MU132: Writing About Music

In case anyone still checks this...

2009-02-24T18:21:00.001-05:00

Here's Freaks & Geeks' James Franco promoting Carl Wilson's book on MTV:

Movie Trailers - Movies Blog

Pitchfork gives music 6.8

2008-12-03T20:20:00.002-05:00

Here's the links for Maggie and my presentation on the Onion's satire of Pitchfork.

This is the actual Onion article.

This is Pitchfork's review of "I Am... Sasha Fierce."

And these are the review tropes that we came up with:

-reference to an obscure band

-mainstream pop cultural reference, usually undercut and ironic -- instead of presenting one reference, contrast two to bolster the critic's reputation

-comparisons with artist's other albums -- looking for evolution -- the word sophomore is often used

-present set-ups followed immediately by a joke that's usually sarcastic and glib

-measuring quality with a quantified system -- arbitrary methods such as stars (sometimes out of four, sometimes out of five) -- what makes a 6.0 album .3 better than a 5.7 album?

-tendency to psychoanalyze the artist and why he or she is making the music -- usually reviews contain little or no discussion of the music itself -- why is this acceptable in music reviews but not reviews of literature or film?

-more likely to knock something down that support something -- not necessarily ratio-wise, but the language used to criticize is stronger than that used to compliment (Wilson is an example of this)

Link for The Band

2008-11-06T20:14:00.003-05:00

For anybody interested in learning more about the Band, this is a great place to start:
theband.hiof.no
Rob Bowman's history of the group (under Articles) is a good one.

Some Music for Election Day

2008-11-04T10:29:00.002-05:00

I thought this would appropriate in light of today's election. As I was working for Thursday's presentation, I came across a video of Randy Newman sitting in what looks like his living room and videotaping himself sing a song called "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country." Listening to this song, I couldn't help but be reminded of "Political Science," a much older song of Newman's that deals with similar themes. But the purpose of the two songs couldn't be more different. "Political Science" was released in 1972, while "A Few Words in Defense of Our Country" was first performed live on tour in 2006 and released as a single in 2007. Listening to the two songs gives a unique insight into the development of an artist's political ideas.

"Political Science" is probably most famous for it's ultimate political solution: "Let's drop the big one and see what happens." "No one likes us," Newman sings, so the easiest way to deal with the world is just get rid of it and make "every city the whole world round/...just another American town."

"A Few Words" couldn't be more different. Newman admits that our country's having a tough time--he admits that America's "time at the top/ could be coming to an end." But times like these, he says, are the times "we sure could use a friend." Gone is the talk of making everyone else be like us--now, Newman just wants to be pals. The song ends with a beautiful image:

"Like the Spanish Armada adrift on the sea

We're adrift in the land of the brave

And the home of the free."

It's hard not to think of the closing image of "Sail Away" when you hear those lines.

"Political Science"

Youtube video & Lyrics

"A Few Words in Defense of Our Country"

Youtube video & Lyrics

Even more writing about music!

2008-10-29T00:35:00.002-05:00

Now that we're moving into the popular music phase of the course, I wanted to let people know about an opportunity for some music writing outside of class. I'm one of the music editors at Post- (that thing in the BDH on Thursdays), and we're always looking for articles about pretty much anything music-related: album and concert reviews, features on artists, trends, and genres, and more conceptual/literary stuff. Also lists. We like lists. Anyways, if you ever have an idea for a piece or want to be put on our potential writers list, you can email me at Evangeline_Kurtz-Nelson@brown.edu or talk to me during class. There's been a ton of seriously awesome writing in this class so far, and it would be great to see some more of it in Post-.

it isn't passive listening if you're actively trying to be pretentious

2008-10-20T23:36:00.003-05:00

What would Stravinsky and Hanslick say about these listeners?

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/09/01/108-appearing-to-enjoy-classical-music/

"He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)"

2008-10-18T14:13:00.005-05:00

In the grand tradition of covers, here's another one cover of "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" by the Crystals, this one by Grizzly Bear. I'm sure quite a few of you have already listened to this, but I imagine it brings an interesting gender dynamic to the song.

http://www.fabulist.org/archives/2008/10/in_praise_of_ca.html

You can just follow this link, and there's a link that you can right-click and save as to listen to the song.

-Jordan

Classical Music in Film: A Programmatic Oddity?

2008-10-17T14:48:00.000-05:00

In light of our early discussions about assigning "programs" to pieces and our discussion of Stravinsky, I thought I would share a related experience I had recently.

Last week I was watching a 1944 propaganda film called "Know Your Enemy: Japan," which was made to encourage continued American support of the war with Japan. Much can be said about this 70-minute work, but I found one of the most interesting elements of the film to be the use of music. The director (Frank Capra, perhaps better known for his feel-good Christmas classic It's a Wonderful Life) uses some clips of Japanese music to demonstrate the "backwardness" and "otherness" of Japanese society, which was not unexpected. However, I was shocked to hear the familiar strains of Le Sacre du Printemps over footage that featured recreations of pre-modern Japanese conflicts. You can watch the scene here (Le Sacre begins around 4:20).

The use of this piece raises a lot of questions. Le Sacre is perhaps one of the most programmatic works in existence, and it's hard to believe that the filmmakers wouldn't have had some idea about the content of the piece. It's not hard to believe that Capra's use of a ballet depicting pagan rites was intentional. Considering his discussion of the objectivity of music in Poetics of Music, one wonders what Stravinsky's perspective on the piece's use might have been, too. Is drawing a parallel between Japan's Shintoism and Russian pagan rites the kind of betrayal Stravinsky considers "interpretation" to be?

Propaganda films aren't the only place one can find reappropriated classical music. Richard Strauss' tone poem "Also Sprach Zarathrustra", based on Friedrich Nietzche's landmark work, is a highly programmatic work in itself, but may be best known in its appropriated form as the "Theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey". The piece has been used in other films, in ironic turns in Catch-22 and Clueless. With the piece so firmly ingrained into our cultural memory with images of discovery and vastness, it's hard to hear the seminal opening as anything different.

(Shameless plug: You can hear the piece played by the Brown Orchestra tonight at 10, tomorrow at 8, and Sunday at 3. Tonight's performance will be followed by a screening of 2001, so you can analyze the effects of the reprogramatization of the piece first-hand!)

How does the reappropriation of classical music change how we view its program, whether or not it was initially intended to be programmatic? Is it a betrayal of the composer's intent, or is it just another way to do honor to a great composition?

Signing Up for Leading Discussion

2008-10-17T14:11:00.002-05:00

This is the official spot for discussing who will take what assignments. I'll also mention that if no one else wants to claim it, I would be happy to lead discussion on John Cage. To add a comment, just click on the link below where it says "0 comments" (or however many comments have been added by the time you read this post) and leave your preferences. And then be sure to check back to see what other people have requested, etc...

useful readings on stravinsky

2008-10-15T17:46:00.004-05:00

Here are three pieces of writing on Stravinsky that contain important information about the Poetics of Music and The Rite of Spring ; one is by Robert Craft, noted Stravinsky scholar and Stravinsky's long-time amanuensis; two are by Richard Taruskin, surely the world's leading scholarly authority on Stravinsky today.

1) On the actual writing of the Poetics of Music :
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/832889.pdf
Robert Craft, "Roland-Manuel and the 'Poetics of Music,'" Perspectives of New Music , vol. 21, no. 1/2 (Autumn, 1982 - Summer, 1983), pp. 487-505.

2) On Stravinsky's use of Russian folk melodies in Rite of Spring (a usage he wanted subsequently to conceal) :
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/831304.pdf
Richard Taruskin, "Russian Folk Melodies in The Rite of Spring," Journal of the American Musicological Society , Vol. 33, no. 3 (Autumn, 1980), pp. 501-543.

3) On the notorious (fabricated) review by Alexis Tolstoy, as quoted in Stravinsky's Poetics (p. 115), of Shostakovich's 5th Symphony :
see Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, c. 1997), pp. 516-524.

Physiology and Music

2008-10-08T19:34:00.001-05:00

In our last class we discussed the extent that we have learned about the connection between music and physiology. In the end, we agreed that the translation claiming that there was much to be discovered in this field was more accurate one and this triggered my memory of a book that I read over the summer. Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music discusses how the brain is used in relation to music. The most interesting point that I took away from his work is that if one plays, composes and listens to music, he or she is using all of the parts of the brain that science has accounted for to this day. This brought me to question Hanslick’s assertion in regards to the relation of physiology to music. It is my impression that he was referring solely to the ways in which one listens to music and not performance or composition. I would be curious to hear what Hanslick would say about these other realms of music and how they could be used to support or oppose the arguments that he makes about the relationship between music and feelings.

