This leads me to believe that the third CD was included to bring the project to conclusion, even if none of the advance documents say anything about this being the final volume. My current conjecture is that, across all of those CDs, there are two tracks that consist of two short compositions played back-to-back. (The closest to “hard evidence” I have is that the advance material for the sixth volume described it as the penultimate release.) [added 5/16, 4:20 p.m.: I have now identified that "The New Sa-Hoo" [CXLVII] by Giles Farnaby is not in any of the seven volumes.]

Cover design for the Dover publication of The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (from its Amazon.com Web page)

Conditions being what they are, I decided this morning that the time on my hands could be put to good use by pulling my two Dover Edition volumes of The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book off the shelf and onto my keyboard’s music stand. I have done this from time to time in the past, but never before with the recordings by a scholar like Belder at my disposal. As a result, listening to this final volume had more impact on my motivation to play the music for myself than it did on discussing the music itself. This is entirely understandable, since, as I have already observed, this music was compiled for personal recreation, rather than for performances before an audience.

That said, I have to confess that a rather significant skill set has to be acquired before the experience can feel “recreational.” Most important is that the approach to embellishment differs in some significant ways from the sorts of practices one encounters in the keyboard music of François Couperin or Johann Sebastian Bach. Listening to Belder as a student with not much of a skill set was significantly different from “audience” listening organized around recognizing tunes and how they unfold into variations. As a result, even the shortest of dance forms quickly reveal themselves as technical challenges, the sorts of challenges that require either highly-focused students or adults with enough financial and social security to devote the better part of their time to learning to play these pieces.

This leads me to wonder whether listening was ever part of the equation cooked up by the compilers of The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. Such questioning might lead to the conclusion that this impressive collection of CDs was never really intended for “audience-oriented” listening. Rather, the value of the collection is pedagogical. For any piece in the collection, Belder confronts the would-be student with a perspective on how the music should sound. It then falls on that student to figure out how to make the piece sound that way. This need not be “faithful reproduction,” since there are any number of possibilities for both melodic and rhythmic variation that lead the skilled performer beyond the mere marks on paper.

Many, if not most, of those possibilities can be apprehended by even a casual listener. However, where the sociology of music-making is concerned, listening takes a distant back seat to executing for the sake one’s own listening and little more. In that frame of reference, I can recommend both Belder and the packaging of his recordings as a first-rate resource for those willing to take the plunge into making the music for themselves.

What are the Percepts When we Listen to Music?

As a result of some exchanges with Stephen Malinowski that followed up on my piece last Sunday about his visualizations of two of the “Razumovsky” quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven, I realized that I was scratching the surface of a landscape of far deeper issues pertaining to the acts of listening to music. However, this also revived earlier thoughts suggesting that the landscape itself could be divided into different regions, each of which could then be “mined” in efforts to understand the nature of listening. As I had mentioned this past July, when I was discussing the writings of James Tenney, one possible way to organize those regions was to appeal to the medieval trivium of logic, grammar, and rhetoric to serve as a foundation of “first principles.”

That said, however, there was a potential shortcoming to such a foundation. One might say that all three of the trivium disciplines are concerned with utterances. More often than not, those utterances are conveyed through text; but, even when they arise through viva voce delivery, those disciplines still treat what has been uttered as static objects. In other words those disciplines are concerned with what, for some time, I was calling “noun-based thinking.” On the other hand one of the key points I tried to make in my critique of Tenney’s efforts was that “the experience of listening to the ‘music-in-itself,’ [is] an experience that must, of necessity be verb-based.” (Tenney had been using Immanuel Kant as his point of departure!) Thus, there may be a fallacy residing in my choice of headline, because the very concept of a percept is noun-based. Making music, on the other hand, entails in-the-moment verb-based activities; and the listener’s response to those activities is just as verb-based.

If we are to think about how a specific performance of a specific piece of music can be realized as a “real-time” animation for which the performance itself provides the sound-track, then I think a case can be made that logic, grammar, and rhetoric provide “first principles” for the real-time visual experience as much as they do for the experience of listening just to the music being performed. Being able to identify those principles, on the other hand, is no easy matter. In the first place the very concept of a “sentential utterance,” which provides the foundation for all three trivium disciplines, is no longer “noun-based.” Nevertheless, there are clearly structural aspects to just about any “musical utterance,” which suggests that we should be able to appeal to basic principles of grammar (without deep-ending on parts of speech and sentence diagrams) to provide a foundation for identifying both the structures themselves and how they are used.

From this point of view, I continue to believe, as I first speculated back in 2007, that the very idea of structure allows us to sort out the embellishing from the embellished. Those who are more experienced in music theory and analysis probably recognize that this approach to sorting can be found in the theoretic writings of Heinrich Schenker, and those that are serious in their Schenker studies will probably be quick to point out that Schenkerian analysis owes much to Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, whose Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (an essay on the true art of playing keyboard instruments) provides a systematic and extensive study of ornamentation. In other words, principles of grammar serve to sort out the embellishing from the embellished (sometimes taking into account the possibility that an embellishment may, itself, be embellished) just as the syntax of a language allows us to sort out the basic nouns and verbs from the adjectives and adverbs that modify them.

If grammar provides the tools for sorting out the embellishments from what they are embellishing, it may be fair to say that logic serves to identify what it is that is being embellished in the first place. Schenker did not seem to regard this issue as relevant. As far as he was concerned, the only construct “worthy” of embellishment in the first place was a basic I-V-I (tonic-dominant-tonic) cadence. Needless to say, this was far too restrictive an ideology, even before the first rumblings of atonality began to emerge from Vienna. My favorite example from one of the composers that Schenker favored comes from the orchestral introduction to Joseph Haydn’s Hoboken XXI/2 oratorio The Creation, which is “faithful” to the key signature of C minor but manages to undermine any attempt to suggest a dominant-to-tonic cadence.

The point is that there are any number of constructs that can be applied to embellishment. Indeed, the final act of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck opera was described as a set of “variations.” What is varied changes from one scene to the next. The act begins with the conventional approach to variations on a theme, but this is followed by a set of variations on a single note. There is then a set of variations on a rhythm. The fourth scene consists of variations on a single chord, and it is followed by an instrumental interlude of variations on the key of D minor. The final scene is then organized as variations of a rhythm consisting only of quavers (eighth notes). Thus, I would argue that it is through logic that one understands part-whole relationships, which may be based on a wide variety of different approaches to embellishment.

This brings us up to role of rhetoric. This is the discipline that it most closely linked to performance. One might say that, when composers like Haydn and Berg choose to go down a rabbit hole of complex grammatical structures, it is up to the performers to make the result accessible to attentive listeners. In Aristotle’s time rhetoric was all about suasion, getting those listening to a speech to accept what a speaker is saying, whether it is a compelling call to action or simply expressing a point of view to be shared. If there is any level of suasion in the performance of music, it probably comes down to just convincing the audience to pay attention to the music one is performing. That task of convincing is probably best appreciated in the performance of opera, where seizing and maintaining audience attention is usually shared by both the conductor and the stage director.

