Glenn Gould: Bach Preludes and Fugues

It took a bit longer than usual for me to work my way through the third of the four categories into which I have sorted the 30 CDs in Sony’s The Bach Box collection of recordings of Glenn Gould playing the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. This is the category that covers different approaches to preludes and fugues. It consists of nine CDs, six of which are devoted to the 48 prelude-fugue couplings of the two books of The Well-Tempered Clavier (BWV 846–893). Each of the books provides a coupling in each of the 24 major and minor keys. Neither of the books was published during Bach’s lifetime, but copies of the manuscript were widely circulated. The first printed edition appeared in 1801.

Neither of the collections would have been out of place in the series of Clavier-Übung (keyboard exercises) publications. Bach probably used the first book, compiled in 1722 during his service at Köthen, in training his sons and possibly members of the family and retinue of Leopold, the Prince of Anhalt-Köthen. Indeed, the title page includes a lengthy description emphasizing (in English translation) “the profit and use of musical youth desirous of learning, and especially for the pastime of those already skilled in this study.”

The title page of the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier in Bach’s handwriting (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

In this respect we would do well to consider at least the first book in the same light as the Inventions and Sinfonias (BWV 772–801) collection of two-part and three-part contrapuntal “inventions.” These are also included in my preludes-and-fugues category; and the fifteen two-part inventions (the first half of the collection) were also composed in Köthen. They are also given a lengthy text introduction as follows (again translated into English):

Forthright instruction, wherewith lovers of the clavier, especially those desirous of learning, are shown in a clear way not only 1) to learn to play two voices clearly, but also after further progress 2) to deal correctly and well with three obbligato parts, moreover at the same time to obtain not only good ideas, but also to carry them out well, but most of all to achieve a cantabile style of playing, and thereby to acquire a strong foretaste of composition.

In other words, from a pedagogical point of view, Bach expected this music to be performed with clarity but also with the intention of presenting “good ideas” through expressive (“cantabile”) rhetoric.

Gould clearly takes this introduction seriously in his recordings, not only of the entirety of The Well-Tempered Clavier and the Inventions and Sinfonias but also in his execution of many of the shorter preludes and fugues collected on a single CD and the BWV 903 coupling of a “chromatic fantasia” and a fugue, both in the key of D minor, also probably composed in Köthen. Furthermore, while it is clear that none of these collections were intended to be lumped together for “marathon” recital experience, one can still appreciate having a resource that provides a recorded account of all of them. Thus, when Gould fills a single album with eight prelude-fugue couplings, he clearly wants the listener to be aware that each of them has its own unique set of “good ideas.” Put another way, if I was concerned about Gould being too idiosyncratic in his Clavier-Übung recordings, his approaches to the diversity of preludes and fugues is more convincingly inventive.

That said, I have to get back on an old favorite hobby-horse about the second book of The Well-Tempered Clavier. The first time I had to write about a recital performance of this collection was in 2009, when Frank French performed the “second round” of 24 preludes and fugues in its entirety. This second collection was compiled in Leipzig in 1742, about twenty years later that the first collection and less than ten year’s before the composer’s death. Having already listened to French perform the “first round,” I found myself speculating that, rather than simply preparing another Clavier-Übung volume, Bach was using his second book as “a retrospective reflection of a life of making music in a wide variety of settings.” Particularly among the preludes, there is a diversity of forms and styles that bear “family likenesses” (a phrase coined by Ludwig Wittgenstein) to past compositions.

This is clearly little more than a “pet theory.” Were I to pursue more serious research, I would not be surprised to encounter more than a fair share of grounds for refutations. Nevertheless, I find that I have developed a tendency to refer to Bach as a “music-maker,” rather than a “composer.” I think this has to do with my own disposition to prioritize the act of making over the artifact that is made when writing about Bach. If these thoughts are leading me down the wrong tracks, I am sure that someone better informed will shake them loose some time in the future!

Reflecting on Some Words of John Cage

Earlier this year, when it was still possible to wander around San Francisco without worrying about others or even having any particular goal in mind, my wife and I made one of our visits to the City Lights Bookstore. I always enter that place thinking that I am not going to do anything other than browse, but I always seem to leave with a new acquisition. On this particular occasion I finally succumbed to purchasing The Selected Letters of John Cage, which my wife had been persuading me to buy simply because my name was in the index.

Since then I have been taking my time in progressing through the book. However, COVID-19 has allowed me to spend more time on it, simply because I feel it necessary to focus on doing productive things. More recently, I have been following the dates of the letters more closely to see which of them address circumstances I knew or had involved my (usually modest) contribution. One of my favorites had to do with Cage complaining about how hard it had been, when he was at the University of Illinois, to have a computer program that would implement his coin-tossing procedure for consulting the I Ching. To hear him tell the story, it took months before the program had been "debugged" enough to be useful.

I was there to hear that story. When the Merce Cunningham Dance Company was visiting Boston on one of their tours, I arranged for both Cage and Gordon Mumma to give a seminar in the Technology Square building that housed the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. When Cage gave his punch line about the amount to time it took to get a working program, one of my colleagues left the lecture hall and went upstairs to the room that housed our PDP-6 computer. By the time the talk had concluded, my friend had created the program and gave Cage a page of its output!

Today I encountered a letter written many years after that incident. It included a sentence that probably would have rolled through my mind at the time:

Music has to do with mind, opening it again and again + more and more.

Back in 1979, when the letter was written, I would have simply filed it away as the usual injunction that we should be as open to electronic synthesis, chance techniques, and microtonality as we usually are to composers such as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Johann Sebastian Bach. These days, however, I realize that the scope of this injunction extends far beyond the immediate present.

In 1979 I tended to revel in my dislikes as much as I waxed enthusiastically over my likes. For example, as a result of my fanatical interest in the music of Gustav Mahler, I found it easy to dismiss Anton Bruckner with my personal motto that "Bruckner tried where Mahler succeeded." Similarly, I had little regard for any opera written after Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and before Alban Berg.

Back when I was writing about dance performances, my mentor emphasized that my first goal should be to provide an objective account of the experiences. If there were any "column inches" remaining for my article, only then could I take the liberty to express my opinion. When I first began to shift my attention to writing about the performance of music on this site, those words returned to me. I realized that I had an obligation to provide description, even if I was writing about compositions that I had disliked or simply chosen to ignore on grounds of insignificance.