Book Review of This Is Your Brain on Music

judgment vs. entertainment (Hanlick vs. today)

2008-10-08T15:09:00.005-05:00

The issues we discussed in class yesterday in connection with Hanslick--the pros and cons of modes of listening that focus on musical specifics and recognize hierarchies of value vs. listening done for our own purposes that takes a more relativistic view of value--is clearly alive and kicking. I've reprinted below an essay by Leon Wieseltier in the latest New Republic. His subject is a recent essay by Louis Menand in the New Yorker concerning the once eminent literary critic Lionel Trilling. I read Menand's essay and found it puzzling at spots. Usually Menand is one of my all-time favorite essay writers, but there were things about this essay that troubled me. Lionel Trilling was one my teachers in graduate school (at Columbia), and I have a very high opinion of him. Wieseltier's column clarifies some of what bothered me about Menand's essay, though I'm not wholly on Wieseltier's side. I'm putting it on the blog because the argument is exactly the one we discussed yesterday in class. I've provided a link to the original article, but I suspect it won't work if you're not a subscriber to The New Republic. But maybe it will.

wieseltier new republic 10/22/08

The Shrinker

Leon Wieseltier , The New Republic Published: Wednesday, October 22, 2008

'He is barometrically interesting." This was Irving Howe's judgment of a professor of literature whose prominence we were mischievously discussing. We were praising the guilelessness of barometers. They come right out and say it. The same candor about the weather is gained when a writer unexpectedly expresses himself in a way that requires no interpretation, and thereby exposes the Geist in the Zeit. It is always satisfying to see the errors of one's time clearly stated. I am grateful to The New Yorker for this satisfaction. I refer not to its deaf and blind publication, in the week that the economy was collapsing and the nation was panicking, of a piece about the millions that Leona Helmsley bequeathed to her dog. We are known by what we find important. But in the same issue there appeared a mincing and hostile essay by Louis Menand about Lionel Trilling, an expanded and worsened version of an introduction that he produced for a recent re-issue of The Liberal Imagination. The critic who, also in The New Yorker, compared Jay McInerney to Heinrich von Kleist now pronounces Trilling's work to be "small but subtle and distinctive." I should confess an interest here. Trilling was my teacher. My feelings about him are filial. His legend means nothing to me. But Menand is the latest in a long line of English professors in revolt against the legend. He has summoned the courage to suggest that Trilling was a man with anxieties and ambitions. He has some shallow things to say about the tangle of Trilling's Jewishness. And he contends that Trilling explored the political implications of culture because he held that "people have some sort of moral obligation to match up their taste in art and literature with their political opinions," which is wildly wrong. The synchronization of the realms, which was one of the crimes of Stalinism, was what Trilling deplored.

But what really rattles Menand is Trilling's magnitude. In his conception of the intellectual life, Trilling was big. Menand is the professor of littleness. He is a man in flight from the seriousness of his own vocation. In his telling, Trilling exemplified the era of "heroic criticism," whereas "it feels a little funny just typing the words today." I don't know, I just typed them and it felt fine. But Menand, you see, "went to graduate school after the nineteen-sixties, when the age of heroic criticism was over, and thank God." He has more to tell us about himself: "I became a critic because I wanted to write sentences like 'This intense conviction of the existence of the self apart from culture is, as culture well knows, its noblest and most generous achievement.'" Also: "I didn't care about the canon, and I didn't care much about Communism, either." I am not sure why he expects to be admired for his mental blitheness, but he is certainly not the only liberal for whom the Communists are as pertinent to us as the Donatists and the Cathars. "I just liked the way Trilling could turn a thought," he weirdly brags. But then he discovered that "there was a lot of righteousness, not to mention self-righteousness, back in the days of Partisan Review." Unlike in these post-heroic days, I suppose. And to what do we owe our exemption from grandeur, our release from gravity? Menand explains this--he knows, above all, how things work--in a passage that should move the parents of his students to demand the return of their tuition: "Most people don't use the language of approval and disapproval in their responses to art; they use the language of entertainment. They enjoy some things and don't enjoy other things. It just doesn't matter to them whether someone prefers Dreiser or James. This seemed to me to give literary criticism a lot less moral work to do." The less moral work, the better.

There is a term for the indifference and the perfunctoriness that Menand is espousing. It is philistinism. But this is a peculiar variety of philistinism, an airy and calculated mixture of Eustace Tilley and Richard Rorty. The language of entertainment: this is not be mistaken for any sort of aesthetic commitment. Aestheticism, in its desperation or in its delight, is more strenuous--Hamilton Hall strikes again!--than Menand's indolent ratification of popular taste. It is not pleasure that Menand is recommending, it is fun. (In an entry in her journals in 1963, which will be published later this year, Susan Sontag noted: "'Fun'--the American substitute for pleasure.") Is there any less toilsome engagement with culture, any less thoughtful and less lasting, any less salutary for this society, than the engagement with entertainment? Menand mocks Trilling's solemn pronouncement that "with that juxtaposition [of Dreiser and James] we are immediately at the bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet," inanely observing that "no actual blood has ever been spilled in disputes" about literature. He is a poor student of totalitarianism. But he will not allow that anything of consequence is at issue in the study of literature. He will not pick up the weight. Menand's objection to Trilling's "pretty dramatic" analysis of the choice between Dreiser and James is that "it makes it seem as though a lot is at stake in getting books right." The contribution to criticism of the Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University is, :).

The complacence about mass opinion and the acquiescence in the authority of "most people," the relaxed whatever-ism, the preference for the shrug over the frown, comes from Rorty, to whom Menand once attributed "genius." Rorty, who gleefully and without recourse to argument exchanged objectivity for solidarity and reason for ethnocentrism, claimed that the true and the beautiful are whatever most people believe are the true and the beautiful. Or as Menand remarks, "there is no stable point outside a culture from which to critique it. " No foundation for independence or dissidence, there; but then all that is over, and thank God. His experience in the faculty lounge has taught Menand that "all push becomes pull someday." All that is left for an intellectual to do is to understand the scene and to make it. There are no causes, there are only careers. But I swear I see pain and confusion and dread almost everywhere. Locally and globally, these are sordid times. Sweet, earnest, smart David Foster Wallace, who was his generation's model of the consecration to seriousness, just hanged himself. And we should chill? "It makes it seem as though a lot is at stake in getting books right": nobody will ever become a critic because they want to write sentences like that.

Leon Wieseltier is the literary editor of The New Republic.

Wagner and Anti-Semitism

2008-10-08T10:38:00.007-05:00

Here's a fascinating "New Yorker" article I found on how Wagner's political beliefs are or are not embodied in his music, and also on Hitler's interpretation of Wagner and his legacy. Really interesting research on where the influence of Wagner's writings and music can be found in Hitler's book and speeches. A bit long, but definitely worth reading if you have time--after all the historical reading, I found it refreshing to read about Wagner from a modern standpoint.

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2004/05/wagner.html

"A Book To Keep Music Critics Honest"

2008-09-22T21:03:00.004-05:00

"My Music; Explorations of Music in Daily Life"; the book doesn't merit an outstanding review, but the write-up is intriguing.

http://www.good.is/?p=12115

Hanslick's Vacuum Jar

2008-09-22T18:01:00.002-05:00

On p. 25 of Hanslick's On the Musically Beautiful (Payzant translation), he refers to "a bird in a vacuum jar." I thought you'd be interested to know that Hanslick was referring to a famous set of experiments that helped define the emergence of the scientific thought associated with the Enlightenment--a mode of thought clearly vital to Hanslick's conception of aesthetics. Here is one description of it:

http://jap.physiology.org/cgi/content/full/98/1/31

J Appl Physiol 98: 31-39, 2005;

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

“Robert Boyle’s landmark book of 1660 with the first experiments on rarified air”

John B. West

Department of Medicine, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, California

In 1660, Robert Boyle (1627–1691) published his landmark book New Experiments Physico-Mechanicall, Touching the Spring of the Air, and its Effects... in which he described the first controlled experiments of the effects of reducing the pressure of the air. Critical to this work was the development of an air pump by Boyle with Robert Hooke (1635–1703). For the first time, it was possible to observe physical and physiological processes at both normal and reduced barometric pressures. The air pump was described in detail, although the exact design of the critical piston is unclear. Boyle reported 43 separate experiments. . . .

[B]y early 1659 Boyle had a much-improved air pump and was ready for experiments. The pump was designed and constructed by Robert Hooke (1635–1703), who was a mechanical genius. He made important contributions to an extremely wide field, including microscopy, horology, mechanics, and architecture. Boyle hardly mentioned Hooke in the 1660 book, but later he acknowledged the great contributions of his assistant. In fact, it seems likely that a number of the experiments described in the 1660 book owed their origin to Hooke’s interests. . . .

These observations led to a much longer account in experiment 41 on studies on the nature of respiration. A lark was placed in the receiver and sprang to a good height on several occasions when the pressure was normal. But when air was removed, it began to "droop and appear sick, and very soon after was taken with as violent and irregular Convulsions as are wont to be observ’d in Poultry, when their heads are wrung off." Another experiment was carried out on a hen-sparrow, and the bird seemed to be dead ~7 min after the pump was employed. However, when the air was restored, the bird revived and nearly escaped through the top cover, which had been removed. But when the air was removed a second time, the bird convulsed and died. A mouse inserted into the receiver behaved in a similar way, being very active initially but when the pressure was reduced appeared giddy and staggered before falling down unconscious. Again, the animal was revived when fresh air was let in.

more bloggin

2008-09-22T17:34:00.002-05:00

Class members Evan Carmouche (aka i. kharamot) and I occasionally write for a music blog that my friend Fran and I started last Spring called Dancing About Architecture. For some reason the www's before the address are essential -- this is the first domain either of us has owned and issues like this have been common (if anyone can help please let me know).

Rating Music

2008-09-22T14:07:00.005-05:00

Hi All,

The Sgt. Pepper talk reminded me of this thing I read a while ago:

http://www.spin.com/articles/give-me-centrism-or-give-me-death

Enjoy, Jeremy

Agee on listening

2008-09-22T11:30:00.002-05:00

Here is a passage from James Agee's book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, an ethnography of three tenant farmer families in Depression-era Alabama. This passage is taken from the end of his introduction, as he tries to explain how readers should consider the book, which tends toward the inflammatory. In the process he outlines an unusual way to hear canonical music.

"Above all else: in God's name don't think of it as Art.
Every fury on earth has been absorbed in time, as art, or as religion, or as authority in one form or another. The deadliest blow the enemy of the human soul can strike is to do fury honor. Swift, Blake, Beethoven, Christ, Joyce, Kafka, name me a one who has not been thus castrated. Official acceptance is the one unmistakable symptom that salvation is beaten again, and is the one surest sign of fatal misunderstanding, and is the kiss of Judas.