Note that, in the above paragraphs, one could approach matters of both grammar and logic using “noun-based” terminology. However, because rhetoric is more concerned with performing the results of grammar and logic, it is an activity, rather than a construct. This touches on the fallacy that lurks in how Johann Wolfgang von Goethe chose to dramatize the Faust narrative. The contract says that, when Faust declares that a moment is so wonderful that he wishes it to be suspended in time, Mephistopheles will them claim Faust’s soul. The fallacy is that, when a moment is suspended it time, it no longer exists!

Apparently, Goethe forgot any of his past studies of Augustine of Hippo. Anyone that wishes to think about the nature of time would do well to “go back to the basics” of Augustine’s Confessions. I refer specifically to the following passage (in the translation by Henry Chadwick):

What is by now evident and clear is that neither future nor past exists, and it is inexact language to speak of three times—past, present, and future.  Perhaps it would be exact to say:  there are three times, a present of things past, a present of things present, a present of things to come.

This clearly had an impact on Edmund Husserl, since his lectures on time-consciousness explicitly discussed that “present of things past” (which he called “retention”) and the “present of things to come” (which he called “protention”). I doubt that anyone would disagree that both retention and protention are actively “in play” when one engages in attentive listening; but just as important is how those engaged in the act of performance can impact awareness of retention and protention among those listeners.

This allows me now to loop back to my thoughts about the strategies Malinowski engages in creating his visualizations. The mere fact that a visualization is conceived as what amounts to a horizontally-scrolling pattern implies that the viewer always has on the screen representations of not only “things present” but also “things past” and “things to come.” For that matter, as one becomes acquainted with the patterns of the visualization, one may recognize connections between “things to come” and “things past” more readily than if one is only aware of the sounds themselves.

This then raises a challenging question: How do performers deal with those matters of listener awareness in the absence of such “visual aids?”

Mike Tamburo to Bring “Sound Experience” to C4NM

Mike Tamburo with his instruments (from his Facebook Events Web page)

Last December the Center for New Music (C4NM) hosted a “sound experience” planned and implemented by Mike Tamburo. This was a solo performance involving the Crown of Eternity, an ensemble of over 50 overtone-rich instruments including gongs, bells, hammered dulcimer, and tuned metal instruments. From the audience perspective, this amounts to a synthesis of “deep listening” (as Pauline Oliveros originally conceived of that phrase) and meditation.

Last year members of the audience could choose between sitting and lying on the floor. According to the advance information for this year’s concert, “extended relaxation” will be part of the experience. As a result, all those attending are encouraged to bring a yoga mat, blanket, or cushion to make the floor more comfortable. Also, the ticketing information for this event suggests that C4NM is only providing the venue; and, as of this writing, it is not included on the C4NM Events Web page.

The performance will begin at C4NM at 7 p.m. on Friday, November 1; and the experience should last for about two hours. Tickets may be purchased in advance for $25 through a BrightStar Live Events Web page. If any tickets remain at the door on the evening of the performance, they will be sold for $30. C4NM is located at 55 Taylor Street, about half a block north of the Golden Gate Theater, where Golden Gate Avenue meets Market Street.

On the Virtue of Raising Hell

Landmark’s Opera Plaza Cinema, which happens to be almost directly below where I live, started showing Raise Hell: The Life and Times of Molly Ivins this past Friday. There are very few films that I seek out as soon as they open, and even fewer of them that have nothing to do with either music or dance. However, there was no doubt in my mind that Janice Engel’s effort to chronicle the life and works of Molly Ivins in a documentary that runs a little over 90 minutes would be one of those films. Having now seen it, the first thing I can say is that my instincts were right on target.

I am not sure when I took my first hit of Ivins’ insight and the wit she engaged to seize and hold my attention. I am pretty sure that it was when she was being interviewed by Jim Lehrer, back when his television program was called The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour. Her sense of humor was so outrageous that I could catch Lehrer himself squirming from time to time; but that was a time when Ronald Regan was the 40th President of the United States, making jokes about “We begin bombing in five minutes” during a sound check, not knowing that the microphone was going out over the air.

Ivins seemed to live by the mantra of never taking anything too seriously. To the contrary, she knew how to tease humor out of any number of dire situations. Many took offense at her style, but most of those had been responsible for getting our country into those situations. For the rest of us, her humor provided a release value and possibly the reassurance that there were clearer heads who could tell a naked emperor from one that could be taken seriously as a leader.

My one concern is the risk that the generations that have followed mine may not pick up on what this account of Ivins opinions signifies. Those who read this site regularly know my mantra that the prevailing culture is one that is “ignorant of history and proud of that ignorance.” Engel’s documentary reminded me that such a perspective was around long before we became a nation of zombies aware only of the screen on a cell phone. Ivins certainly knew about that culture. However, hers was an age when people still read text in print, rather than reading from screens; and, while her words may have offended some, they flashed on light bulbs for others.

Will Engel’s film flash on any more light bulbs? Damned if I know. I do know that Ivins mastered a sense of presence, both in her writing and when addressing an audience; and the nature of that presence reverberates, at least to some extent, in “new media” figures such as Jon Stewart and John Oliver. Indeed, I suspect that, were she alive today, Ivins would be impressed that someone like Oliver can deliver persuasive argumentation on the scale of a written essay and still, by interjecting just the right jokes at just the right time, command an attentive real-time audience. So I would like to believe that there was always a foundation of optimism supporting the plethora of razor-sharp barbs coming out of Ivins’ writing; and, if I can believe that, I can also hope that those now following Oliver will get around to realizing that “getting the message” should never be a passive response.

Does Jazz Have a Future?

I just finished an article in The New York Times entitled “Blue Note Records at 80: Can a Symbol of Jazz’s Past Help Shape Its Future?,” written by Giovanni Russonello. The online version of this article gave no indication of who the author is or what credentials he brought to writing what turned out to be an impressively lengthy essay. Between my own personal listening experiences and the recordings I have accumulated, I came away with the impression that Russonello did not know that all much about what was going on half a century ago or what role Blue Note played in those activities. However, when it came to writing about those who currently call what they are doing “jazz,” his article turned out to be more informative; and I was glad I had taken the trouble to wade through the muddle of the author’s initial thoughts.

I suppose that my tolerance of Russonello and a lot to do with my grudging acceptance of living in a culture that is “ignorant of history and proud of that ignorance.” Mind you, there are any number of jazz performers here in the Bay Area that are well aware of the giants of the past and impressively capable of standing on the shoulders of those giants. For that matter, this has been the case in general for much of the past, certainly among those recording with Blue Note in its prime. Thelonious Monk had a prodigious appreciation of his predecessors; and his first recording session with Riverside consisted entirely of selections from Duke Ellington’s “book.” (Charles Mingus similarly admired Ellington, even if that admiration resulted in the notorious Money Jungle recording session, which, for the record, eventually found its way to a Blue Note recording.)