I take this as a turning point in how I approached the task of listening itself. I realized that the very task of listening to a new performance, even one of music that I felt had been performed to death, was a matter of opening the mind. These days I do not have to worry about whether or not I have enough "column inches" to voice my own opinions. However, that obligation to describe has done more than I can imagine to the ways in which I have refined my listening practices. My guess is that Cage could have cared less if that process of opening provided me with a new way to approach on old Beethoven favorite; but, as is always the case, the principle is more important than the substance that has been selected for both description and subsequent exercises of judgment!

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.

An Encounter with Thomas Clifton’s Text

Reading James Tenney’s review of Thomas Clifton’s Music as Heard: A Study in Applied Phenomenology, I came away curious about what it would be like to read one of Clifton’s texts. On the basis of Tenney’s account, I decided that I would not try to take on the book he had reviewed without some sense of what sort of a writer Clifton was. As a result, I turned to an article that Tenney had cited entitled “Some Comparisons between Intuitive and Scientific Descriptions of Music.” After all, this site has, for all intents and purposes, served as my “field notes” in exploring how one describes the performance of music; and, every now and then, I turn my attention to how musicians themselves approach the task of description. One of my favorite examples of that latter case has been György Ligeti’s approach to describing Pierre Boulez’ “Structure Ia,” which turned out to be an engaging exercise in the relationship between pure logic and the rhetoric of expression.

Clifton’s paper was published in the Spring, 1975 (Volume 19, Number 1) issue of the Journal of Music Theory. It involved a quest for an approach to description that would serve as a viable alternative to the rigor of scientific description, in which the description itself amounts to an assertion (albeit a large and complex one) whose consistency can be validated through the tools of formal logic. Having once encountered a doctoral thesis that used formal logic to validate compositions by Arnold Schoenberg based on his twelve-tone technique, I could appreciate Clifton’s objective. However, formal logic is basically a tool for analysis of symbol structures; and the only symbol structures in music are the marks on the score pages. I have previously cited Jonathan Biss for observing that the music resides not in the marks on paper but on how those marks are realized through performance.

Unfortunately, reading Clifton turned out of be a rather frustrating experience. This was probably due, in no small part, to his invoking the term “intuitive” as a dialectical opposition to “scientific.” There are probably about as many different ways to interpret what “intuitive” means as there are disciplines that invoke the adjective. As one reads through Clifton’s paper, one realizes that he is weaving his way in and around all of those disciplines; and it is not difficult for the reader to feel that (s)he is getting lost in the midst of all that weaving. Not only is this understandable, but I came away with the distinct impression that Clifton himself had gotten just as lost and had not been able to find his way to a satisfying conclusion at the end of this article.

The good news is that he tries to make his case through musical examples, rather than resorting entirely to prose-based argumentation. Sadly, the insights that emerge from those examples seldom have much impact on the “mission statement” embodied in the paper’s title. The examples amount to Clifton saying, “Here is an imaginative way to describe this particular musical excerpt,” to which I would reply, “I agree that it is imaginative, but what point is it making?” By the time I reached the end of the paper, I felt that Clifton had led me into a dark forest in which I could not figure out which path would lead me back to daylight.

In many respects the concept of “intuition” seems to have led Clifton away from his goal, rather than toward it. Thus, he has the same predicament that Tenney has encountered in his work with computers, in which he had to use programming languages that allowed the evaluation of complex numerical forms but not the manipulation of symbolic structures. Rather than focus on “intuition” and what the many different schools of thought have to say about it, Clifton would have done better to go “back to the basics” of description itself. Specifically, description should be approached as a text type through which individuals can communicate with each other.

There is a discipline in literary theory concerned with the nature of text types. What is relevant in this case is that the text type of argumentation, which is basically the text type behind “scientific” reasoning, is distinctly different from that of description. The other two text types are exposition, found in topic-based essays, and narrative. Note that narrative is the only time-dependent text type, suggesting that discourse about “music as heard” probably requires a synthesis of description and narrative, amounting to the use of narrative for means other than storytelling.

Most likely we are now swimming in waters that were unknown to Clifton when he was working on the paper that would appear in the Journal of Music Theory. Indeed, those waters become known to me only during the final decade of the twentieth century; and I still cannot claim that I have come to terms with them. Nevertheless, I can appreciate that Clifton’s own swimming took him into a considerable amount of turbulence. My own thoughts about these matters are also contending with that turbulence; but I am hoping that, with enough persistence, I shall eventually be able to chart and pursue a more viable course that I can swim!

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

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?

Kyle Gann Tries to Reinvent Tonality

courtesy of Other Minds

A little over a week ago, Other Minds released its latest recording, a two-CD album of Kyle Gann’s seventeen-movement suite Hyperchromatica. On the strength of numbers alone, this marks a significant addition to the ranks of compositions whose creators have chosen to reject equal-tempered tuning in favor of working with natural harmonics. The tuning systems for such efforts are known collectively as just intonation. In such systems all intervals are based on integer ratios, usually with a limit on the number of integers involved.

The movements in Hyperchromatica are based on 13-limit just intonation. Thus, the integers used in forming the ratios range from 1 to 13 along with different combinations arising from multiplication. Put in another way, all of the ratios have numerators and denominators that arise from multiplicative products of the prime numbers 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, and 13.

Those who read my extended essay about listening to integer ratios, written when I was trying to get my head around Lou Harrison’s compositions based on just intonation, may recall that the thirteenth harmonic has rich history. Benjamin Britten singled it out in the horn solo that begins and concludes his Opus 31 serenade, requiring that the horn be played without the use of valves. As might be guessed, that solo involves an abundance of tonic-to-dominant perfect fifths. However, towards the end of the solo, the dominant pitch is approached by stepwise motion from above; but the “step” is neither a semitone or a whole tone. It is somewhere between the two; and the result can be spooky, provocative, or downright disturbing, depending on the personal disposition of the listener. That result is the movement from the thirteenth harmonic to the twelfth (two octaves above the third harmonic, the basis for the so-called “perfect fifth”).