Really it should be possible to hope that this be recognized as so, and as a mortal and inevitably recurrent danger. It is scientific fact. It is disease. It is avoidable. Let a start be made. And then exercise your perception of it on work that has more to tell you than mine has. See how respectable Beethoven is; and by what right any wall in museum, gallery or home presumes to wear a Cezanne; and by what idiocy Blake or work even of such intention as mine is ever published and sold. I will tell you a test. It is unfair. It is untrue. It stacks all the cards. It is out of line with what the composer intended. All so much the better.

Get a radio or a phonograph capable of the most extreme loudness possible, and sit down to listen to a performance of Beethoven's Seventh Symphony or of Schubert's C-Major Symphony. But I don't mean just sit down and listen. I mean this: Turn it on as loud as you can get it. Then get down on the floor and jam your ear as close into the loudspeaker as you can get it and stay there, breathing as lightly as possible, and not moving, and neither eating nor smoking nor drinking. Concentrate everything you can into your hearing and into your body. You won't hear it nicely. If it hurts you, be glad of it. As near as you will ever get, you are inside the music; not only inside it, you are it; your body is no longer your shape and substance, it is the shape and substance of the music.

Is what you hear pretty? or beautiful? or legal? or acceptable in polite or any other society? It is beyond any calculation savage and dangerous and murderous to all equilibrium in human life as human life is; and nothing can equal the rape it does on all that death; nothing except anything, anything in existence or dream, perceived anywhere remotely toward its true dimension.

Beethoven said a thing as rash and noble as the best of his work. By my memory, he said: 'He who understands my music can never know unhappiness again.' I believe it. And I would be a liar and a coward and one of your safe world if I should fear to say the same words of my best perception, and of my best intention.

Performance, in which the whole fate and terror rests, is another matter."

pp. 12-13. Agee, James. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1988.

Paul Phillips on Symphonie fantastique

2008-09-18T12:02:00.002-05:00

An Exchange with Paul Schuyler Phillips, Director of the Brown Orchestra, 9/18/08, concerning a discrepancy between the Kerman’s diagram of the last mvt. of Berlioz’s Symphony fantastique and the Norton Critical Score.

RRS:
Paul, my class is discussing the Symphonie fantastique today, and I'm trying to follow it both via the score and via Kerman's diagram in "Listen." since some of my students will be using each. At the climactic moment of the last movement, when the Dies Irae enters on top of the witches theme, Kerman says "trumpets play the Dies Irae for the first time.” I've always taken this on faith. But today for some reason I looked closely at the score, and all I see is huge long prolonged rests in the trumpet part while everyone else is blaring away. Do you remember this moment? Am I missing something? Would appreciate any quick answer you may have.

PSP:

Rose, Kerman’s sort of right. The spot is bar 414 (letter K) in the finale, marked “Dies Irae et Ronde du Sabbat ensemble”. All the winds (except flute & piccolo) that can play chromatically play the Dies Irae theme in octaves do so in this spot. Trumpets cannot, so they are left out, but “cornets à pistons” do. These valved brass instruments are very similar to trumpets and sound like them. Moreover, these parts are almost invariably played by trumpets, since relatively few orchestral players use cornets, but, strictly speaking, Kerman should have said “cornets play Dies Irae”. Of course, then he would have had to explain that in Berlioz’s time valved cornets had recently been invented and that trumpets were still valveless instruments that could only play the harmonic series, etc., so it’s easy to understand why he wrote what he did, even though it’s not precisely true.

RRS:
I see also another line is blank at that point, presumably the horns, and for the same reason as the trumpets (?)

PSP:
As you rightly point out, Horns 1 & 2 (in E flat) are also left out in that spot, also because they could not play the notes of the Dies Irae parts in Berlioz’s day. Since the advent of valved, chromatic brass instruments, all the notes can be played, and I’m sure that innumerable conductors have added Horns 1 & 2 and the two trumpets to this passage over the years. What has struck me about this passage is what a difference the edition makes on one’s perception of it, for in my score – the Breitkopf & Härtel /Bärenreiter Neuausgabe published in 1972 – the score page is “optimized”, as they say, meaning that lines are omitted when instruments have rests. If you were to look at that edition (which is in Orwig with the Berlioz Complete Works), you’d see on pages 152-3 that Horns 1 & 2 and the trumpets are not included on those pages, so it’s easy to overlook the fact that they don’t play there. In the score you’re reading from, it’s much more obvious that those players are sitting there with their instruments on their laps. The piccolo and flutes are included and given rests, but that’s because they join in on the violin/viola counterpoint that begins 8 bars later (b. 422), whereas the resting horns and trumpets don’t return until b. 467, six score pages later.

testing 2008

2008-09-13T14:23:00.006-05:00

Here is how to do a link:
BROWN

Tristan & Isolde

2005-12-10T15:12:00.000-05:00

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!

http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/tristanandisolde/

Benjamin on Boredom and Listening

2005-11-28T11:13:00.000-05:00

We talked a few weeks ago about boredom and listening to music, and someone (Lizzie?) brought up the idea of listening in the car or while engaged in some other automatic task. I thought this passage from Benjamin's "The Storyteller" was relevant - he's talking about listening to stories, not music, but methinks the ideas transfer quite readily.

"If sleep is the apogee of physical relaxation, boredom is the apogee of mental relatxation. Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience. A rustling in the leaves drives him away. His nesting places - the activities that are intimately associated with boredom - are already extinct in the cities and are declining in the country as well. With this the gift for listening is lost and the community of listeners disappears. [...] It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled."

Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schoken Books, 1968. p 91.

Wagner and the Egg of Experience

2005-11-28T11:09:00.000-05:00

"Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so."
John Berryman, “Dream Song 14”

In the Parsifal Prelude, Richard Wagner has brought forth luxurious and languid music that flows like an somnolent brook shimmering in silver moonlight. The music is a languorous dream journey full of masterly confidence and slow genius. In a word, it’s profoundly boring. Let me explain.

In this day and age, we rarely allow ourselves to be bored. I need not enumerate the multitudinous distractions that lie ready to amuse us, but think internet, television, mp3s, ringtones. Boredom in adult life is an unfamiliar and uncomfortable sensation, and in general we learn to avoid it through a busy, accessorized iLife.

And the Parsifal Prelude, like much of Wagner’s music, is indeed very boring. It contains little in the way of frilly ornamentation and rarely gives us anything approaching a catchy melody; there is little in Wagner’s music to distract us. The Prelude begins with a simple theme (if one can call it a theme) consisting largely of inverted and reiterated arpeggios. The orchestral effects are admittedly quite beautiful: light strings mixed with muted, thoughtful winds. After several minutes with little change in sound, however, beautiful quickly becomes boring. Three minutes or so into this bland mishmash, the music fades to a moment of silence. Then, almost unbelievably, the entire tedious process is repeated. For all that’s become of Wagner’s music in the last century, the stuff is really quite boring.

Contemporary American adults seem to share a common fear of boredom. I myself have a hard time admitting that I am bored; it is much easier to admit sadness or even a failed attempt. The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips describes boredom as “that state of suspended anticipation in which things are started and nothing begins, the mood of diffuse restlessness which contains that most absurd and paradoxical wish, the wish for a desire.” If we know what we want to do—or what we ought to do—then we can either do it or bask in anticipation of it. But to be bored is to admit that we do not know what we want, and so we wish desperately for a desire or, better yet, a distraction. Boredom is worse than failure because it isn’t even an attempt. It’s no wonder, then, that we fear and resent boredom with such vehemence; to be bored is to face the existential crisis of not knowing what to do.

When you throw Parsifal’s Prelude on the CD player, you’re in for a long thirteen minutes. See it in concert, and be prepared to twiddle those thumbs. Perhaps at first you’ll follow the ambient effects with anticipation of, and then desire for, a more gripping musical experience. Eventually you’ll realize that nothing is coming but more of the same, and this leads to frustration and then resentment. At this point, you may look something to do while you listen or simply put on more exciting music. If you’re like me, though, you’ll wallow stubbornly and stoicly in excruciating boredom through the end of the piece, enacting some half-masochistic duty to finish what you started.

Yes, you will be bored as hell. But beware: in the boringness of Wagner’s music lies its power. Adam Phillips writes that “boredom is inherent to the process of taking one’s time” , an idea that Wagner surely would have embraced. He values music too much to give his listeners easy ways out, demanding instead that we engage with the music even if boredom is inevitable to the process. The Parsifal Prelude bores through our defenses, through our desperate desire for distraction, and touches us at the vulnerable core of our uncertainty. If given time to gestate, the boring beauty of the Prelude becomes hauntingly melancholy as it fills with insecurity and ephemerality. Walter Benjamin once wrote that “boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” Indeed, Wagner challenges us with his boring beauty, for when we are bored we unwittingly ask ourselves that great existential question: “What shall I do now?” Don’t get me wrong though: the Prelude remains painfully boring.

--
Phillips, Adam. “ On Boredom” in On Kissing, Tickling, and Being Bored: Psychoanalytic Essays on the Unexamined Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schoken Books, 1968.

writing electronic music for acoustic instruments

2005-11-18T22:22:00.000-05:00

I have to say I thought Morton Feldman's 1971 Rothko Chapel was beautiful, though quite different from the limited about of Feldman that I'd heard before. I was especially struck by the fifth movement. One of the many things that I think make it such a successful piece is the way it combines tonal and post-tonal idioms, with the lyrical violin part on top of the vibraphone ostinato creating a rather shimmering tonal background against which the unresolved dissonance and dark texture of the lower and vocal parts rumbled. I say post-tonal rather than atonal because to my ear the dissonant lower parts owe more to electronic music than to any other atonal paradigm such as Schoenbergian or integral serialism. Specifically, the low drones reminds me of Gordon Mumma's 1965 composition The Dresden Interleaf 13 February 1945, written for the bombing of Dresden, which Kurt Vonnegut would immortalize three years later in his book Slaughter-House Five. Richard Taruskin identifies this trend of writing music for actual instruments using techniques from electronic music in his Oxford History of Western Music. Among the examples he uses to illustrate this trend is Ligeti's Atmospheres, in which Ligeti creats real-life analog to filtering white noise in electronic music by having an orchestra play every note in its range simultaneously and selectively "filtering" certain sections of the orchestra in the same way that one filters portions of the sound spectrum out of white noise. I find the the trend of mapping the compositional techniques of electronic music back on to acoustic instruments to be very rewarding. If any of you guys are familiar with the Mumma piece I mentioned, let me know what you think about my hypothesis, and what else you think about this trend in composition.