The cover of the Money Jungle album, showing Duke Ellington at the piano, Charles Mingus at his bass, and drummer Max Roach (from the Amazon.com Web page for the remastered release of the recording)

So it is not the performers that trouble me. My real concern is with the audiences and my belief that, however wedded to Internet sources everyone may be, earbuds and Internet connectivity will never be an adequate substitute for being in the presence of music being made in-the-moment by skilled musicians. Thus, I am less interested in all the names that Russonello drops at the end of the article in conjunction with recent Blue Note projects and more concerned about how many of those names have followers listening to them in “real-time” performance settings.

When I go over to the SFJAZZ Center, I occasionally encounter someone whose past experiences overlap my own; but, mostly, I find myself among people who happen to be there just because they happen to be there. (I also have to confess that I have had little satisfaction from my few encounters with what SFJAZZ purports to do in the name of “education.” I am all for education; but, to be blunt, those responsible for it at SFJAZZ strike me as having a lot to learn and showing few signs of being motivated to do so!)

The bottom line is that whatever it is that we choose to call “jazz” will only have a future if there are audience bases that allow it to do so. Going to places like the Red Poppy Art House (and, for that matter, Union Square during the summer) indicates that such audience bases can be found in San Francisco. From a more “mainstream” point of view, I have been impressed by what San Francisco Performances has done in offering jazz in a variety of different settings. Whether such efforts are sufficient to build audience interest and support to a “critical mass” remains to be seen. Nevertheless, when I see many of the results of efforts by both the San Francisco Symphony and the San Francisco Opera to strike a healthy balance between past and present, I feel as if I am in the right place to see if that critical mass will emerge.

Post Script: Tomorrow’s print edition of The New York Times will run another article by Russonello entitled “A History of Blue Note Records in 15 Albums.” (As the hyperlink indicates, this article is now available online.) I decided to see how many of those albums were in my collection (whose growth depended heavily of mailings I would receive announcing new Mosaic albums). Only four of Russonello’s selections are in my collection; but my own view of jazz does not give as much attention to the recent past as Russonello does! Indeed, four of the items on his list did not exist when I was building my collection.

James Tenney: the Remaining Appendices

The collection of articles by music theorist and composer James Tenney published by the University of Illinois Press under the title From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory includes three appendices. The third of these has already been discussed in an account of the five-year period during which Tenney tried to develop a more “contemporary” theory of harmony. This article will examine the other two appendices and thus conclude the ongoing effort to account for the entire collection.

The first appendix was written in 1959; and, when this book was being planned, it was given the title “Pre—Meta + Hodos.” It amounts to a collection of initial thoughts that would eventually be refined into Tenney’s Master’s thesis, “Meta + Hodos: A Phenomenology of Twentieth-Century Musical Materials and an Approach to the Study of Form.” That means that the “big picture” of “Meta + Hodos” includes these initial preceding thoughts and well as the succeeding thoughts that were eventually published as “META Meta + Hodos.”

(I have to say that I am no stranger to this “evolutionary” approach to writing. Shortly after I began work in Santa Barbara in 1978, I was invited to a party where I got to meet several former graduate students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that arrived after I had received my doctoral degree in 1971. One of them came up to me; and, as soon as I introduced myself, he said, “I have been trying to rewrite your thesis for the last several years!” I replied calmly, “I wish you had gotten in touch. I’ve done that many times already.” In retrospect I realize that I now regret that I did not keep the notebook in which I first set down those thoughts that would eventually become my thesis. Tenney was clearly more conscious about such things that I was!)

“Pre—Meta + Hodos” never mentions phenomenology. Indeed, I hope that Tenney’s spirit would not be disturbed if I described this document as a study in terminology. This effort at “coming to terms” (a phrase I have unabashedly appropriated from the title of a book by the late narrative theorist Seymour Chatman) was motivated by Tenney’s recognition that the vocabulary of music theory was, at the time he was writing this essay, still very much locked into semantics based on “common practice” traditions. Tenney appreciated that those semantics needed to evolve to keep up with how practices of making and listening to music had changed since 1900.

While I admire the project he set for himself, I have found myself wrestling with an alternative point of view that clearly had not yet entered Tenney mindset in 1959. This has to do with the extent to which the common practice lexicon is almost entirely rooted in nouns and noun phrases, thus holding off at considerable distance the extent to which both making and listening to music are actions (probably a combination of physical and mental activities). In other words, if we are to do justice to the “practice” side of “common practice,” we need to explore verb-based approaches to description, perhaps to the extent that we accept the breadth of verb grammar with constructs such as tense and mood.

Then, as a corollary, we must recognize that any verb-based strategy must be based on time-consciousness. I see this as the strategic shift that both Tenney and myself pursued to mine the resources of phenomenology in general and Edmund Husserl’s lectures on time-consciousness in particular. However, awareness of phenomenology is only part of the foundation. We also need to recognize that when we actually set about to write about either making or listening music, we draw upon the “text type” (a term I acquired through reading Chatman) of description.

The problem is that writing descriptions tends to be much more difficult than writing other text types, such as the logic of argumentation, narrative, or even general exposition. Writing a description in which time-consciousness is involved is even more difficult. During one of my past efforts to grasp the nature of verb-based thinking, I wrote the following:

The challenge of providing a textual account of “what is” is already, as has been previously discussed, formidable enough.  Where the performance of music is concerned, however, “what is” is secondary to “what is happening;”  but “what is happening” is already “in the moment.”  We cannot begin to describe it (and mind cannot try to deal with it in terms of categories and instances) until it has elapsed;  and then we have to worry about a “new moment!”  The act of description is not only formidable, it may also be theoretically impossible.  The best we can do is engage in an ongoing process of coming up with approximations;  and the beauty of the performance of music is that there will always be room for yet another approximation, which may or may not be a refinement of a previous one!

I think it would be fair to say that Tenney never really rose to this challenge. The two appendices that precede the one written as part of his theoretical approaches to harmony are solidly noun-based. “Pre—Meta + Hodos” is basically an effort to lay a terminological foundation; and, in that foundation, even time itself is treated as a noun. The second essay then explores “musical parameters,” which amounts to laying out the adjectives that can be summoned to modify the nouns. Both of these essays cover significant distances and can be valued for that; but they do not help us to approach the verb-based side of music. A systematic approach to coming up with useful descriptions of “what is happening” when we make or experience music still eludes us; and, when one considers From Scratch in its entirety, one can see how that approach also eluded Tenney.

Tenney’s Rigorous Balance of Chance and Choice

Those who have been following my discussion of the articles by James Tenney collected in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory should, by this time, appreciate how much rigor can be found in Tenney’s efforts, whether they are directed toward musical composition or toward imaginative reconceptions of practices that have come to be called “music theory.” When it comes to composition, there is a good chance that Tenney was inspired by John Cage, who could also be meticulously rigorous when called upon to explain the method behind the creation of one of his compositions. What is interesting about Cage is that, while many of those methods were based on a foundation of using a chance technique (such as the ritual for selecting passages to read from the I Ching), there could be prolific diversity in how that technique would be applied. The Silence anthology has two short articles about such applications, one published in 1952 and the other in 1957; and from these we may appreciate how the creation of method was as important to Cage as the creation of the music itself.

