Late yesterday afternoon, while waiting for the 5 p.m. local news broadcast on television, my wife and I were listening to the Music Choice Classical Masterpieces channel provided by our xfinity service. The recording being played was a relatively old one of Christoph Eschenbach conducting the Houston Symphony. The music was Arnold Schoenberg’s orchestration of Johannes Brahms’ Opus 25 (first) piano quartet in G minor.
In one of his letters, Schoenberg claimed that he composed the orchestration because the chamber music itself was rarely performed (and, when it was performed, it was performed badly). Schoenberg was probably right in making those assertions in 1937, when he prepared the orchestration. These days there are plenty of recordings and chamber music recitals that allow the attentive listener to appreciate this music as Brahms wrote it, and that listener is much less likely to encounter opportunities to listen to Schoenberg’s treatment.
The attentive listener quickly appreciates that the arrangement is much more about Schoenberg than it is about Brahms. The instrumentation is far more extensive than any Brahms engaged in his own orchestral compositions, particularly in the percussion section. Indeed, the only instruments that are missing are from the keyboard family.
The fact is that there are more details (many of which run the gamut from mildly amusing to hysterically funny) than can be grasped in a single listening experience. Indeed, I doubt that I shall be able to get my head around all of them through a recording. According to my records, the last (and probably only) opportunity I had to listen to a concert performance took place in November of 2007 when Benjamin Shwartz included it on a program presented by the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra. This was a capable reading, but it did not really register much of the underlying wit that Schoenberg brought to his orchestration. (One of the better jokes involves the few measures of music that were copied directly from the original Brahms score. Detection is left as an exercise for the informed listener.)
I relate this anecdote because, like many (most) others, my wife and I tend to approach the latest news with a sense of dread, much of which has been cultivated by the sustained impact of lockdown conditions for about half a year. Listening to what Schoenberg had done to Brahms brought a flash (however brief) of “positive thinking” to both my wife and myself. I make this observation because I have encountered a variety of efforts to approach music for its “healing” powers. While I am willing to accept a “whatever works” evaluation where others are concerned, in our family “feeding the mind” with vigorously engaging stimuli has it over “healing” hands down.
from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed
I offer this long-winded anecdote as explanation for the dim view I took of Inside, a new release on Summit Records of music by Scott Routenberg. The album will be released one week from today. As expected, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.
The eleven tracks reflect the impact of quarantine on the composer’s longing for the “outside.” He works with a variety of keyboards and software, adding his own vocal work to one of the tracks, “Flower Moon.” Several of the tracks involve contributions by fellow musicians, captured and digitized remotely and then passed to Routenberg through the Internet for editing and mixing. While this allows for richer instrumentation (and vocal work) than Routenberg could have summoned on his own, there is a uniform rhetoric of blandness that pervades all of the tracks, regardless of the diversity of sonorities.
To be fair, these are entirely personal reactions. The point I have tried to make is that, in many settings, vigorous stimulation has much more benefit that soothing comfort. The latter may encourage mind to let go of things, but letting go is only beneficial when there is something else to grasp. Mind you, finding anything to grasp in many of Schoenberg’s “original” compositions is seldom an easy matter. However, he was clearly having fun with his “Brahms makeover” project; and I shall prefer buying into those high spirits over soothing sonorities any day!
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