Usage note regarding 'banal'

2005-11-16T22:10:00.000-05:00

ba·nal P Pronunciation Key (b-nl, bnl, b-näl)
adj.
Drearily commonplace and often predictable; trite: “Blunt language cannot hide a banal conception” (James Wolcott).
[French, from Old French, shared by tenants in a feudal jurisdiction, from ban, summons to military service, of Germanic origin. See bh-2 in Indo-European Roots.]
ba·nalize v.
ba·nally adv.

Usage Note: The pronunciation of banal is not settled among educated speakers of American English. Sixty years ago, H.W. Fowler recommended the pronunciation (bnl, rhyming with panel), but this pronunciation is now regarded as recondite by most Americans: it is preferred by only 2 percent of the Usage Panel. Other possibilities are (bnl, rhyming with anal), preferred by 38 percent of the Panel; (b-nl, rhyming with canal), preferred by 46 percent; and (b-nl, the last syllable rhyming with doll), preferred by 14 percent (this last pronunciation is more common in British English). Some Panelists admit to being so vexed by the problem that they tend to avoid the word in conversation. Speakers can perhaps take comfort in knowing that any one of the last three pronunciations will have the support of a substantial minority and that none of them is incorrect. When several pronunciations of a word are widely used, there is really no right or wrong one.

[d] [a]

2005-11-13T12:27:00.000-05:00

Clara Schuhmacher
1 November 2005

It is a curious phenomenon – this transformation of a composition into a named object that is no longer heard as a collection of notes and rests but is heard, rather, as a collection of connotations that often has little to do with the original raw material out of which it was composed. A transformation well-illustrated by Wagner’s epic Tristan und Isolde, if not by the entire work then at very least by the Prelude. It is difficult – or perhaps impossible, or perhaps even largely unnecessary – to isolate the moment at which such a transformation occurs, for the transformation is not merely a function of personal familiarity with the work. And yet, somewhere in the century since its 1865 premiere this composition of unresolved dissonance and, to borrow a term from Hanslick, ‘endless melodizing’, ceased to be a mere prelude and become the Tristan Prelude, capital T and capital P inclusive. The act of listening to the Prelude as mere music has become almost irrelevant, for it is no longer the ‘music’ as such that holds any quantifiable value. Is it not true that the music enthusiast and the scholar alike can no longer listen to the work without the burden of its history obscuring the notes with endless connotation?

And more curious still is how this transformation has rendered the piece virtually ignorable. It is almost counterintuitive – one would think that our claiming the work by Name would reinforce its presence within our attention. Instead, by reducing the prelude to a single non-descript phrase – the Tristan Prelude – we allow ourselves the luxury of ignoring any responsibility we may have originally had towards the music. We have here something of a paradox: the famous prelude is of such importance to the history of music that it has become common cultural currency, and yet this transformation has created an object that negates the very importance that motivated that original transformation. Wagner has created a monster – but the true monstrosity is that the listener has learned to tune it out. And thus so unengaged, we are left with a product that, in modern terms, almost seems to resemble – dare I say it – musak.

Well, perhaps not literally. To equate Wagner with elevator music and supermarket white noise is nothing if not blasphemous, and as an aspiring Student of Music I should be shot. Besides, such an equation precludes a compositional genius that even Wagner’s most ardent opponents could not deny. And yet, there is something in the self-indulgent elusiveness of the Prelude, something in our ability to listen to the work without actually listening to the music, that smacks of ambient background sound.

As those who people the future that Wagner invokes in his eight volumes of verbosity, we are charged with evaluating how his works have accomplished the absurd task of outbidding all other attempts at musical production for the title of ‘music of the future’. From our modernistic or perhaps post-modernistic slant the task is less absolutely absurd than it is relatively absurd – in our mess of current cultural fragmentation ensuring that one is a music of the present seems drastically more important that ensuring one’s posterity. But let us, for a moment, indulge the composer who is himself something of a cultural monster. Is Wagner the music of the future, or, as time would have it, the present? And if so, however did he manage?

The answer no longer lies in the music, as Wagner perhaps imagined it would, and his is not the only music of the present, as I am certain Wagner would have preferred. If Wagner is a music of the present, he is so only insofar as he is a music of the background of the present.

Do not be insulted, my dear friend – the genius that has rendered your Tristan Prelude so easy to ignore has, to complicate the paradox, secured you an irrefutable spot in the future you once claimed for yourself. And rest assured that you are in good company – do you not see, over there, Eric Satie with his musique d’ameublement, and next to him the equally musical Sigur Ros and Sander Kleinenberg and Noir Desir? I suppose, in the end, the discourse leaves us nowhere but with the age-old problem: what, and why, is music? A question we would prefer to not answer. And I cannot help but, with a tip of my proverbial Melvillian hat, exclaim, ‘Ah, Wagner! Ah, Humanity!”

Tristan & Toadies

2005-11-09T20:30:00.001-05:00

The lush, slutty climax of the Transfiguration Scene is certainly more memorable, but Isolde’s most vocally heroic moment actually occurs even earlier, in act one of the histrionic death salute known as Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. It’s the point just after when, onboard a cruise liner bound for Cornwall, Brangaene gallops back from the poop deck to inform her mistress that Tristan is too busy aspirating in the backstage costume closet to deal with his prisoner’s operatic angst. And then we get magic: in a truly sensational display of laryngeal contortionism, the pre-bulimic Deborah Voigt – or whichever pneumatic soprano-truck driver’s on for the evening – delivers her frustrated tale of how she’d once saved Tristan’s life despite his role in her husband’s demise. For a few minutes, everything around her perishes and only she feels eternal.

In fact, if the beauty of Isolde’s aria feels as infinite as the sea, it’s only interrupted by the tragically dismal reality of her situation. Kidnapped by Morold’s killer, she’s been betrothed to her husband’s killer’s uncle, the paunchy basso nightmare King Marke. Will she fall for Tristan – or his uncle? Fifteen minutes into the first act, neither seems appealing. It is here that she dips into her secret stash of assorted potions, her actions rationalized by a freaky revenge fantasy in which she kamikazes Tristan and settles the scores.

It is also here that the audience begins to notice the weird incest vibes emanating from Wagner’s libretto. To my young and fragile mind, such sexual deviance could once be justified by sheer recognition of the story’s medieval folk origins: like reclaiming the Near East on some inexplicable reign-of-terror crusade mission, these devices were clearly all things of a more primitive era. Having recently reviewed Robert Bailey’s thorough – if somewhat breathless – mise-en-contexte for Norton, however, the more insidious muse for Wagner’s “all in the family” love triangle appears in fact to have stemmed from the incestuous fanaticism of his friends.

By my stars, it’s a marvel Richard didn’t letter bomb the sniveling mess that was Hans von Bülow at first opportunity. Bülow, whose completion and first performance of his compatriot’s Tristan Prelude earned little more than an epistolary slap on the wrists, couldn’t be swayed from masochistic subservience. Astonishingly, even more overt reprimands from his object of devotion – a bizarre exchange comes to mind involving a snooty, self-important letter from the bully composer to starry-eyed Hans, hauling him over the coals for what, in hindsight, was mostly just an embarrassing glut of compliments – didn’t discourage the conductor enough to stop him from sending desperate mea culpas to both the Blätter für Musik, comrades from the New German School, and the Niederrheinische Musikzeitung. Normally, one would feel sorry for this victim of Wagnerian browbeating – that is, if he didn’t seem to relish it so much: I read excerpts from these petty squabbles with the existential good humor of an elementary school teacher watching a scrawny fourth-grader get stuffed and locked into the janitor’s closet by his sixth-grade superior. “Does this mean our recess date is off?” he croaks from behind a dustbin. In the years to come, Wagner would commit the ultimate affront and make off with Cosima Liszt, von Bülow’s beloved wife. I’ll bet Hans paid for their honeymoon.

But for all his pathos, von Bülow was not the worst of the sycophants. Rather, this distinction is owed to the illustrious boot-kisser Franz Liszt. Father, not coincidentally, to Wagner’s stolen bride, Liszt cemented the incestuous circle of the Future Music coterie by dedicating his Dante Symphony – from the bottom of his “unchangeably faithful” heart – to his soon-to-be in-law. Wagner responded in kind: “It has made me positively red with shame, believe you me!” According to Bailey, the Ring-bearer’s less-than-gracious reception was probably appropriate given the circumstances: Wagner knew that such preciosity could only give the tittering Viennese press fuel for more of the same, cynical write-ups it had recently thrown his way. In my opinion, however, Bailey condones his subject’s insolence for entirely the wrong reasons: as stands, it’s a fairly undisputed fact that whatever decorum Wagner lacked, he made up for in a profusion of undeniably good taste. Liszt, creator of what I affectionately like to refer to as “Poop Music,” shouldn’t have dared place genius of such magnitude beside his frontispiece – it’s no wonder the German felt demoralized. Wagner’s music is a cosmic, almost mystical interpellation of base human pleasures enacted and reified onstage through modulation and tonal poetry. Liszt conquered the piano with impossible transcriptions and a dilettante’s enthusiasm, but never wrote an outstanding piece of music in his life.