Cage’s approach would have an impact on other composers. The best known of these is probably Pierre Boulez. In 1958 Die Reihe published an article by György Ligeti that provided a deep dive into the creation of one of Boulez’ particularly challenging compositions. The title of the article was “Pierre Boulez: Entscheidung und Automatik in der Structure Ia” (Pierre Boulez, decision and automatism in “Structure Ia”); and evidence of Cage’s impact on Boulez is not hard to find. (The article appeared in the English-language edition of Die Reihe in 1960.)

As Ligeti’s title makes clear, much of the composition process is “automatic,” although it might be better to call it “algorithmic.” The connotations of the latter adjective allow us to appreciate that one cannot have an algorithm before first identifying input data, output data, and the relations that connect them. These are the issues that Ligeti addresses in the “decision” portion of his article.

Tenney’s article “About Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps” is very much cut from the same cloth that served Cage and Boulez. However, where Boulez was concerned with serial techniques that could be applied to the twelve pitches of the equal-tempered chromatic scale, Tenney was more interested in exploring the pitches of the natural overtone series. He decided to do this by dividing the semitone into six equal micro-intervals, providing him with an equal-tempered gamut that would enable better approximations to upper harmonics, which could be represented terms of smaller “chromatic shifts” from the traditional pitch classes. (The reader should now appreciate why Tenney’s piece was scored for six harps; each harp had a different “micro-shift” in the pitch of its strings.)

In terms of method, Tenney was far more rigorous than either Cage or Boulez. His expertise in higher mathematics allowed him to make rigorous specifications of subtle variations. This was most evident in his effort to extrapolate principles of harmony into the domain of his 72-pitch equal-tempered gamut. Nevertheless, I think it would be fair to say that almost every reader of this article will come away with absolutely no sense of what it would be like to listen to the results.

(Back when I was living in Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to listen to a tape that Tenney played of an excerpt from a performance of Changes. I had as much trouble making sense of my listening experience than I had encountered during my “first contact” with “Structure Ia!” I gather that there is now a performing version six guitars, taking the same approach to chromatic tuning; but I missed out on an opportunity to listen to that music played at the Center for New Music.)

It would be easy to dismiss Tenney’s project as “much ado about not very much.” The fact is that it is very difficult to establish the relationship between Tenney-the-composer and Tenney-the-listener. That relationship was always much clearer in Cage’s work: There was none! Cage simply created the “sonorous materials” for a listening experience; and the listener was free to make of those materials whatever (s)he wished.

Tenney, on the other hand, seems to have been motivated by a desire to explore how one could work with pitches based on the overtone series through techniques consistent with pre-existing knowledge of counterpoint and harmony. Those who have followed this site for some time know that he is far from the only composer to be so motivated. The two composers that have probably received the most attention in my writing have been Ben Johnston and, more recently, Harry Partch. Of these three, Partch has struck me as the one that gave the most thought to the sorts of listening experiences that would arise from his techniques. In that context Tenney occupies the space at the other extreme of the pendulum swing, a claim that I shall be happy to withdraw if convinced by sufficient experience in listening to Tenney’s music, rather than reading about his approaches to composition!

Tenney’s Five-Year Struggle with a Theory of Harmony

If it seems as if it has been a while since I have continued my writing about From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, the University of Illinois Press collection of articles by music theorist and composer James Tenney, it is because I have been deeply occupied with four consecutive chapters (and one appendix), which collectively account for a five-year period during which Tenney tried to develop a theory of harmony that would apply to contemporary music as effectively as it did to the traditions of the nineteenth and preceding centuries. The texts that occupied my attention for so long are the following:

• Chapter 10: Introduction to “Contributions toward a Quantitative Theory of Harmony” (1979)
• Chapter 11: The Structure of Harmonic Series Aggregates (1979)
• Chapter 12: John Cage and the Theory of Harmony (1983)
• Chapter 13: Reflections after Bridge (1984)
• Appendix 3: Excerpt from A History of ‘Consonance’ and ‘Dissonance’ (1988)

As can be seen from the first of these titles, Tenney’s orientation throughout these chapters is primarily quantitative. His methods are grounded in mathematics, but it is a mathematical orientation that reflects his experiences in using computers to manipulate properties that are fundamentally numerical in nature. It is from that foundation that he believed that there can be “a quantitative theory of harmony.” So it is that we encounter this sentence in Chapter 10:

Unless the propositions, deductions, and predictions of the theory are formulated quantitatively, there is no way to verify the theory and thus no basis for comparison with other theoretical propositions.

This is a rather unfortunate attempt to apply the methods of formal logic to quantitative properties. Sadly, it leads to a misunderstanding of what formal logic can and cannot do. While those who work in formal logic will use terms such as “truth value” casually, Tenney seems to have overlooked that such logicians are not constrained by dictionary definitions of the noun “truth.” The “mission” of formal logic is never anything more than a means to establish whether a collection of propositions is consistent; and deductions involving the determination of truth values is the tool for seeking out an inconsistency. (It takes only one inconsistency for the whole collection to dissolve into uselessness.)

In pursuing that mission, whether or not a proposition is “formulated quantitatively” is not relevant. Identifying an inconsistency is a matter of symbol manipulation, the manipulations being the workings of deduction. As I have previously observed, had Tenney enjoyed the benefit of an intellectual community in which “computing” was more concerned with manipulating symbolic structures, rather than evaluating complex numerical forms, he would have realized that the role of numbers in a “theory of harmony” is only part of the story, a story that is more concerned with finding useful symbolic constructs to represent the nature of signals that must be processed when either making or listening to music.

As a result, even after Cage had radically broadened Tenney’s view to accept that a “harmonic structure” may involve any simultaneity of sounds, Tenney continues to be obsessed with the integers that represent the overtone series. This is understandable, but it also distracts from where the real questions reside. Consider, for example, some of the ways that Cage worked with a piano (both with and without “preparation”). Clearly, he understood that composition and performance needed to deal with simultaneities of sounds. However, Cage was willing to deal with a sequence of such simultaneities as if it were a progression no different from the progression of chords in a four-voice hymn setting. In Cage’s case, however, one could not reduce that progression to a sequence of Roman numerals or figured bass integers.

Tenney clearly appreciated this quality of Cage’s music; but, by the end of Chapter 12, one gets the impression that he had not quite figured out what, in his capacity of theorist, he should be doing about it. The good news is that he was aware that there are actually (at least) two different kinds of simultaneity. In one case, such as in those hymn settings, one is aware of both the individual notes and the chords that they form. In another case, such as one of Henry Cowell’s tone clusters, the individual notes “fuse” into a single “sonorous object,” whose “signal” is an integrated whole, rather than a superposition of recognizable parts.