Britten wrote that daring passage in 1943 for Dennis Brain, the leading horn player of his day. Some 75 years have elapsed since then, during which Harrison emerged as only one of several composers bent on turning to just intonation to explore new ways to think about the fundamental foundations of musical composition. Remember, this was a time when many composers were wrestling with how to approach composition after Arnold Schoenberg had “emancipated” the concept of dissonance. Schoenberg himself saw that emancipation as a liberation from harmonic progression, meaning that the primary foundation of his own work was polyphony; but his was a polyphony that was similarly “emancipated” from the strictures of species counterpoint, which had is own rules based on a distinction between consonance and dissonance.

45 years on we now have Gann, who has written in his notes for the booklet accompanying Hyperchromatica, that his goal “is no less than to reinvent tonality.” I have to confess that this quote sticks rather uncomfortably in my craw. I prefer to think that tonality was discovered, rather than “invented.” Making music is a behavior that probably goes back to the earliest practices of prehistoric social groups. During those prehistoric times, there was probably the emergence of a fundamental precept that, if you liked something you did, do it again. Eventually, when our ancestors were not hunting or gathering, they would assemble in a group to tell stories, or sing them, or perhaps even sing them while others provided “instrumental accompaniment.” Not too long thereafter, those “instrumentalists” realized that they could “perform” just as well without “accompanying” the singers!

It probably took many centuries before mind developed to a point where one could consider these practices and recognize them as instances of some systematic infrastructure. Such systematic thinking dates back (at least) to Socrates (or Plato’s documentation of Socrates’ wisdom). However, it was only in the Middle Ages that more extensive efforts at such documentation advanced. Those efforts would eventually work their way into educational curricula. However, for a long time educational practices seemed to lack the ability to recognize the difference between a document that was descriptive and one that was prescriptive. So it was that the confusion between rules to be followed and descriptions of past practices first emerged; and, on the basis of some of Schoenberg’s more caustic writings, it would appear that all too many practitioners are still laboring under that confusion.

I am not sure where Gann stands in the midst of that confusion, but I think that one way to establish a point of view is by going back to the basics behind practices of making music. Put another way, what was Gann actually making in the process of creating each of the seventeen movements of his suite? At the most fundamental level, he was writing MIDI programs for Disklaviers. MIDI, of course, was based on the equal-tempered tuning of twelve semitones, all the same size, to the octave, the usual way in which most pianos are tuned. In order to deal with just intonation Gann had to alter the hardware of his Disklaviers to synthesize pitches they had not been designed to synthesize. Furthermore, to account for a gamut of 33 pitches per octave, he needed three of those Disklaviers to account for all of the pitches. In other words what Gann made was an extensive library of software to run on an array of hardware, which he had made specifically for that software.

All that probably sounds so dry that many readers may wonder, “What does that have to do with making music?” It is therefore to Gann’s credit that I have to say that, if one puts all thoughts of theory aside and just listens to these two CDs, it is not difficult to imagine that Gann was playing at some non-standard keyboard, perhaps even improvising, rather than building a software library. In other words, while his methods were not actually products of the tight coupling between listening and making, he has successfully created the illusion of that coupling.

Having accepted that illusion, what is the listening experience that emerges from these recordings? The overall impression is one of exploration, often involved with establishing some “seed” of content and then playing around with different approaches to expressing that seed. Those who have listened to (and enjoyed) many of the prolonged improvisations that have been recorded of Keith Jarrett’s solo piano work can appreciate this approach to listening; and, for the most part, Gann works on durational scales that are not quite as extended as Jarrett’s.

On the other hand everything we listen to in the present is informed by what we have listened to in the past. One of my first counterpoint teachers (from the days of that “great confusion” between description and prescription) would consistently come down on all of his students for writing what he called “slimy chromaticism.” Gann has a frequent tendency to run through long strings of consecutive “micro-semitones” in his gamut that would escalate my former teacher’s sense of “slimy” to a level he could not have imagined.

However, Gann’s “hyperchromatic” runs may be the tip of a more imposing iceberg. Over the course of these seventeen pieces, there is little sense of hierarchy in what Gann is playing. The durational value of individual notes often serve as a clue to which of his notes are basically embellishments, but it is not always clear just what they are embellishing. As one who continues to have considerable respect for the theoretical writings of Heinrich Schenker, I feel that the absence of a clear distinction between the embellishing and the embellished reduces much of what Gann is doing on these recordings to another term that my counterpoint teacher used to throw at us: noodling.

To be fair, I am sure that Jarrett has any number of critics that would throw that same term at many (all?) of his prolonged improvisations. For that matter, there are any number of reasons to believe that Miles Davis felt the same way when John Coltrane launched into one of his longer improvised takes on whatever tune they happened to be playing. In other words the experience of listening to Hyperchromatica may, for better or worse, simply be similar to that of my recent account of listening to the world premiere of Lera Auerbach’s Labyrinth, in which I cited Henry Miller’s definition of “confusion” as “a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.” Fortunately, a recording provides ample opportunity to eventually home in on an order that is not yet understood!

Using Hypermedia to Write about Music Performances

This morning I found myself allowed to observe an exchange between a colleague and one of his readers. The reader had expressed a desire that my colleague could have augmented his text with sound files, which is a question dear to my own heart. How can any of us do a satisfactory job of writing about a listening experience without providing the reader with appropriate listening matter?

To be fair, technology is not on the side of those of us doing the writing. The authoring tool I had at my disposal when I was writing for Examiner.com basically allowed me to incorporate one image and embed one video from YouTube. These would be placed at the top of the article, and that was that. The tool I use to write this particular article is a bit better. I can embed both images and video at the most appropriate location in the text, but the only way I can incorporate audio is if it happens to be the soundtrack of a video.

Charles Rosen was in a somewhat more advantageous position when he was writing for The New York Review of Books. The editors created what amounted to a blogging site for their authors; and on December 28, 2011, Rosen contributed an article entitled “Elliott Carter’s Music of Time.” This amounted to a review of a recital given in honor of Carter’s 103rd birthday at the 92nd Street Y in New York. Rosen embedded four audio excerpts from the concert into this article. However, he could only do this because the 92nd Street Y had opened an account of SoundCloud, where audio files may be shared in a manner similar to the sharing of video on YouTube. Unfortunately, the hyperlinks that Rosen created for his article no longer work (although there is a link to an MP3 file taken from another recital at the very end of the article, which, as of this writing, is still functional). The good news, however, is that the Web page of the excerpts that Rosen cited are still on the SoundCloud site. Thus, while this is a step in the right direction, it also demonstrates that we have a long way to go in using real-time media to make a case when writing about a performance.