There’s something delicious about an irreverent genius such as Richard Wagner. And yet, it’s somehow depressing to think that he spent much of his life broke and running from kowtowing birdbrains such as von Bülow and Liszt, whose self-affirming interest in their own progressivism feels somewhat narcissistic and vain. As though creativity were tenable or contagious. As though familial closeness might vindicate their masturbatory fervor. Ultimately, Wagner’s cynicism may have stemmed from the very friendships that might have otherwise spurred him to greater heights: trusting no one but his brooding menagerie of nihilist scholars, he came to see the compliment as a distraction. Whenever I hear the Liebestod, I feel the throbbing excitement of Isolde’s surreal, sexual pulse. But there’s also an edge that I can’t say I like, the nauseating wave of a ghostly social club, as countless, lusty Wagner kiss-ups sigh and climax into the stratosphere.

Allegory of Love

2005-11-09T14:08:00.000-05:00

Allegory of Love
Fitzhugh B. Karol - November 2, 2005

In examination of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, Love’s arrow I simply could not dodge. My romance began in Act II when listening, I found myself in King Marke’s garden. Flanked all around by tall trees. They looked like Cypress trees, foreboding my passage to the Isle of the Dead, but in my state I truly cannot tell. Wrapped in the mood of Isolde’s frantic banter I realize this garden in Cornwall is no more – a transfiguration of my own perhaps? I do not remember boarding any ship or sailing any distance. This must be a dream for only ‘The Dreamer’ enters this garden I’m told. At once the garden, humane as it was, fills with Gods, Temptations and Virtues. This garden belongs to Pleasure and hidden within I sense a love that I’ve yet to meet.
As I wander through the garden, stalked by cupid, I meet face to face in a reflecting pool with Tristan’s moment of rapture. In my ‘Allegory of Love’ I see in the waves of reflection, a rosebush that as I turn and approach presents me with one flower, yet unopened that promises to steal my heart. At that very moment Love’s arrow, tipped with sweet poison, pierces me and from the hollows of every tree surrounding comes a familiar tune. (drink/death motif)
In my ‘Romance of the Rose’ I am struck by four more arrows, completing my intoxication and as the poison enters my body so too does the poison draught course through Tristan – and with that the heart’s ‘tiny golden key’ is given over to Love itself and Love leaves us with our penance: “To fix your every thought on love, night and day, without remission; think of it always, ceaselessly, bearing in mind that sweet moment whose joy is so long delayed.”
Meanwhile, back in Cornwall and back in Act II, far above my garden portal Isolde’s longing for her lover builds with each passing minute. Her longing seeks to snuff the torch signal that keeps her beloved from her breast. As night falls passion awakes. Night is the lovers’ time; but does that make day the enemy of love? Here we find the most delightful romantic notion of all, shared by many poets and courtly lovers. The notion of which I speak is put so lyrically by our Mediaevals and is sung so desperately by our star-crossed lovers. The “l-i-g-h-t” motif. Love’s fury is unleashed on Tristan and Isolde as they embrace. Is this ‘that sweet moment’ that Love itself has promised? Wagner’s handling of this encounter suggests it is. But no sooner are passions lit than we are reminded of the bittersweet impermanence. L’aube, Alba, the light. Bewail the dawn and Tristan and Isolde do just that; as so many knights and truant ladies have done before them. If it weren’t for Marke’s castle couldn’t we find our pair in an orchard somewhere under a tree as dawn approaches. Oh woe. Isolde sings, “Day and death, would they not with equal force attack our love?”
The story of Tristan is so delightfully set in what we look back upon as the romantic ruins of the Middle Ages. The virtues of ‘courtly love’ then expounded for the world to look back at and dream with. With Tristan, Wagner, a dreamer himself in the garden of Pleasure brings a wonderful update to these sensuous myths. Once caught, once drunk or once pierced, how awesome the swells are. And what of conquering death, Love’s perilous grip? It is fitting that the “Romance of the Rose,’ where I began my swoon, was never finished by it’s original author, (Guillaume de Lorris. 1230.) The lover in his tale, universal as we can see, was left with his beloved trapped in a turret. Again I ask what of conquering Love’s spell? What of holding the key to our own hearts? Us romantics say never!

Alba - Ezra Pound, Langue D’oc

When the nightingale to his mate
Sings day-long and night late
My love and I keep state
In bower,
In flower,
‘Till the watchman on the tower
Cry:
“Up! Thou rascal. Rise.
I see the white
Light
And the night

Flies.”

Jackson, W.T.H., The Anatomy of Love: The Tristan of Gottfried von Strassburg. New York/London. Columbia University Press. 1971

Lewis, C.S., The Allegory of Love. Oxford. The Clarendon Press. 1936.

Owen, D.D.R., Noble Lovers. New York. New York University Press. 1975.

Strassburg, Gottfried von. The Story of Tristan and Iseult. Trans by Jessie L. Weston. London. David Hutt. 1907

Taylor, Henry Osborn. The Mediaeval Mind. New York. The Macmillan Company. 1919

Wagner, Richard. Tristan und Isolde. Karl Bohm Conducting. Bayreuther Festspiele. Deutsche Grammophon. 1966.

The Bricoleur and the Beast

2005-11-09T02:29:00.000-05:00

The notion of synthesis dominates both “high art” and popular culture in the postmodern age. Films like Pulp Fiction and television series like Aqua Teen Hunger Force achieve greatness by their clever recycling of cultural detritus, while composers like Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon write music equally indebted to Steve Reich, DJ Spooky, and Led Zeppelin. The postmodern synthesis has its roots in the somewhat less extravagant but no less bold idea of bricolage—the free use of pre-existing material and tools to constitute ones own work--that emerged in the writings of French structural anthropologist Claude Levi-Struass. While Levi-Strauss used bricolage to create an arsenal of interpretative techniques, for Igor Stravinsky bricolage meant creating art from a broad assortment of pre-existing styles. In this paper I want to try to present the compositional strategy of Stravinsky, and also his rivals, through the double lens of Jacques Derrida’s reading of the Levi-Strauss in Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.”

Since this is a music class rather than a class on semiotic theory, I should give a short introduction to Derrida’s essay. Derrida’s “Structure, Sign, and Play” was delivered in 1966 at John Hopkins University, and was, depending on who you ask, one of the inaugural papers of post-structuralism. In the essay, Derrida evaluates structuralism in the context of metaphysics, bringing to light structuralism’s limitations and the ways to which it, as a system of thought, was chained to the traditional episteme of a metaphysics which favors centered systems and self-presence over absence and decentered play. In a typically deconstructive gesture, Derrida finds a partial solution to the problems of structuralism—in other words the beginning of the post-structuralist gesture—in the work of one of the pioneering structuralists: Claude Levi-Strauss.

In his book The Savage Mind, Levi-Strauss contrasts two differing methodological standpoints which the theoretician may adopt: that of the bricoleur--the jack of all trades--and that of the engineer. Derrida writes that “The bricoleur, says Levi-Straus, is some one who uses ‘the means at hand,’, that is, the instruments he finds at his disposition around him, those which are already there… [and who is] not hesitating to change them whenever it appears necessary, or to try several of them at once, even if their form and origin are heterogeneous” (Derrida 255). I think already we can see Stravinsky as the bricoleur, reappropriating whatever musical styles he sees fit for his compositions, from his clever manipulation of Rimsky-Korsakov’s ocatatonicism in Petroushka and The Rite of Spring to his mixing of jazz and baroque elements in his neoclassical works. There is even a similarity between Derrida’s description of the bricoleur and Stravinsky’s own description of how he approaches composition: “I shall over come my terror and shall be reassured by the fact that I have seven notes of the scale and its chromatic intervals at my disposal… [and] that in all of these I possess solid and concrete elements which offer me a field of experience” (Stravinsky 64).

In contrast to the thieving bricoleur, the engineer seeks “to construct the totality of his language, syntax, and lexicon” (Derrida 256). He is “a subject who would supposedly be the absolute origin of his own discourse” (Derrida 256). Serialism, anyone? The fact that leading serialists actually were engineers (Milton Babbit and Pierre Boulez both studied math before they became composers) doesn’t help them deny the charge. For Derrida, Levi-Strauss, and, I would argue, Stravinsky, the engineer is a myth because no one can possibly hope to create or theorize without using the inherited language of a tradition. Only God, to whom Schoenberg subtly compares himself more than once in his Composition with Twelve Tones, could make any sort of self-present utterance unbound by inheritance from a tradition.

If the position of the engineer is naïve about language, then the position of the bricoleur is necessarily critical. One cannot capriciously employ heterogeneous styles of art or theory without disavowing the possibility of absolute style or self-present meaning; rather the bricoleur “preserve[s] as an instrument that whose truth-value he criticizes” [Derrida 255]. We can see this criticism of language in the writings and music of Stravinsky. “Danger lies not in the borrowing of clichés,” he wrote. “The danger lies in fabricating them and in bestowing on them the force of law” [Stravinsky 78]. Stravinsky’s music first criticized the gentility and individualism of the bourgeois with The Rite of Spring, and later brought down barriers between “high” and “low” art genres and other styles of music which seemed incongruous. When Stravinsky pleas for critics to spare composers from questions of form and subject, it is not, I would argue, because he wants his music to be taken at face value, but rather because he is aware these elements of his music have only face value. The bricoleur’s stylistic decisions have only methodological value, enabling him to accomplish his task but carrying no other inherent worth. However, “this methodological value is not affected by its ‘ontological’ non-value,” and indeed it is only by denying absolute truth or aesthetic value to any given approach that the plurality of bricolage is tenable. [Derrida 255]. Stravinsky’s musical eclecticism and Levi-Strauss’s structuralist method both embrace the superficial usefulness of their respective approaches while denying their techniques any claim to truth or absolute value, and this very denial constitutes a criticism of the languages each is forced to speak.