The good news is that, by the time Tenney wraps up Chapter 12, he is beginning to appreciate that time-consciousness is more relevant to perception than “score reading,” associating correlations between auditory constructs and symbols on staff paper. Once again, however, I need to be fair to Tenney. He was writing at a time when few were focusing on issues of time-consciousness raised by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, and even fewer were trying to relate their focus to the cognitive foundations behind listening to music. Those who read From Scratch today are better equipped to consider going down roads not taken by Tenney; and, if Tenney’s efforts did not lead very far, they may yet provoke a new generation of readers to seek out new paths.

James Tenney’s Formal Thoughts about Form

In “Form in Twentieth-Century Music,” written between 1969 and 1970 and the sixth essay in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, James Tenney returns to matters of phenomenology after accounting for his computer-based research activities that took place between 1961 and 1966. This is a relatively short essay that, more than anything else, reminded me of a caustic remark made by Arnold Schoenberg in a letter to René Leibowitz:

I do not compose principles, but music.

The good news is that Tenney avoids making Leibowitz’ mistakes. He is fully aware that the prize on which he must keep his eyes is that of music (as opposed to, for example, music theory).

Mind you, he resorts to philosophy-speak to establish this point:

Actually, the “thing-in-itself” doesn’t even exist in music apart from our perception of it. All that may be said to “exist” are various partial manifestations or symbolic representations of it, and even these must be mediated by perception.

However, we are on a slippery slope here. There is, of course, the problem that “thing” is a notoriously vague weasel-word (Does “Ding an sich” sound classier just because that is what Immanuel Kant wrote?); but, even more problematic is that fact that it is a noun.

The wording of Tenney’s next sentence seems to recognize the distinction between nouns and verbs:

So it is really the form of the musical experience that must be dealt with.

Nevertheless, as the essay proceeds, one finds that Tenney’s argument is linked to the fact that “experience” is also a noun, suggesting the premise that the attribute of form only applies to noun-based constructs. That slippery slope seems to be pulling us into a pit in which terms that we use comfortably, such as “perfect cadence” or “recapitulation” have more to do with “forms” perceived on score pages than with the experience of listening to the “music-in-itself,” an experience that must, of necessity be verb-based.

To the best of my knowledge, the earliest studies of perception dealt with the “processing” of visual stimuli. That processing involved how the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sensory signals registered by the retina (as William James put it) are ultimately registered by mind as configurations of objects. However, the operative phrase in that last sentence is “registered by mind.” Perception is in the mind of the perceiver, so to speak; and mind is always in the midst of processing, whether or not the stimulus is static.

The best example of such ongoing processing may be found in the response to the stimuli of the Necker cube. This is a line drawing of a cube in which it is possible to interpret two different squares as the front face of the cube. The Wikipedia page for this optical illusion illustrates that ambiguity of interpretation as follows:

What is important is that the ambiguity is dynamic. Mind can flip back and forth between those two interpretations, even though the stimuli themselves never change.

When we shift from visual to auditory stimuli, the dynamic nature of perception is further confounded. We are no longer trying to reduce the process of vision to a “scene analysis” consisting of a configuration of static objects. Rather, the sensemaking that emerges over the course of listening involves ongoing dynamic interpretations of stimuli that are, themselves, dynamic. To push that theatrical metaphor, one is not only occupied with the “scene” but also with the “actions (physical and verbal) of the “actors performing” in that “scene.” Mind is no more occupied with trying interpret musical stimuli in terms of static marks on score pages than it is with trying to reconstruct the text of the script while experiencing the play being performed on the stage.

To be fair, the very nature of the noun “form” carries connotations of a static object. The significance of the Necker cube, however, is that, even when the stimuli are static, mind is never anything less than an ongoing dynamic process that terminates only with death. To be fair, when Tenney wrote this essay, there were not very many cognitive scientists dealing with the dynamics of brain that enable what we call “mind;” and, on the philosophical side of the coin, very little had been documented to go beyond Edmund Husserl’s lectures on time-consciousness other than Martin Heidegger’s proposition that “being” was a verb-based phenomenon, rather than a noun-based one.

As we learn more about brain dynamics, we are less inclined to reduce listening to the noun-based foundations of scene analysis. Nevertheless, the infrastructure of listening to music remains elusive. Those actually making the music probably have some advantage, since they experience the in-the-moment nature of relating what they are doing to what they are hearing. However, when it comes to describing those experiences, they are probably no better at it than those of us trying to account for the “audience perspective” of those same experiences.

I often refer to this site as my “laboratory notebook” for my efforts to understand better just what such description entails. (I also frequently call going to concerts my “field work.”) Whether or not I have yet learned anything of significant value from the pages of that notebook remains to be seen!

Vänskä Continues Mahler Project with “Resurrection”

courtesy of Naxos of America

At the beginning of this month, BIS Records released the third disc in its project to record the music of Gustav Mahler. Like the first two releases, this album presents a performance of a single symphony, the second (“Resurrection”) in C minor. It follows up on the release of a recording of the fifth symphony in C-sharp minor in August of 2017, followed by the recording of the sixth symphony in A minor in April of 2018. BIS launched this series in collaboration with the Minnesota Orchestra and its Music Director Osmo Vänskä. At the end of last year, Vänskä announced that he would not renew his contract when it expires in August of 2022 but would act as guest conductor. For those interested in a broader view of how this project is progressing, recordings have already been completed for the first symphony in D major, the fourth symphony in G major, and the seventh symphony in E minor. The tenth symphony in F-sharp major has been scheduled for recording this coming June, but it has not yet been announced which version will be recorded.

The second is the earliest symphony in the cycle whose resources go beyond the “symphonic.” In the last of the five movements, the Minnesota Orchestra is joined by the Minnesota Chorale, prepared by Chorus-Master Kathy Saltzman Romey, and two vocal soloists, soprano Ruby Hughes and mezzo Sasha Cooke. Mahler conceived of the symphony as consisting of two parts, the first movement followed by the remaining four. The recording honors this segmentation with an extended pause between the first two movements. Similarly, the third, fourth, and fifth movements are linked by attacca transitions. The entire recording takes slightly more than 84 minutes (which, for those counting, is longer than the 75 minutes for the fifth and shorter than almost 87 minutes for the sixth).

So much for the nuts and bolts. Where performance is concerned, there are several factors that matter significantly when any Mahler symphony is presented. The most important is clarity. Mahler loved working with large ensembles, weaving thick textures of polyphony, often emerging from unique instrumental blends.

In his many visits to the podium of the San Francisco Symphony, I have been impressed by the clarity that Vänskä brings to just about anything he performs; but, when recordings are concerned, responsibility lies as much with the production team as with the music-makers themselves. Robert Suff has been the Producer of all three of the releases now available, and the results suggest that he is as skilled at following the composer’s score as he is at monitoring all of his microphone levels. If the Devil resides in all of those details, then Suff has done a convincing job of making clear who really is the boss!