Most important is the question of intellectual property. The resource that Rosen used had been created by the producers of the recital, which reinforces the announcement most of us know by heart prior to any concert, making it clear that we should not be using our personal devices to capture any portion of the performance. (I rather like the kind explanation that Kathy Barr gives before every Old First Concerts recital, in which she explains that holding up a video capture device blocks the view of others.) The fact is that those of us charged with writing about a performance do not have the right to create examples with media capture technology, nor should we. After all, time spent fussing with equipment takes away from paying attention to the performance!

However, even when a third party provides “authorized” media, there are still problems in how those media can be used effectively. Once again I must raise the issue that what we are doing as writers is tightly coupled to an experience that depends heavily, if not entirely, on the flow of time; and what we commit to any document can never be anything but static. The best way to appreciate this distinction is to consider what happens when the static medium is not present. Having had to sit through more lectures about music than I can enumerate, first in classrooms and later at conferences, I am struck by how often it is the case that the lecturer will play a recording and then talk over it, saying things like “Now!” just before the particular moment in which (s)he wants us to pay attention to that recording. (Even with all that support, there will still be cases in which listener may not be sure what was brought to his/her attention.)

The point is that capture and reproduction will never be enough. If one wishes to explain a time-based experience, then one must do it by creating another time-based experience. This means that we have to stop typing at our keyboards and learn the craft of audio and video editing suites. Writing as an old dog that is willing to learn new tricks, I must still confess that all this turns the effort of documenting into a substantial project, My work habits are such that I want to do my writing about an experience while that experience is still fresh in my mind. If I spend too much time assembling my media support, that freshness may wear off; and I may find myself losing my grip on the argument I wished to make in the first place.

This leads to the conclusion that, flawed as they may be, words are still the preferred medium, even when we are charged with accounting for a time-based experience. There is no “method” that serves all of us. After all, there is as much diversity in the “experiencing” as there is in the experience itself. The bottom line is that our own memories are the most valuable resource when it comes to documenting a time-based experience. For my own part I have my own techniques for trying to “reconstruct the past” before I begin writing; but I have no reason to assume that any of my colleagues have techniques that are even remotely similar to my own. Nevertheless, we all do what we can, always well aware that some of those experiences are much harder to document than others!

What am I Doing?

This site is where I first decided to embark on writing seriously about the “composition and performance” (as it says on my new business card) of music. Through that activity I was able to compile a strong amount of “audition material” that served me when I applied to write for Examiner.com. After I settled into that site, my writing about music on this site gradually abated; and I used it primarily to comment on some of the many absurdities I would encounter while reading my news sources about both current events and the world of technology. Following the passing of Examiner.com and my frantic efforts to preserve as many of the pieces I wrote there before their URLs became inaccessible, I have returned to this platform for writing about music. This feels a bit like a homecoming; and, in that spirit, readers may have observed that I used yesterday’s article about the guitar music composed by Jorge Liderman as an opportunity for some autobiographical musing.

However, since I spent more than half a decade putting out a large number of articles for Examiner.com, all of which took on the task of turning listening experiences into text, I realized that it might be worth while to take stock of the current state of my thoughts on such matters. From that point of view, I should probably begin by apologizing for using a phrase like “state of my thoughts,” which implies that my mind is some sort of a database that gets fed with new entries every time I write something and becomes the source of my memories. Yes, I have been building a database (which is why I used print-to-PDF on Safari to back up my Examiner.com articles, since that tool preserved both searchable text and hyperlinks). However, the database is not my memory; it is the crutch I use when memory fails me.

Even before I was writing about music, I was using this site to call out and explore the critical differences between what I called “noun-based” and “verb-based” thinking. Simply put, a database is a resource that is confined to noun phrases, nouns and the adjectives that modify them. However, as a result of reading the books of Gerald Edelman, I began to appreciate that memory, like consciousness itself, is an ongoing process. As a result, without some grasp (even a hypothesized one) of how we deal with our awareness of the passing of time, we are unlikely to grasp just how the “wet brain” deals with memory. Actually, that link to consciousness is a critical one, since, in many ways, the most important take-away from Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time has to do with his use of “being” as a verb, rather than a noun.

In other words we have become so wedded to the advantages of digital technology that we have begun to lose an appreciation for what that technology does not do; and a primary example is the inability to deal with the time-base nature of verbs, rather than just their grammatical role in parsing sentences. This turned out to have a major effect on how I would think about music, because making music is a particularly accessible instance of time-based behavior. Indeed, sound itself is time-based. Because sound arises from the temporal phenomenon of oscillation, there is no such thing as an “instant” of sound. One cannot “freeze” an auditory stimulus for “closer inspection,” the way a digital stimulus can be captured in a photograph.

The impact of this attitude on my writing has emerged over the last half-dozen years or so. More and more I used phrases like “in-the-moment” when writing about a performance. Indeed, following up on Augustine’s Confessions, I often think of the “immediate” present in terms of its two “horizons,” one of those events that have passed and the other of events that are anticipated. Because any performance of music is tightly coupled to an awareness of an entire score at every instant of the performance (or, in the case of jazz improvisation, an awareness of the sorts of things that every other player is likely to do, as well as whatever (s)he has already done), it would be fair to say that one cannot provide a performance that engages the attention of the listener without building on a solid foundation of time-consciousness.

Perhaps “solid” is not the right word. It may be that asking a musician to talk about time-consciousness is in the same league as asking a fish to talk about water. In a somewhat overly reductive way, one might say that “what time is” is less important than “what you do with it.” It is through the doing that both past and future bump into the present as described in the preceding paragraph. The performing musician may not know what is happening or why it is happening, (s)he just knows “what to do” in the circumstances at hand.

If we include memory as part of the area of speculation, then it would be fair to say that we have been worrying about the nature of time since the Ancient Greeks. There is no questioning that we have made progress since then; and these days those with enough patience can appreciate at least some of that progress through the “wet brain” literature. Nevertheless, the stimuli associated with listening to music are still too complex to be handled adequately with the current tools of scientific research. Thus, the best we can do with a phenomenon like listening to music is speculate and then try to come up with sufficient warrants to lend credibility to our speculations.