Derrida, Jacques. “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” The Language of Criticism and the Sciences of Man: The Structuralist Controversy. Ed Richard Macksey & Eugenio Donato. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1970.

Stravinskky, Igor. Poetics of Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.

Liam Gerussi, Nov. 3, Paper #2 - Disney and Stravinsky

2005-11-03T13:56:00.000-05:00

The initial reaction to Stravinsky’s Le Sacré du Printemps was one of incomprehension. A year before the outbreak of the First World War, the 1913 Paris audience expressed protest, outrage, and laughter at the ballet’s premiere. It seemed at the time that the composer’s modern rhythms, frenetic melodies, and unpredictable musical rhetoric were too much for the civilized, upper-class audience to bear. As the orchestra played on, the audience became degenerate, approaching the level of an in-theatre riot (Kelly 209).

Over the next thirty years, a similar breakdown would occur throughout Europe, but on a much larger scale. After experiencing or at least witnessing the Russian revolution, two world wars, and mass genocide, Europeans could hardly take so-called civilized cultures at face value any longer. With all its cosmic fear and sacred complexity, Le Sacré du Printemps would indeed have been appropriate background music for either the Nazi genocide or the Bolshevik revolution. In this context, it does not seem quite so outrageous of Stravinsky to have been writing about primitivism and pagan sacrifice using folk motifs and appropriately disorienting techniques for an increasingly disorienting modern world.

Stravinsky tried to construct a portrayal of primitive pagan Russia using recycled Russian folk songs as well as his own work, which was presented on modern instruments, with modern techniques and experimentation. While Stravinsky’s work was undoubtedly a milestone in modern classical music, this convalescence of new and old, primitive and modern, is nothing new. Walt Disney also combined the primitive with the modern: his Disneyland theme park, which opened in Southern California in 1955, was based on the combination of nostalgia for an earlier American way of life and a futuristic, consumer-oriented flair for visionary enterprise.

The Rite of Spring was also immortalized in Walt Disney’s mid-century motion picture experiment Fantasia, now a Disney cult classic. Disney’s film put animated sequences to well known classical works – the most famous scene being the segment set to Paul Dukas' The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, featuring Mickey Mouse. Walt chose The Rite of Spring – a symphony to dissonance and primitivism – for an animated sequence chronicling the dawn of time, from cells splitting in the primordial soup to the dinosaurs’ extinction.

Perhaps Disney’s choice of Stravinsky as the artist to underscore his dawn of time sequence was not entirely inappropriate. Stravinsky’s piece is, in essence, an imitation of primitivism: a theatrical enactment of an early pagan ritual, presented in a modern style. Disney’s work also takes modern stock of older and more primitive forms, from his animated features based on classic fairy tales to his presentation of classical music in Fantasia itself. Most significantly, the Disneyland theme park is, by definition, a theatrical, fantastic, and romantically modernized place. It is an iconic re-enactment of turn-of-the-century, middle-class American life, with an essentially modern look towards the future and technology. Both Disney and Stravinsky attempted to replicate something from the past, while presenting it with their own self-consciously modern spin.

Thomas Kelly, Stravinsky, Le Sacre du Printemps, 290.
References to Disney’s Fantasia (1940): Wikipedia.com, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasia_%28movie%29; International Movie Database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032455/usercomments.

2005-11-02T02:26:00.000-05:00

Lizzie Vieh
MU0132
1 November 2005
The Rite of Spring as a Return to the Jungle
“We carry the jungle with us.” So said C.G. Jung, Freud’s most influential disciple, in a prophetic statement that came to characterize the incredible violence and tumultuous change that took place in the Western world during the first half of the twentieth century. This era is characterized by intellectual giants who stripped bare the primitive nature of man: Freud, Darwin, Marx, Frazer, and, I would also argue, Stravinsky. The Rite of Spring renders the libido of the decade in musical form. In thirty-four minutes, Stravinsky strips away the bourgeois costume of civilization and lays bare man at his most nakedly primitive. He is a savage, pitiless, terrified creature, utterly controlled by forces beyond his control: those of nature, evolution, the power of the collective, and his own murky unconscious. The Rite of Spring premiered in 1913, one year before the archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated and Europe was plunged into the most bloody war the world had ever known. Death had never occurred on a scale like this. It was as though man had reverted back to a primitive archetype of the bloodthirsty savage bent on self-annihilation.
The audience at the premiere of The Rite of Spring was the very definition of “bourgeois.” Wealthy and well-fed, these civilized Parisians were as far-removed from prehistoric man as filet mignon is from a slab of bloody cow meat. Yet when the opening bars of Le Sacre began, this top-hatted crowd devolved into a primitive monkey-house. It was as though that primitive, relentless rhythm, and that frightening dissonance hit some deranged, primeval switch in the collective mind. They were outraged and horrified.
The Rite of Spring represents ancient concepts of sacrifice. The individual is subject to the collective. If the tribe demands the virgin’s sacrifice to ensure the return of spring, then she is bound to dance herself to death. She has no will of her own, no ego to protect, and no social illusions to uphold. She is driven by powerful, unknowable forces that delight in her self-annihilation and view atrocities and violence with a cool detachment. The melody of the music is warped and perverted in bizarre ways, but the rhythm beats on, steady and relentless. Both the subject matter of the ballet and the emotional resonance of the music reinforce the absence of self that characterized both ancient and modern man.
The Rite of Spring portrays the disintegration of the ego and how fluidly the primeval world permeates the present. The concerns of late industrial society – how the individual can maintain a sense of self when assailed by titan forces beyond his control – mirror those of prehistoric man. Freud argues in Totem and Taboo that just as the dilemma facing modern man mirrors that of his ancient ancestors, so is the modern neurotic a manifestation of ancient man. Prehistoric man did not understand the forces that governed his world, nor his tremendous sense of guilt and anxiety, but he tried to influence the forces and mollify his remorse through a variety of rituals. His behavior was extremely inhibited and governed by a variety of bizarre taboos. Failure to adhere to these rules and taboos resulted in tremendous guilt and hysteria. An actual representation of this phenomenon can be seen in Charcot’s “hysterical women.” In their frothing, writhing, screaming displays, they hark back to primeval man and his rituals of self-sacrifice and atonement.
The Rite of Spring offers a veritable soundtrack for these rituals. In its primeval rhythms and neurotic melodies, the piece is a compendium of both archaic and modern man. It infuriated Parisian audiences in 1913 because it showed them their true selves, buried under layers of fine manners and social conventions.

Stravinsky, Culture, and Play (paper #2, 11/1/05)

2005-11-02T01:14:00.000-05:00

Stravinsky, Culture, and Play
Whit Bernard

I recently read an article for a 20th century theory class by Gretchen Horlacher, an American music theorist, who sought to contest Pierre Boulez’s assertion that Stravinsky’s music is “anti-developmental.” Citing Adorno and Schoenberg, among others, as critics who have time and again accused Stravinsky of “empty formalism” and “superficiality” because of the lack of a discernible inner structural coherence, a-la-Brahms and Webern, in his neo-classical works, she seemed to sense an urgency to put to rest the notion that such seminal works as Le Sacre and the Symphony of Psalms might in fact consciously skirt the edges of rigorous formal development. Her project was purely and simply theoretical: demonstrate the ways in which Stravinsky’s music actually does develop logically, and thus position him firmly within the predominantly Germanic cannon of post-romantic structuralism. The singular validity of that cannon, of course, is never questioned. After all, the narrative that gave birth to it features such heavy hitters as Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, the greatest exponents of progressive phases of a basic, unquestionable axiom. In fact, the patently misguided assumption that Boulez’s characterization of Stravinsky as non-developmental is pejorative is not questioned either. If music does not develop according to a set of rational principles, it cannot be autonomous, and if it is not autonomous it is corruptible, contingent, superficial, and morally inferior. (Horlacher, 171-174)

I am projecting my own notion of structuralist thought, and particularly Adorno’s philosophy, onto this theorist, which is not fair. I have no way of attaching her to any ideological tradition based on such a limited article. Her project was narrow in scope, and while she did quite clearly misread Boulez, I think she was quite successful in demonstrating some of the hidden connections between disparate materials in pieces that often seem to shift arbitrarily from one idea to another, iterating previously stated ideas without “earning” them in the traditional sense of development. But the apparent cultural position of her argument interests me much more than its content, and so if nothing else I hope to acknowledge her role in the articulation of some larger questions: Is the universal value or validity of Stravinsky’s composition at stake here? Why, and according to whom? Does anyone care?

To couch the situation in Althusserian terms, one could argue that Schoenberg and Adorno, and perhaps even Gretchen Horlacher, are trapped within an ideological problematic that conditions its own blindness to itself. The staggering destruction of World War One, totally unanticipated by the positivistic empiricists of the early 20th-century mainstream, suggested to artists and intellectuals of all stripes that rationality itself had become a paradoxically closed, self-referential normative structure with no recourse to universality. Its substructures are not only subject to contingent relationships with one another, but also relationships to realities outside the paradigm of Western Reason, realities to which the Western thinker is necessarily blind, and which are thus necessarily repressed by the structure itself. It is thus the guiding delusion of early 20th century structuralism that “coherence” is by its very nature categorical. As Derrida suggests in his Grammatology, any concept, or for that matter any “structural parameter” in the normative Western European epistème is “always already” present, and thus demonstrated as true by virtue of its own presence within an overdetermined field. Meaning is manufactured out of itself, neither true nor untrue.