Then there is the question of what may be called “overall landscape.” Mahler loves intense climaxes. He loves them so much that inferior conductors easily fall into the trap of making those climaxes sound like “one damned thing after another.” The conductor that has best articulated this issue has been Pierre Boulez. In an interview that New York Times music critic James Oestreich conducted with Boulez, Oestreich emphasized that Boulez recognized the need “to sort out the climaxes from the lesser peaks, so that the real ones stand out.”

Once again, this gets tricky where recording technology is involved. When listening to Vänskä in performance, I have a clear sense of where those “real” peaks are. By all rights, Suff should have the same experience when listening to a performance; and he should know those peaks well enough to make sure that they are recognized as such on a recording. Where the Mahler second is concerned, the question of how many “real ones” need to be acknowledged (and, of course, where they are in the score) is particularly challenging and can probably allow for a variety of different conducting strategies. On the other hand, I tend to doubt that any recording of a “real one” is likely to make me kvell as much as when I encounter that moment in concert!

On the other hand “climax management” is only one brick in the wall of expressive conducting. Even if I do not find Vänskä’s capacity of expressiveness as compelling on recording as I find it in concert, I would still stay that the expressive strategies he brings of all three of the symphonies released thus far are definitely sufficient to seize and hold listener attention. As the song goes:

… it will have to do

Until the real thing comes along

Naive and Sentimental Musical Sensemaking

Readers who have followed this site for some time know that I have a tendency to fall back on the noun “sensemaking” when talking about the nature of listening to music. While this word is not in the Oxford English Dictionary (although the hyphenated version “sense-making” is), it had been adopted by several of my former research colleagues to address the rising problem of being able to extract “useful meaning” from very large bodies of data. The Oxford definition of the hyphenated version does little more than echo the two component words; but, if we look back about half a century, we find that Friedrich Hayek was dealing with the same issue when addressing sensory data, rather than databases. The term he introduced was “sensory order,” the biological drive to find order in what William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sensory signals.

from the Amazon.com Web page for Comparing Notes

With that as context, I found it hard to resist reading the book Comparing Notes: How We Make Sense of Music by Adam Ockelford. Ockelford is Professor of Music at Roehampton University (in England). He also directs the university’s Applied Music Research Centre. He occasionally makes reference to his doctoral studies in music, suggesting that he got his advanced degree in music. However, much of his research has involved the acquisition of musical skills among young people with sensory or cognitive disadvantages. His practices thus keep one foot in music and the other in psychology.

That sort of background should, by all rights, have made this book both fascinating and valuable reading. For my part, however, I was profoundly dissatisfied; and that dissatisfaction can be traced back to the second word of Ockelford’s title. At the end of the day, he has little to say about anything other than those marks on paper that all practicing musicians are expected to be able to decode. What that as his foundation, he dwells on that tiresome question of what music actually is, how it “works” (whatever that means), and, ultimately, how we “make sense” when it comes to either performing the music or listening to it. Only at the beginning of his final chapter does he cite sociomusicologist Christopher Small’s contention that music is not some kind of “thing” but, rather, “an activity, something that people do.”

My decision to devote personal time to writing about music owes much to my ability to spend a fair amount of time hanging out at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (SFCM), which is only about half a dozen blocks from where I was living. Through my own experiences in higher education, I have come to a naive but probably useful conclusion about where who learns what. In universities we learn about theories about music; in conservatories we learn about how music is practiced.

Universities occupy their curricula with things, to such an extent that one might almost say that education can be reduced to a knapsack of noun phrases. Ockelford’s noun phrases come from a wide variety of sources, almost all of which have to do with academic publications that may or may not signify to anyone beyond other academics. The grammatical infrastructure of the conservatory education, on the other hand, is build on verb phrases. One emerges (hopefully) with refined skills for doing, often without necessarily verbalizing (or, for that matter thinking about) what one is doing.

In his academic context it is understandable that Ockelford cannot get his head out of all those notes on staff paper. He has some clever ideas (which he calls his “zygonic conjecture”) about a foundation based on replications and transformations of patterns; but these are just familiar concepts dressed up in a new notation. As a doctoral student I was taking the same sort of approach to music in my thesis, except that my patterns were modules of computer code and the transformations resulted from parameters passed to those modules.

As a result of observing master classes at SFCM, I came to appreciate just how limited my perspective had been. Apparently, Ockelford has yet to encounter that revelation. Nevertheless, to be fair, shifting attention from nouns to verbs is no easy matter. Even the very idea of how one describes grammar for verbs has major qualitative differences from the almost computer-like formality of noun grammar. However, Ockelford never seems to accept that sensemaking cannot be anything other than an ongoing process. Like sound itself, if you try to freeze it in a single moment of time, it all vanishes.

When I read Ockelford’s title, I approached his book in the hope that someone had finally come up with, if not an underlying theory, at least a usable roadmap for negotiating the complexities of verb-based thinking. Instead, I encountered that very noun-based song-and-dance that I have been trying to escape for at least a decade. My guess is that those music-makers who really “get” the verb-based activity of their work are too occupied with the work itself to waste any time theorizing about it.

Pierre Boulez, que me veux-tu?

Pierre Boulez on the cover of his Deutsche Grammophon album of his complete works (from Amazon.com)

In continuing to pursue my interest in the relationship between the listener’s point of view and the performer’s point of view, I finally decided to sit down with one of Pierre Boulez’ more notorious essays, whose title is a quotation, “Sonate, que me veux-tu?” The translation is best phrased as “Sonata, what do you want of me?” For some reason I had believed that it originated with Claude Debussy; but it actually goes back to the transition between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and is attributed to Bernard Le Bouvier de Fontenelle. It was a reasonable question for him to ask when there was little sense of “sonata form” other than a collection of movements, not to mention that vast library of single-movement sonatas composed by Domenico Scarlatti.

Boulez chose this title for an article, which was first published in German in 1960 in Darmstädter Beiträge zur neuen Musik. The article was intended as a discussion of his third piano sonata. It was first translated into English by David Noakes and Paul Jacobs for publication in Perspectives of New Music and subsequently translated again by Martin Cooper for Jean-Jacques’ Nattiez’ collection of Boulez’ writings in the volume Orientations. 1960 also happens to be the year in which György Ligeti’s analysis of Boulez’ “Structure Ia” appeared in Die Reihe.

These two essays could not be more different. Most importantly, Ligeti was dealing with a composition that had been completed (in 1951), performed (in 1952), and published by Universal Edition (presumably in time for its first performance). Ligeti’s article is one of meticulous description that addresses the interplay between decision (specific commitments to structure on a variety of different time scales) and automatism (specifications that are  “bound logically” to the decisions). By the end of the article Ligeti even provides the reader with some sense of those “features” emerging from the automatism stage that are likely to be apprehended by attentive listening.