I suppose that is what I am doing these days. I am using those settings in which I listen to music, in performance or on recording, as a “laboratory workbench” at which I speculate about the nature of time-based behavior. From that point of view, writing provides me with the discipline to maintain a “laboratory notebook.” Perhaps one of these days I shall be able to draw some useful conclusions from those many speculations!

Music Description Recapitulates Philosophy?

I noticed that yesterday, while writing an Examiner.com piece about the performance of George Frideric Handel's HWV 55, L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato as part of the 2014 American Bach Soloists Festival, that I let slip the phrase "listening experiences in which one’s sense of 'inner time' seems to stand still." This was probably an inevitable consequence of the fact that I had been reading the paper "Mozart and the Philosophers" by Alfred Schutz, in which Schutz cited Henri Bergson's concept of durée, which is basically the psychological sense of time, rather than the physical sense of time defined by, for example, the steady ticking of a clock. I realized that, by now, I have gotten so used to this terminology that I tend to use it without citation. Thus, the above hyperlink is not about Bergson but about how Verdi could achieve the same effect and how he probably learned it from his bedtime reading (which were the scores of the string quartets of Ludwig van Beethoven)!

This reminded me of an observation I had made when I was an undergraduate mathematics major. While there were these books of sample problems and how they were solved that could be a valuable reference for engineering students, they did not take you very far in pure mathematics. I realized that getting to understand pure mathematics was a matter of building up your working vocabulary. It was all very well to be introduced to abstruse terminology, such as "eigenvalue" or "Skolemization;" but what really mattered was whether or not your internalization of the concepts had an impact on how your actually did your mathematics. (For Ludwig Wittgenstein this was true of language in general, rather than just specialized terminology.) This also had a parallel in music theory: The truly advanced music theorist knew how to work "Neapolitan" into any paper (s)he wrote in a manner that really made sense in the context of a harmonic progression.

To be fair, the context of the phrase I quoted in that first paragraph was then qualified through comparison with a ticking clock. I like to think I am in this game to provide readers with thoughts they can understand, rather than trying to convince them that I know more than they do. Another memory from my undergraduate years was a physics recitation instructor who liked to say:

Remember, there is always someone who knows more than you do!

Nevertheless, I think it is important that no single discipline has a lock on all verbal terminology that may serve us. Every now and then we have to raid someone else's larder. I think what I like about the way in which I work is that I am as like to direct my rant at Bergson as I am at Henry Miller (or, in the case of another recent Examiner.com article, Wayne's World)!

How Can we Study Acts of Listening to Music?

Last Saturday, when I was trying to cope with the question of the "semantics" of music, I tried to home in on Jürgen Habermas' efforts to develop a theory of "communicative action." I suggested that, where music is concerned, the nature of the engagement that takes place between those who make music and those who listen to it carries more significance than more objective approaches to communication, which assume that some kind of "signal" is being passed from a "sender" to a "receiver." What is now known as the "mathematical theory of communication" is almost entirely about how what the receiver receives is basically identical to what the sender sends without acquiring any of the interference of "noise."

Where music is concerned, however, this theory may not rest on a useful set of premises. It may be hazardous to assume that listening to music involves some kind of "processing" of an "auditory signal" by brain or mind. Rather than thinking in terms of either the objective world of signals and noise or the psychological world of collecting data from reproducible experiments, it may be necessary to recognize that the act of listening is as much a matter of in-the-moment behavior as the act of making music is. This may require taking a stance that is more in the spirit of phenomenology, with its assumption that mind constructs neither more nor less than appearances, than in the spirit of cognitive psychology. As I have previously observed, this is a generalist approach that tends not to sit eill with those whose careers depend on their skills in practicing "normal science."

Nevertheless, it circles back on a theme I have tried to explore in the past. An appearance may best be viewed as the construct of an individual mind; and, because it is a mental construct, it does not lend itself to being reduced to a signal that can then be subjected to noise-free transmission. For better or worse, "transmission" can only be achieved by the effort of the individual to provide an "account" (which probably amounts to a "description") of that appearance. Such an act requires skill, and that skill may be important enough to be addressed by those who have committed themselves to educating future generations of serious listeners, such as would-be music critics. This may be where the real need to explore the relationship between language and music resides, simply because those "accounts" can only be grounded in language, rather than in the music itself. If this means that similar regions of brain are involved in these two acts, then so be it; but that involvement may not have anything to do with whether music is linguistic in nature (or whether language is musical in nature). It requires a new area of study that probably will not sit will with the "normal" scientific community.

Don't Blame the Fiction, Blame the Reader!

There is much to be said for Bill Carter’s think piece in The New York Times today entitled, “Real-World Killings Pressure TV Fiction.” His laundry list of television series that involved murder on a regular basis is extensive and dispassionate. Still, I’m not sure that the comments of Nina Tassler, President of CBS Entertainment, had very much to add to the violence-on-television debate. She justifies Criminal Minds, with its focus on serial killers, with the claim that “the bad guys are brought to justice,” adding that she would (note that Carter did not use “does” in his article) allow her fourteen-year-old child to watch it because “it’s an adult show.” It is certainly true that the good guys prevail on Criminal Minds; but I think that what makes it an “adult show” is the obsessive detail surrounding each serial killer, not just through often grisly description but also through depiction. If we were talking about sex acts, we would call this pornography; and I certainly do not have any trouble invoking that same noun, even if through a thin layer of metaphor.

The guy who may have said something worth reading, however, may likely be John Landgraf, President of FX. Here are the paragraphs Carter devotes to him:

John Landgraf, the president of FX, which programs hit dramas based on some level of violence like “America Horror Story” and “Justified,” stressed a distinction between what he called “third-person entertainment” and “first-person entertainment.” The former describes the passive viewing of scripted dramas; the latter describes participatory entertainment, like video games, where shooting and mayhem are personally inflicted on characters.

He explicitly tied the prevalence of violence in the United States to the availability of guns, noting that television viewers in Britain watch the same shows as Americans and play the same video games, but that the country has drastically lower murder rates.

“We should be looking at ourselves, but I think we have to look at what is most substantially responsible for this kind of violence,” Mr. Landgraf said. “One way to look at that is by looking at the rate at which it takes place in our country and other countries that don’t have access to those kinds of 100-round, 30-round assault-weapon guns.”