The paradox of twentieth century composition, a paradox that Adorno seems to have been fully aware of in his later, more angst-stricken writings on Schoenberg’s twelve tone music, is that the seemingly authentic, autonomous (and yet always conceptually ambiguous) structure that is meant to vindicate music from the corruptibility of social contingency and elevate it to the level of “true art” is not only unattainable, it is in fact as contingent and culturally determined as any parameter of Stravinsky’s playful formalism. In the realm of corruptible human constructs it is but another node in an endless field of malleable reference, with no structural depth from which to distill and anchor a moral hierarchy. Stravinsky is perhaps guilty of un-self-conscious superficiality and naively pedantic formalism as he waxes on about “good taste” in the Poetics, but a post-structuralist reading would reward him for being, at the very least, honest about his own particularity. He gives us nothing more than surface play, but it is surface without the pretense of depth. In a postmodern epistemological sense, Schoenberg’s impulse to universalize his art through a structural analogy with some other, extra-ideological dimension larger than himself is perhaps the more dangerous and insidious of the two. (Stravinsky,

As a composer who has, for better or worse, spent far more time over the past few years taking courses in cultural studies and writing analytical papers on the status of contemporary creative work than I have creating music myself, I have grown acutely aware of the reality that composition is, on a fundamental level, an excersize in cultural criticism, and thus intimately tied up in the world of representational play from which it struggles to stand apart as unique, and as somehow “good” for the world.

It is easy to get caught up in an obsessively conceptual and moralistic framework of aesthetic judgment, though. If we are hopelessly and irrevocably trapped within the realm of cultural play, I suppose a better angle for looking at the potentially positive achievement of a work of art, if only in a relative sense, is its position in relation to that culture to which it is hopelessly contingent. The tendency then becomes to argue in favor of the discerning consumer, and thus deny art the ability to oppose capitalist cultural production. As an example that resonates on a disturbing level for me personally, the genre of “contemporary concert music,” which arguably has roots in both Schoenberg and Stravinsky, has fallen far from its monopoly on Bourgeois-intellectual musical life in the pre-war years, to the realm of an obscure subcategory of classical music, acknowledged by a small group of academics, performers, and eccentric enthusiasts. It has alienated itself from the public, largely through an ongoing insistence on structural autonomy, to the extent that the idea of a new “academic” musical composition having the kind of immediate cultural impact of The Rite of Spring or even the Five Pieces for Orchestra is, as a member of my post-tonal theory class put it last week, “laughable.”

There are surely as many reasons for this ongoing alienation as there are explanations, and as many explanations as there are alienated composers and listeners, and so I will back off on that front. What I would like to say in a somewhat arbitrary move towards concluding this paper is that the only way to maintain cultural currency and further one’s own ideological vision of a better world through art, as far as I can see it, is to engage in the very field of contingent relationships to a broader culture that Schoenberg and Adorno looked upon with such anxiety, and in fact to make one’s work contingent, through strategic cultural reference, in such a way that it demystifies itself as a product, and emerges from the normative and politically neutralizing realm of the genre as a relatively unique, although entirely determinate, utterance. It was Adorno, after all, who gave rise to the notion of the critic as the actualizer of an artistic gesture. Music criticism for Adorno was not a means of making aesthetic judgments from a position of indifferent objectivity, but rather it was an enterprise that demanded getting inside the work, inhabiting its structure and furthering its development, and thus inheriting its autonomy and actualizing its potential to enforce a rigorous morality and challenge social structures through dialectical synthesis. Discarding the modernist universalism inherent in this approach we can retain it as a model for the composer as cultural critic. Rather than avoiding reference to cultures outside its own internal field, successful new music juxtaposes anachronistic references to the point where it begins to defy those references, to shape them into something just beyond associability. It engages dialectically with the broader field of cultural production in a mode Barthes might refer to as intertextual play. Without depth, there is no masterpiece, only intervention, however by inhabiting culture the contemporary composer retains her ability to make a statement.

Bibliography
Boulez, Pierre. Ed. Jean-Jaques Nattiez. Orientations: collected writings. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Horlacher, Gretchen. The Rhythms of Reiteration: Formal Development in Stravinsky’s Ostinati. In Music Theory Spectrum, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Autumn, 1992)

Stravinsky, Igor. Poetics of Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1942.

Subotnik, Rose Rosengard
Why is Adorno’s Criticism the Way it Is? In Developing Variations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.

Toward a Deconstruction of Structural Listening. In Deconstructive Variations. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996

The Artisan

2005-10-28T00:38:00.000-05:00

Did anyone else notice how jumbled and maundering my thoughts were earlier today? Must've been one of those mornings: waking up was more of a chore than usual and I felt distracted and out of sorts.

So. One thing I would've brought up, had there been more time or more caffeine in my system, is the weird sense of déjà-lu I experienced when first encountering this remark from Stravinsky's Poetics:

"In a society like that of the Middle Ages, which recognized and safeguarded the primacy of the spiritual realm and the dignity of the human person (which must not be confused with the individual) -- in such a society recognition by everyone of a hierarchy of values and a body of moral principles established an order of things that put everyone in accord concerning certain fundamental concepts of good and evil, truth and error. I do not say of beauty and ugliness, because it is absolutely futile to dogmatize in so subjective a domain.
"It should not surprise us then that social order has never directly governed these matters. As a matter of fact, it is not by promulgating an aesthetic but by improving the status of man and by exalting the competent workman in the artist that a civilization communicates something of its order to works of art and speculation. The good artisan himself in those happy ages dreams of achieving the beautiful only through the categories of the useful. His prime concern is applied to the rightness of an operation that is performed well, in keeping with a true order." (75-76. Trans. Arthur Knodel & Ingolf Dahl. Cambridge: Harvard College Press, 2003. 16th ed. Italics mine.

For me, the passage rang several bells. But where had I run into this artisan character before? Could it have been in something of Benjamin's, I wondered? I hopped back to my dorm room and dusted off my dog-eared copy of his Illuminations.

And there it was: in an essay praising the folk-like narratives of Nikolai Leskov -- and, more broadly, bemoaning the dying legacy of the oral tradition -- Benjamin introduces a Marxist mechanic somewhat akin to Stravinsky's.

"An orientation toward practical interests is characteristic of many born storytellers. More pronouncedly than in Leskov this trait can be recognized, for example, in Gotthelf, who gave his peasants agricultural advice; it is found in Nodier, who concerned himself with the perils of gas light; and Hebel, who slipped bits of scientific instruction for his readers into his Schatzkästlein, is in this line as well. All this points to the nature of every real story. It contains, openly or covertly, something useful. The usefulness may, in one case, consist in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or maxim. In every case the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers.
[...]
"The art of storytelling is reaching its end because the epic side of truth, wisdom, is dying out. This, however, is a process that has been going on for a long time. And nothing would be more fatuous than to want to see in it merely a 'symptom of decay,' let alone a 'modern' symptom. It is, rather, only a concomitant symptom of the secular productive forces of history, a concomitant that has quite gradually removed narrative from the realm of living speech and at the same time is making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing." (83-? Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1988.)

If indeed parallels are to be drawn between the two depictions of the artisan -- one bound to the old tonal rules of music, the other shackled by conventions of epic literature -- a corollary pairing of traditional tonality and narrative structure may be equally fitting. (Does this make sense?)

A Bamun artisan at work in Foumban, West Province, Cameroon. (8/2004)

UGH, Hanslick.

2005-10-20T10:03:00.000-05:00

I'll get off my soapbox soon enough, but Hanslick really rubs me the wrong way. While I endorse his contempt for Wagnerian-brand antisemitism, I can't help but feel irked by his bowdlerized take on aural pleasure, that beauty is independent of the observer:

"If the contemplation of something beautiful arouses pleasurable feelings, this effect is distinct from the beautiful as such. I may, indeed, place a beautiful object before an observer with the avowed purpose of giving him pleasure, but this purpose in no way affects the beauty of the object. The beautiful is and remains beautiful though it arouse no emotion whatever, and though there be no one to look at it. In other words, although the beautiful exists for the gratification of an observer, it is independent of him." (pp.9-10, trans. Gustav Cohen, Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1957. [I like this translation better than Payzant's.])

Hrm. Where to begin?! I shall spend the next few days pinpointing exactly why this concept vexes me so -- I'll start by revisiting Lacanian notions of pleasure and the ideal -- but first, a question for all of you:

Assuming that we all undergo the same psychic battle between intellect and emotion when subjected to music of any sort, what role(s) do you think fantasy might play in the internalizing process? In other words, to what extent do you guys think we simply feel whatever it is we think we should feel when we hear a piece of music?

When Prof. Subotnik played us the Mozart today, she summarized the piece's emotional constitution as "melancholy," and even, "devastating." But, I wanted to ask, how did you tap into that core of your being that said, "Be sad now"?

Greatness, post-hero?

2005-10-20T00:20:00.000-05:00

Listening to the presentation of my classmate’s paper on Beethoven last Thursday, and re-reading some of the assigned texts later that day, I was struck by a recurrent, seemingly predestined conclusion: Beethoven was a genius.
The following questions have largely shaped my approach to this paper: Why is Beethoven considered Great? Why, paradoxically, does that “greatness,” still palpable as an artifact today, seem so to have become so devoid of cultural substance, and even relevance? And finally (and I promise these are not ancillary questions), Where does Berlioz fit in? What about Boulez?