Boulez’ own article could not be more different. It is more like a progress report than an account of a completed composition. The overall structure of the sonata consisted of five “formants,” each of which had its own self-contained logic for both composition and execution. However, after discussing the first three formants, “Antiphonie,” “Trope,” and “Constellation” (which included the “mirror image” “Constellation–Miroir”), Boulez confesses that he will not discuss the remaining two formants, “Strophe” and “Séquence,” because “their forms are not yet definitive, having been put on one side and then interrupted by other works.” Indeed, in the Deutsche Grammophon collection of Boulez’ complete works, the recording of the third sonata, performed by Paavali Jumppanen, accounts for only two of the formants, “Trope” and “Constellation–Miroir.” Any connection between what one reads about these tropes in Boulez’ article and the experience of listening to Jumppanen is left, as they say, as an “exercise for the student!”

However, any shortcomings in Boulez’ talent for the art of verbal description are balanced (so to speak) by the first half of his article, which amounts to no-holds-barred polemic. Reading these outbursts can be entertaining, perhaps even as entertaining as coming up with counterexamples to the more outrageous assertions. However, we must be fair to Boulez and remember that, when he wrote his text, his experience with conducting was probably limited almost entirely to his work in the Domaine musical concert series, almost all of which involved composers who shared his polemic dispositions.

It is probably fair to say that, as a conductor, Boulez’ perspective changed when his attention shifted from his own experiences as a composer to those of past composers, such as Richard Wagner and Gustav Mahler. It is hard to imagine that he approached either of these composers from one of the perspectives he voiced in his sonata paper:

Finally, Western classical music is opposed to all active participation, and this sometimes makes it difficult to establish any really significant contact, even if actual boredom does not intervene between the musical object and the listener contemplating it.

The very fact that he recognized that, in such music, a conductor needed “to sort out the climaxes from the lesser peaks, so that the real ones stand out” (as James Oestreich reported when writing about Boulez for The New York Times) makes it clear that by 2009 (when Oestreich wrote his article) Boulez had distanced himself from his 1960 outburst. Such a sorting-out process necessarily entailed “active participation,” first between conductor and ensemble and subsequently between performers and listeners.

Reading that passage reminds me of when Roger Sessions held the Norton Chair at Harvard University and gave his requisite six “poetics” lectures. What I remember most from that experience was Sessions’ remark that a composer should be able to listen to something he wrote ten years earlier without blushing. While the noun “sang-froid” tends to come to mind whenever my thoughts turn to Boulez’ personality, I have to wonder: Did he ever reread his 1960 diatribe against Western classical music later in life; and could he do so without blushing?

A Listener’s Point of View of a Performer’s Point of View

Earlier this morning I cited the book Evenings On and Off the Roof: Pioneering Concerts in Los Angeles, 1939–1971 by Dorothy Lamb Crawford. This is a chronicle of a concert series that I came to know only about a quarter century following the end of the chronology cited in the title, when I had the opportunity to enjoy a stimulating evening of “new music” in the auditorium of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Through Crawford’s book I learned that, late in his life, Igor Stravinsky had become a “regular” audience member for the concerts in this series, even when his own music was not being performed! That same concert series also led to Pierre Boulez forming a high opinion of Los Angeles as a venue for experiencing adventurous new works by a wide diversity of composers.

Through this book my attention was directed to an early article in the Perspective of New Music journal, which had been contributed by Leonard Stein. (During my own time in Los Angeles, I knew Stein primarily as the Director of the Arnold Schoenberg Institute, which, at that time, was based on the campus of the University of Southern California.) The title of Stein’s paper was “The Performer’s Point of View;” and it involved how he, as a pianist, tried to deal with the complexities of many of the compositions that he had tried to prepare for performance.

Stein’s paper appeared in the Spring, 1963 issue of Perspectives, only the second issue to have been published. By 1963 there was a significant body of composers who felt that basic music notation was inadequate for what they wanted to create. There emerged a wild diversity of scores, some of which extended the expressiveness of traditional notation, others invented elaborate symbol systems (which required even more elaborate supplementary notes on how those symbols were to be interpreted), and still others were coming up with little more than graphic designs, often with few, if any, hints as to how those images should be interpreted as acts of performance.

As an aside, it is worth noting that five years later, in May of 1968, John Cage completed a book entitled simply Notations. The book consisted of single-page score samples provided to Cage (one by Cage himself) by 269 composers. Those samples were presented in alphabetic order of the composer’s last names. In addition, each composer was asked to provide a brief statement (no more than 64 words).  Each of those statements was then assigned to a specific page of the book on the basis of chance operations, meaning that (as far as I could tell) what the composer chose to say never ended up on the same page as the notation example (s)he had submitted.

Cornelius Cardew’s contribution was a page from his Treatise, described on his Wikipedia page as “a 193-page graphic score which allows for considerable freedom of interpretation.” Another composer who tried working with highly abstract graphics without any notes about the process of interpretation was Earle Brown. His “December 1952” from his Folio collection was such a piece. Given that interpretation was in the eye of the reader, the Composition Department at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music selected eight students to compose their respective interpretations of Brown’s abstract image; and, in July of 2016, the members of sfSoundGroup performed their interpretations of the scores created by the students (not all of which involved conventional notation). In such a context of diverse approaches to composition, Stein clearly had his work cut out for him in trying to establish and then document his “point of view” when confronted with such scores for performance.

For the most part, the article surveyed a sample of challenging score pages. In each case Stein began by considering what he had to read and proceeded from there to make a case for how decided to interpret what he had read as a keyboard performance. Ironically, however, Stein’s manuscript does not include a single instance of a word whose stem is “listen!” This recalled Milton Babbitt’s article about the growing distance between composers and listeners, which he published under the provocative title “Who Cares if You Listen?” (That title was misinterpreted by many, including at least one New York Times critic, to mean that Babbitt and his colleagues were contemptuous of audiences, failing to recognize that Babbitt was calling out a problem, rather than declaring a manifesto!)

This brings us back to Crawford’s book and a passage quoting the words of percussionist William Kraft. Boulez had come to Los Angeles to conduct a performance of his “Le Marteau sans maître.” Kraft described the first rehearsal as follows:

We assumed that Marteau had been mathematically conceived and mechanically notated. Certainly, it was not the product of the human mind and ear. When [Boulez] began the first movement with the count-off, “Un-deux-trois,” so rapidly as to sound like one word (perhaps the name of a new French perfume or liqueur), we simply froze—and said, “What did you say?” … He has since reduced the tempo marking of that movement from a quarter-note equals 208 to a quarter note equals 168. But it was when he sang our parts that the true shock hit us. The man knew what he had written. Furthermore, if it could be sung, albeit with the registral adjustment for the voice, it could be played. … My ears became so finely tuned that I could (and had to) hear what everyone else was doing.

In other words Boulez clearly knew how to listen to his own music, and a primary goal of rehearsal was to make sure that the players knew how to do the same.

However, this anecdote reveals a problem that is at least as significant as its account of a solution. What if the performers do not have access to someone with the experience of knowing how the music should sound? What if the composer is so committed to indeterminacy that (s)he has no “fixed point” for “how it should sound?” Given a score page in which the very act of interpretation may, itself, be indeterminate, what, if anything, can a performer to do bridge the act of performance with the act of listening on the other side of the proscenium?