Personally, I think that a debate over the availability of large-scale deadly weapons is more serious than the availability of violence on television. Nevertheless, there is still a path that I do not seem to share with any of Carter’s interview subjects. This is the one concerned with the extent to which viewers do not grasp that there programs are fiction. The thing about pornography is that readers tend to get their kicks from the fact that it is fiction, titillating the imagination but not inspiring into action. Could it be that those British television audiences spend more time getting their fiction from books and just react to it on television the same way, experiencing the thrill of scratching an itch without thinking very much of doing it in reality? When you think of how many television viewers out there probably treat the stories of their sacred texts as if they were “God’s truth,” granting the possibility of fiction as nothing less than heresy, is it any wonder that ours is a culture unwilling to recognize fiction for what it is, without letting it cross over boundaries into reality?

Another Order not Understood

From time to time I am still fond of quoting my favorite sentence from Henry Miller's Tropic of Capricorn:

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not understood.

I was reminded of it today while venturing into a 2001 paper by Caroline Palmer, Melissa K. Jungers, and Peter W. Jusczyk. The introduction includes this rather eyebrow-raising sentence:

Expression in music performance can be systematically affected by both structural dimensions (harmony, melody, rhythm, meter, etc.) and nonstructural dimensions (affect, tempo, other interpretive decisions), and it is often difficult to separate the two.

Actually, it is not that difficult to figure out how the authors achieved their separation. The "structural" dimensions are basically attributed captured by music notation; and anything else is "nonstructural!"

It might be better to say that those "nonstructural" dimensions are not as objective as the "structural" ones; but that just means that their structure arises from subjective, or possibly social, factors that may not be understood, probably through lack of trying. The fact is that description that can only be distilled to what is represented objectively in notation will never get at the actual practices of performing music, where notation plays a role but not always the dominating role. Ultimately, the authors' judgment reduces to that of the drunk looking for his lost keys under a lamppost because the light is better there.

Opera Audiences, Then and Now

Last month I wrote a post entitled “Putting the Claque in its Proper Perspective,” based on my experiences in reading William L. Crosten’s book, French Grand Opera: An Art and a Business. I had previously thought of the claque as a publicity engine, designed to shape the opinions of audiences that could not think for themselves. I was a bit surprised to discover that the claque also provided a model for proper decorum. This was basically a coy reminder that the manners of the market, so to speak, were not necessarily those of the opera house or any other venue for music where performance was part of the experience. In retrospect, I should not have been surprised, since much of Richard Strauss’ opera Der Rosenkavalier is about the nature of decorum in the face of the rise of the bourgeoisie.

Ultimately, however, Crosten’s primary message was that the success of opera as a business had a lot to do with telling people what to think. This often involved the delicate matter of providing content consistent with their expectations and then shaping their opinions around that content. Thus, in many respects, this paragraph from the final chapter is a representative take-away from the entire book:

To a bourgeois society that had lost all contact with the past glories of the French lyric theater and that had shown itself singularly unable to appreciate the finely ­modeled, individualistic style of a Mozart or of a Rossini at his best, grand opera of 1830 came as a revelation. Seasoning originality with compromise, it spoke to its auditors in a language they could understand. While the older aristocracy took its patronage to the Théâtre-ltalien, the bourgeoisie stormed the doors of the Académie Royale de Musique, for there they found an art made in their own image—an art that was at once revolutionary and reassuring, that extended one hand towards Romanticism as it held fast to conventionality with the other. Grand opera's luxury, size, and complete seriousness gave it an appearance of greatness which was both stimulating and flattering to its audience; yet there was always enough commonness in its expression to keep it easily accessible. Tied to no program, either classic or romantic, it was in all essentials a popular art keyed to the tempo and taste of its day.

This state of affairs may be a bit harsh for contemporary audiences, whose appreciation of both Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Gioacchino Rossini is probably at least a bit more refined than that of the Parisian bourgeois of 1830; but I am not sure it is that far off the mark. While I have any number of good things to say about Bart Sher’s production of The Barber of Seville for the Met, I still have to admit that it prioritizes spectacle as the primary vehicle for making the music palatable. If Rossini needs that kind of assistance in achieving “the appearance of greatness,” then we can imagine how Met audiences must feel these days when Mozart is on the bill.

Claques did not exist over here during my years of learning to be an informed member of the audience. Now, with everyone glued to their smartphones, they no longer need to exist as they did in 1830 Paris. You may be instructed to turn off your smart phone during the performance, but during intermission you can tweet all you want and follow others doing the same. Opinions are still being shaped; only the medium has changed.

Needless to say, this is a bit demoralizing to those of us old-fashioned enough to believe that opinions should be informed on the basis of more than a tweet. Still, I suspect that those of us who prefer the well-wrought description to the summary judgment, however well-honed it may be by rhetoric, have always been in the minority. Thus, we really have not come particularly far since 1830, even to the point that business interests still trump aesthetic ones and are likely to continue to do so for some time to come.

Ivan Hewitt Revives the Lang Lang Question

In the wake of Lang Lang having performed all five of the piano concertos of Ludwig van Beethoven with the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, Ivan Hewitt has used his column for the London Telegraph to review the disconnect between “his 15,000 adoring fans” and the less-than-enthusiastic critics.  Hewitt makes some good points, and I certainly think the column is worth reading.  However, this is a topic that exceeds the limitations of his column space;  so I would like to provide some supplementary thoughts that both support and question his position.

Let’s begin with the example he presents in Lang Lang’s defense:

Think back to the times when you’ve seen a performance of this concerto, or any concerto that calls on the notion of the heroic performer. Remember how the emphatic passages got much of their power from the look of the pianist’s raised forearms and his expression of stern invincibility. Or how the deliciously coloured flourishes of the slow movement were given an extra glow by the graceful flourish of the pianist’s fingers.

Now imagine another performance where the sounds emanating from the piano have exactly the same expressive force, but they’re played by the pianist with an air of studied neutrality, so you hardly notice his presence. Difficult, isn’t it? In fact I would say it’s impossible, and not just because performance always involves responding to the whole human being in front of us. It’s because a lot of music from Beethoven onwards absolutely requires self-assertive performance. To avoid it out of some misguided loyalty to classical music’s ''purity’’ robs the music of something essential.

The thing about the argument in that second paragraph is that it is not as impossible as Hewitt seems to think.  The fact is that I only had to consult my personal memory to summon up just what Hewitt wanted me to imagine.  Furthermore, the pianist in question was one of those “greats,” perhaps one that provided those critics attacking Lang Lang with just the sort of cudgel they needed.  The pianist was Alfred Brendel.  The occasion was a recital he had given at the California Institute of Technology.