There are no simple answers to any of these questions; and, most likely, there are not any complex ones either. Perhaps the shoe needs to be placed on the other foot. If an ensemble assembles to prepare a performance of “Marteau,” perhaps, before anyone picks up his/her instrument, the group, as a whole, should address the question of why they are playing the piece. The old mountain-climber’s answer (“Because it’s there.”) really doesn’t cut it. Performers are about to invest many hours of preparation time for what will be a half-hour experience on audience side. Assuming that they want something more than a Whiskey Tango Foxtrot reaction from their listeners, they cannot take the matter of audience response lightly.

This should not necessary be treated as a major cerebral undertaking. I have long felt that Arnold Schoenberg’s Opus 7 (first) string quartet in D minor is, as I put it last December, “a major challenge for even the most dedicated serious listeners.” However, on that December occasion, the Telegraph Quartet prepared the audience with a “road map” of key themes and an overall sense of how the uninterrupted performance could be structured into the four traditional movements of a classical string quartet. Given only a few items of such expectation, the challenge ceased to be as daunting as I feared it could have been.

Without trying to raise any religious implications, I would like to suggest that the act of performance involves a Janus-faced pair of acts of communion. On the one hand there is the communion between the performers and the composer, which sometimes can enjoy being face-to-face but, more often than not, is mediated by marks on paper that need to be interpreted. However, that interpretation must than provide a basis for communion with the listeners. It is rarely the case that both of these acts of communion are simple or even straightforward. (If they were, they could be subjected to texting, rather than musical performance!) Thus, rather than worrying about how to care about listening, performers should simply own up to the fact that caring is rarely an easy matter and commit themselves to preparing, rather than surprising, their listeners.

A New Recording of Jerry Hunt at KPFA

The second of the four new digital-only albums recently released by Other Minds Records in its Modern Hits series consists of a single track of almost half an hour in duration. The source was a recording of a live performance given by Jerry Hunt during a visit to the KPFA studio on November 6, 1980. Hunt presented an excerpt from a much larger project (which he would call a “system”) entitled Ground.

Born in Waco, Texas in 1943, Hunt became a pioneer in what would later be called “performance art.” He was one of the first performers to work with live electronic music, but he was as interested in physical sources of sound as in the expressiveness of artificial synthesis. Often the visual appearance of his electronic gear had as much to do with the performance as the role played by the gear in creating sound (and possibly light). By 1980 Ground began to emerge as an overall system for Hunt’s approaches to performance, based more on a framework for activity than a “score” or “program” designed to fill an interval of time that could then be called a “performance.”

During his visit to KPFA, Hunt clearly could not bring the visual element into his performance. He thus limited himself to working with a bank of tape machines and adding his own sounds through hand claps and slaps, sometimes with rattles or bells attached to his wrists. There was also extensive vocalization, all of which was based on a phonemic deconstruction of texts from George Eliot’s novel The Mill on the Floss.

The booklet that accompanies this new recording includes a four-by-four grid of images that set the tone for the listening experience:

courtesy of Other Minds

Photographs of Hunt himself, many of which seem to capture moments of performance, alternate with diagrams that may be plans for an event, specifications for gear, or just suggestive images. If any of the elements of the grid relate to the KPFA performance, my guess is that the relation is purely coincidental. Nevertheless, in its own abstract way, the grid sets the tone for how Hunt approached all of his performances, making it a useful “visual supplement” to this audio-only presentation of Hunt’s creative efforts.

I first learned about Hunt during my graduate student days. One of his friends was a modern dancer, whose work I followed; and she told me that she thought I would be interested in his work. Sadly, I never had the opportunity to meet him or see him in performance. He clearly had a capacity for going boldly where no performer had gone before, a capacity that distinguished John Cage so powerfully during the first half of the twentieth century. By keeping himself in Texas for most of his life, Hunt did little to establish himself in “new music” venues on either of our country’s two coasts, preferring instead to continue with his experiments and see where they led him. He took his own life in 1993 a few days before his 50th birthday, once he learned that he was suffering from both emphysema and terminal lung cancer.

Schuchter’s Schubert Gets Another Reissue

Between 1968 and 1970 the Austrian pianist Gilbert Schuchter recorded the complete solo piano music by Franz Schubert on a Bosendorfer grand piano in Vienna’s Casino Baumgartner Studio. Finding out much about Schuchter has not been easy. However, the “official website” for BBC Music Magazine has a review by Jeremy Siepmann, dated January 20, 2012, of his recording of the complete piano works of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that describes him as “late and barely known.” Given the date, Schuchter’s Schubert project was probably originally released on vinyl and seems to have been given its first CD release by Tudor Recording, based in Switzerland, in 1989.

That release was a box of twelve CDs. At the beginning of last month the collection was reissued, this time in a box with a new cover that sported a detail from Gustav Klimt’s 1899 painting of Schubert at the keyboard:

courtesy of Naxos of America

The new release was both physical and digital. Ironically (if not unpleasantly), Amazon.com seems to be providing only the digital downloads, which have to be purchased separately, one for each CD. Those wishing to purchase the physical box will have to visit Amazon.co.uk and deal with a longer delivery time, as well as currency conversion.

Siepmann clearly had a high opinion of Schuchter’s Mozart, rating him above Walter Gieseking and the more recent Daniel Barenboim but below Walter Klien. Where Schubert is concerned, my own listening has taken in quite a few pianists. My most “historical” recordings are those of Artur Schnabel; and readers are probably aware of my “more recent historical” interest in the recordings of Sviatoslav Richter. When I was writing for Examiner.com, I took a great interest in a series of recordings released by Paul Lewis; and I am currently following the progress of Vladimir Feltsman, having written about the fourth volume of his project this past July.

In that context I feel I can say that it is good to have now a collection the offers “everything in one place,” so to speak. Clearly, there are some compositions that I understand better than others for which I am likely to have stronger opinions. However, I kept an open mind while listening to this collection in its entirely; and I have to say I was never disappointed. I even appreciated the extent to which Schuchter chose to distribute the collections of dances across several different CDs, recognizing that even the most sympathetic listener might begin to tire of too much of a good thing.

I would, however, like to single out my interest in Schuchter’s approach to the D. 850 sonata in D major. I have heard this sonata in concert, as well as on recordings, enough times to recognize that many pianists take the Allegro vivace tempo marking for the first movement as an invitation to jump into the heart of a whirlwind. I can appreciate wanting to do this on a modern instrument; but I still have to wonder if Schubert had really intended such a rough-and-tumble effect on any piano that he would have been playing. Schuchter is more deliberate than most in his approach. The result is that, while his allegro playing may be less “vivacious,” the listener has an opportunity for greater awareness of just what Schubert had in mind when putting his marks on the paper.

While I like to remind readers of Aristotle’s warning that one swallow does not make a summer, I have to confess that Schuchter’s attentiveness to D. 850 reinforced my confidence in his approaches to all of the remaining selections in this collection!