When I had learned that Brendel would be performing Franz Schubert’s D. 960 B-flat major piano sonata, I made it a point to drive from Santa Barbara to Pasadena for the occasion.  The event turned out to be one of sobering disenchantment.  I do not know if I would call Brendel’s composure one of “studied neutrality;”  but there was no ignoring his air of detachment.  Indeed, he was so detached that I had to wonder if his mind was occupied only with getting out of the Caltech auditorium (if not getting out of California) while the rest of his body was on automatic pilot.  The whole affair left me wondering why Brendel had invested so much time in learning D. 960 in the first place.

In that context I would say that Lang Lang might be a useful antidote for those who have become besotted with Brendel’s particular approach to “purity.”  However, like any drug, that antidote should be taken with both moderation and discretion.  Clearly, I do not mind pianists (or any other musicians, for that matter) who view performance as a “whole body” experience;  but I draw the line when it seems as if the body is more important than the music.  This takes me back to the last time I used one of Hewitt’s columns as a platform for refining my own thoughts about Lang Lang.

Back in April of 2009, I wrote a post entitled “Ivan Hewitt’s Thoughts on Lang Lang,” which was a response to my first encounter with one of Hewitt’s well-reasoned defenses of Lang Lang.  In that post I recalled what I had written after my first encounter with Lang Lang, when I saw him perform Frédéric Chopin’s Opus 11 concerto in E minor (the first) with the San Francisco Symphony.  Here is how I described his priorities regarding body and music:

There was almost a choreographed plan to all of his physical gestures of attentiveness during the orchestral sections, and it seemed as if more effort went into those physical gestures than into the musical gestures in the score. The result was a highly skilful act of audience manipulation based on nothing more than the compelling personality of the soloist.

As far as I am concerned, Lang Lang was as detached from Chopin’s music as Brendel had been from Schubert’s.  The only difference was that the two pianists conveyed their detachment in different ways, neither of which benefitted the music very much.  To be fair, however, both of these pianists had to contend with grueling touring schedules.  The fact is that no performer can be “on” every time (s)he comes out on stage in front of an audience;  and, much as I dislike the proposition, I fear that both pianists are more interested in how they present themselves in Carnegie Hall or the Barbican Centre than in any impression they make in any city in California, even one with the musical legacy of San Francisco.

Since I have been watching Luck with great interest, let me turn to the racetrack for a closing metaphor.  Buying a ticket to a concert is a bit like placing a bet on a horse.  You can draw upon no end of “stocks of knowledge” in seeking out a bet that is likely to give you the best payoff;  but all those data can never tell you just what the horse will do after its gate opens.  Thus, those of us who write about concerts are in the same boat as sports writers covering the race after it has happened.  We can describe;  and, from time to time, we may even be able to apply some form of diagnostic thinking to our respective descriptive tasks.  However, we have to be very careful about evaluating, since we rarely know just what factors will be most relevant to making a sound evaluative decision.

Stockhausen Challenged by Description

I have been reading the University of California Press anthology of articles from Source, which I plan to review on my Examiner.com national site.  In the first issue I found a transcription of a conversation in which one of the participants was Karlheinz Stockhausen.  I was particularly struck by one of his observations:

Every day, working in the electronic studio, the worst problem I have is to describe what I have done.  All you can use are words and numbers.  Incidentally, a studio in Stockholm is almost ready where every action is automatically recorded.  You just fool around, and at the end you get a so-called reportage.  Recently I worked four days in our studio.  At the end, I had to spend another four or five days analyzing what I had done in order to write it down.  It is an awful thing for me.  But without what I describe there will be no culture whatsoever in the new dimension.  If I make a thing, I’m not only interested in the result;  I’m interested in the initial culture.  Let’s say we have no score, but we do have a tape.  The tape alone doesn’t help enough for study.  We can listen, yes;  we can get a kind of idea;  it may stimulate other things one can do.  But one is really not able to go further in that direction.  There wouldn’t be any scientific or philosophical or musical progress in our culture if one couldn’t learn from one’s forefathers.

I suppose there is no reason to assume that Stockhausen would have been aware of what was happening in literary theory at the time he made this remark.  I wonder if he would have been comforted or disturbed by the proposition that description was the most difficult of the major text types, to a point where an entire monograph was eventually written to explain why it was so difficult.

More important, however, is why Stockhausen was obsessing over the difficulty of description.  It concerned what he later called the “medium of transport,” which entailed the principle that one could not “learn from one’s forefathers” without some kind of physical medium.  This strikes me as yet another example of artifact-centered noun-based thinking, overlooking the fact that making music is a verb-based practice.  Thus, while Stockhausen may have had the “secret stash” of jazz records that may have inspired him, he may not have had much of a clue as to how the practice of jazz is passed from musician to musician through verb-based practice, rather than through noun-based artifacts.  This makes for an excellent example of how all of us, no matter what we do or how well we do it, have particular blinders that limit our worldview;  and those blinders are so effective that we do not even know they exist!

Debussy and Messiaen

Now that, as a result of my writing for Examiner.com, I have joined the ranks of music critics (even if I continue to believe that “examining” is not the same as criticism), I find that I have become more cautious in what I say about what my colleagues (who call themselves critics) are writing.  I figure it is better to take what I have read from others and use it to reinforce a point, rather than pick a fight.  However, an interesting difference of opinion arose this week over the San Francisco Symphony semi-staged production of Claude Debussy’s Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian that deserves a bit of perspective, without turning the opposing thoughts into grounds for a contentious argument.

I am referring specifically to the review that Joshua Kosman wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle after the opening night performance (which is also the one I attended on my Examiner.com “beat”).  It did not take me long in my reading of Kosman’s text to recognize that he was being more lukewarm than I had been, even though it was clear that he was giving Debussy his due at just about every possible turn.  I suppose what struck me was that he was not giving due acknowledgement to the context of Debussy’s music, which was a five-hour latter-day mystery play with five acts worth of text by Gabriele D’Annunzio and choreography by Michel Fokine for the role of Sebastian being danced by the highly flamboyant Ida Rubinstein.  As I wrote in my own piece, “it would be sadly accurate to describe Debussy’s music for this affair as ‘incidental.’”

Nevertheless, the music was the heart of the San Francisco Symphony performance;  and Kosman kept his focus fixed on Debussy’s score.  However, here is the conclusion he drew:

Yet Debussy never quite gives in to the work's underlying premise; he always seems as embarrassed as we are by the fervid expostulations of d'Annunzio's text, and by the shiny colors of the story. So he buries everything under a layer of propriety, culminating in Sebastian's ascent to a heaven that sounds like some kind of drab gentleman's club.

Again and again through Thursday's performance I kept thinking of Olivier Messiaen, whose brand of unabashed religious frenzy is the only thing that could have made this project whole. When Messiaen depicts heaven, or the saints, or the unearthly bliss of suffering, his belief is so profound and unbridled that it carries you along. Debussy, here, is always hedging his bets.

My own impression is that, if you want to approach this in terms of an ecstatic take on Christian faith, then I am not sure it is fair to use Messiaen as grounds for comparison, simply because Debussy had to work with D’Annunzio’s aesthetic, which, in all likelihood, was far more detached and abstract than Messiaen’s far more sincere professions of faith.  Put another way D’Annunzio’s priorities in conceiving his mystery play were grounded in his particular (some would probably say idiosyncratic) approach to aesthetics.  On the other hand what Kosman calls Messiaen’s “unabashed religious frenzy” was a product of sincere faith of the highest order, far beyond the scope of intellectualization or anything dreamt of in D’Annunzio’s philosophy.

From this point of view, I would not say that Debussy was “hedging his bets.”  Rather, he was, as I like to say, playing the cards that had be dealt to him.  Since I get the impression that his own religious convictions were never as strong as Messiaen’s, I feel he deserves to be judged on his own mindset and the practices that emerged from it.  In that context it is not surprising that Kosman heard “echoes” of Richard Wagner’s Parsifal in Debussy’s score.  Here was a case of one composer with a relatively detached relationship to a religious narrative drawing upon another, who was probably just as detached.

The Baggage of Knowledge

Jeremy Denk’s latest blog post, “Taking on Taruskin,” was just too interesting to be dismissed with a casual reading from the screen.  As a result I printed it and stuck it in my pocket, from which I extracted it while waiting for the beginning of yesterday afternoon’s concert by the San Francisco Bach Choir.  How was I to know that reading it would have an effect on my afternoon’s listening experiences?

Denk’s own conclusion gives the impression that he is picking a bone with Taruskin over whether, in his words, “thought and music are enemies.”  A fairer and less simplistic summary would be that Denk was trying to come to grips with just what we bring to a performance of music (whether as performer or as audience) by way of “stocks of knowledge” (a phrase that seems to have originated with Alfred Schutz) and just what we do with the knowledge we bring.  Using Don Giovanni as an example, Taruskin makes a hyperbolic claim:

Its meaning for us is mediated by all that has been thought and said about it since opening night, and is therefore incomparable richer than it was in 1787.

There are any number of ways in which this claim is absurd, and Denk’s attack recalls Thurber’s joke about the cowboy jumping on his horse and riding off wildly in all directions.  Most important, however, is that it is unreasonable to assume any anyone all-too-human can ever bring that much baggage to a musical experience, let alone does so.

However, this is where my own situation comes into play.  The concert I was attending was entitled Before Bach:  Music from the Family Archives;  and it was the first time I had an opportunity to hear music by Johann Sebastian Bach’s ancestors, rather than his sons.  In other words, in a very real way, I was in a situation that was clearly going to have an effect on the stocks of knowledge at my disposal the next time I heard a performance of Bach.  Indeed, in writing my Examiner.com review of this concert, I was already throwing forward passes to future listening experiences (including, of all things, the BWV 212 “Peasant” cantata)!

Looking back on the “virtual argument” between Denk and Taruskin, I realized that, in the midst of some very impressive name-dropping, there was one name that both parties seemed to have neglected.  I am thinking of Harold Bloom and his preoccupation with the “anxiety of influence,” which has now become The Anatomy of Influence in his latest book.  It is one thing to talk about stocks of knowledge, as if we all go around with vast internalized databases managed by some kind of “wetware” Google.  However, more important is that the actions we take cannot help but be influenced by our past experiences.  That is the essence of learning and has been thus at least since Plato’s attempts to document the wisdom of Socrates.

The key word in that last paragraph, however, is “actions.”  Once again I find myself back on my happy hunting ground of the distinction between noun-based and verb-based thinking.  While the book from which Denk extracted his Taruskin quote is entitled Text and Act, there is something very noun-based in both his argument and Denk’s reply.  The world of music has been reduced to a world of artifacts, including scores, scholarly papers, recordings, and, in Denk’s case, metaphorical barns.  None of this gets at the fundamentally verb-based nature of performance itself, as well as the listening experience (which is only passive if you want it to be).

Focus on the performer, because it is easier.  Performance can only be “in the moment.”  The performer may do any number of things to prepare for those moments, but all that matters is what happens in the course of performance.  There are any number of preparatory activities;  but what is important is that they prepare the body (and probably the mind) for “acting in the moment.”  (I once heard Patricia Racette go through a laundry list of all the things she had to “keep in mind” while “in the moment” on the opera stage.  That was the best case I ever heard for the significance of those preparatory activities.)  Preparation may involve sprucing up our stocks of knowledge, but I would argue that the performance of music is one of the best examples in which we confront the complexity of the relationship between what we know and what we do.  I think that this complexity is what Denk had in mind when he described thought and music as “complicated friends.”

In fairness to those of us reduced to writing from time to time (or more frequently), I should conclude by pointing out that “the moment” is the most difficult construct to deal with in writing.  I can write about a score page when it is sitting in front of me.  I can even use software to help the reader grasp how I am looking at that page and what I am trying to describe there.  On the other hand “the moment” is gone by the time I try to write about it;  and it is gone forever.  Of course we do try to use language to describe actions we have experienced, and that is why verbs are so important.  It is also why the grammar of verb phrases is so much more complex than the grammar of noun phrases.  Time-consciousness is a problematic concept.  Augustine knew it, and Edmund Husserl knew it.  We are the better for their efforts to come to grips with it, but they left us with some gaping analytic holes.  The good news is that those of us who spend a lot of time performing and/or listening to music may be better equipped to fill in those holes than those with more “scientific” (as in noun-based) backgrounds.