My first reaction, besides an impulse to make some kind of joke about the spelling of the composers’ names, is to suggest that the notion of Greatness that seems to follow Beethoven everywhere is a product of Hegelian dialectics. It was Hegel, after all, who gave us the philosophical prototype for the Romantic Hero, the singular mythological individual who became the agent of historical change and thus actualized human progress, fusing his sacred individuality with the historic collective, or in Hegel’s terms (and he is very easy to misread here, so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt), the “state.” This quintessentially “dialectical” synthesis of individual and collective was to inform a certain tendency towards positivistic meta-narrative, particularly in Germanic bourgeois culture, which remains today in a diluted form in the common notion that an artist whose work may seem extreme, peripheral, beyond or alien to the present paradigm may herself realign or even recreate that paradigm, and through a sort of double appropriation become central to cultural production, and thus, a “major figure.” (Hegel, 49)

Beethoven is mythologized in our cultural mainstream as the quintessential hero, perhaps even the architect, of this grand historical narrative. In the most simplistic sense, his synthesis of classical formalism with a strongly individual voice, seen in the emphasis on extra-formal, superficial elements that both enlarge and individualize the form itself, was retroactively immortalized as the opening statement of Romanticism, and thus a dialectical intervention and an essential turning point in the grand narrative of post-enlightenment humanism. Whether or not he actually fulfilled this role is another question, one that begs a long look at the late string quartets. In a way, though, any question of Beethoven “himself” is out of place here. In the Germanic cultural tradition I am thinking of, a tradition whose vestiges remain curiously strong, if paradoxical, in current discourse, there is no pre-myth Beethoven. He has disappeared, as Magritte’s pipe did for Foucault, beneath the layers of historical mythologization and recontextualization which condition a nearly indecipherable web of associations. But what I am more interested in for the moment is that internally complex, constructed, dialectical hero, and how that hero compared to Berlioz, who seems never to have had such a role carved out for him. An excerpt from Reason in History gives us some idea as to why this might have been.

“It is of no help when pretentious aesthetic criticism demands that the material, the substantial of the content, ought not to determine our aesthetic pleasure, but that beautiful form as such, or greatness of imagination and the like, is the aim of the arts; it is claimed that it is this which ought to be noticed and enjoyed by a liberal taste and cultivated mind. Sound common sense does not tolerate such abstractions and does not assimilate works of that kind…. There is not only a classical form but also a classical subject-matter.” (Hegel, 87)

Hegel gives us a clear sense here of that ineffable “spirit” or “truth” at the center of the historical narrative. It is a truth for which Berlioz doesn’t seem to have held much reverence. And history hasn’t given Berlioz much credit for actualizing that truth, thus his absence from this particular canonic narrative and his inability to become “influential” in the Hegelian/Beethovenian sense. Indeed, Berlioz’s correspondence about the Symphonie Fantastique suggests to us that “aesthetic pleasure… the beautiful form as such, [and] greatness of imagination…” were precisely his aims. (ibid)

There is, I think, much that is significant for the contemporary critic in Berlioz’s obvious insignificance to the German Romantic project, and the broader musical mainstream beholden to it. He was eccentric both to his own French cultural mainstream, which he viewed as conservative and uncreative, and to the more progressive German cultural zeitgeist, which he seems to have idolized and yet hardly aspired to, considering the idiosyncratic, defiantly un-classical nature of much of his music. Where Beethoven might be viewed as a composer who played a role in a paradigm shift, Berlioz stumbled into a new paradigm without causing much immediate cultural change.

And yet few would place Berlioz outside the Canon, and fewer still would deny his influence on musical culture. One need look no further than the concert programs from all over the world which celebrated his sesquicentennial in 2002, or the critics, notably Tovey and Boulez, who take for granted the importance of grappling with his legacy. We are all still talking about Berlioz, and listening to his music. So why is his impact so difficult for us to theorize?

The question is endemic of a broad contradiction which, as far as I can tell, musicology is still battling. From my own, admittedly limited knowledge of cultural history, coupled with my readings of the struggles of critics from Schumann to Boulez, my sense is that the great difficulty with Berlioz is that we have no meta-narrative in which to place him.

But we aren’t supposed to be using meta-narratives anymore, are we? And yet we know that Beethoven is a genius. Maybe we should reevaluate.

What strikes me most about Beethoven, the longer I spend with him, is that his output doesn’t line up with the mythology through which he is venerated. The fifth symphony, of course, falls right into line with the Hegelian reading outlined nauseatingly above. But, to echo a question Adorno raised in his own critical language, what does the critic do about the late quartets? Specifically, I am drawn to opus 132, a piece which even today seems profoundly strange. The eighteen minute third movement, constructed out of a four note melodic cell, develops through surface-level similarity and iteration, lacking the rigorous structural coherence essential for the mythologized dialectical achievements of Beethoven’s middle-period compositions. It is some of the most self-consciously stylistic music of Beethoven’s that I have heard, from the enormous, often awkward dynamic contours to the open intervals to the even more idiosyncratic baroque trills and melodic figurations in the fugal section. It is hard for me to listen to this distinctively beautiful and obtuse music as anything but a commentary on its own particularity.

All of a sudden, Beethoven the venerated genius begins to break down. What emerges, for me at least, is a composer not entirely dissimilar from Berlioz, a human being reacting to the ideological tensions of his time not through some kind of sanctified, redemptive synthesis, but rather through a personal and unabashedly particular creative intervention. More specifically, though, I see a musical connection between the two composers that the Hegelian narrative would have blinded me to: a distinctively modern focus on timbre over structure. I would argue, moreover, that this expanded interest in timbre, or in a broader sense sound quality, as an element a priori to formal structure, and perhaps even a site of structuralization in itself, requires a dramatic break with the Hegelian narrative. Schoenberg, the last exponent of that narrative, foresaw its demise in his frustration with the aural dogma imposed by classical harmonic formalism. And yet he resisted the full explication of the serialist techniques he developed because he remained firmly within the discursive system he was trying to escape: a personal need to write “universal music,” to live up to the challenge of Kant’s categorical imperative in historic German fashion, prevented him from taking a critical stance towards the ways in which his revolutionary new harmonies were being physically produced, the musicians who were producing them, and the cultural environment that accommodated them.

The serialization of so-called “superficial” parameters, from timbre to musician placement, was achieved by a defiantly un-German composer already familiar to our class: Pierre Boulez. It’s is an amusing tangent point, although I would argue that the Hegelian dogma was not fully overcome until formalism was not only externalized from traditional harmony but in fact reversed and deconstructed, by composers like Ferneyhough, Murail, and Saariaho, along with early electronic composers, who derived structural parameters for pitch development based on that most basic sensuous physical parameter, the harmonic series. Beyond this, one would want to acknowledge the shift beyond sound quality to extra-aural sensuous properties of sound production, the physical elements of performance. As early as the 1960s glam-bands focused as much or more on the visual and spatial fields of production, from image to genre, venue to scene… broadening the compositional focus to confront the broad field of representation associated with any given musical utterance, such that abstract structural parameters become just one of many potential sites of artistic manipulation, and a subtle and often ignored one at that.

So what happens to our Hero?

The artistic production of the past fifty years, and the theoretical production that has sown its ideological seeds and tended its growth, would suggest that he no longer carries much weight. The master narratives, as Lyotard reminds us, have fallen apart, fragmented into an infinite plurality of localized, synchronic micro-narratives, sites of criticism where acts of artistic intervention have affected the broader social consciousness while forfeiting the right to a categorically valid individual consciousness. Whereas for Hegel, and even to an extent his modernist interpreter Adorno, the dialectical movement of history was achieved through the synthesis of a heroic consciousness with the historical narrative, now that narrative has collapsed and the emphasis on subjective agency has been supplanted by a conceptually shakier field of subjective utterances whose agency can never be fully theorized. Thus the “zeitgeist,” if such a thing can still be said to exist, is much more ambiguous; it can no longer be allegorized through an individual consciousness. (Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, xxiv)

Before we mourn the loss of heroic agents of historical change, though, we ought to remember that we still have great composers. How can we say they are great? This is perhaps the next challenge. How do we criticize music without a set of cultural parameters in which to position either ourselves or the music itself? Indeed, how do we talk about music without a stable concept of “music itself” ? My hope is only that we might begin confronting these questions in earnest, and thus resist the resurging cultural drive towards normative, universalized discourse.

Sources:

Hegel, G.W.F., tr. Robert S. Hartman. "Reason in History." Bobbs-Merrill, Indianapolis: 1953.

Lyotard, Jean-François, tr. Geoff Bennington. "The Postmodern Condition: A report on Knowledge." Univeristy of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis: 1979.

Listening to Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique

2005-10-17T20:32:00.000-05:00

Francois-Joseph Fétis stumbles as he tries to understand what most people listen for in instrumental music, humbly concluding “I simply do not know what they look for in it”*1. Just as Fétis does not understand how others listen to music, I believe that most people—myself included—are generally baffled by the experience of listening to music. We just don’t know what to make of it. Perhaps this explains the abundance of social norms attached to musical experience: at a classical music concert, one sits enraptured and applauds only at certain times; at a metal show, one thrashes with utmost righteousness. Of course, such norms are more or less flexible and they are only outward displays for the benefit of social lubrication. Rules that govern the inner, phenomenological experience of listening to music are more difficult to quantify, but across genres there are certain accepted heuristics used to guide the listener’s experience.

Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique generates controversy among his peers because it defies traditional listening practices of classical music; neither his supporters nor his detractors know quite how to listen to it. In earlier forms of classical music, the experienced listener might follow the formal structure of a piece or count how many variations a theme undergoes, appreciating the coherence and beauty of the music. If all else failed, the listener could simply close her eyes and be moved. When listening to the Symphonie Fantastique, however, such strategies lead only to frustration—the form of the piece constantly subverts expectations and the distinctive idée fixe ruins the fun of counting variations. Quietly appreciating the beauty of the piece can be similarly frustrating because it is not quite beautiful; Fétis is not unfair, I think, when he remarks that “the audience thought it was having a nightmare during the whole performance” (217)*2. Without functional listening practices to fall back on, the audience is unsure how to listen to Berlioz’s music.

In writings about the symphony, this lack of listening strategies manifests itself as a common trope of inexpressibility. Although Fétis is certain of his dislike for the Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath, he’s not quite sure what to write about it: in his exasperation, he can only exclaim “The pen falls from my hand!” (220). Robert Schumann, strong in his support of the piece, is equally baffled by it. Upon first reviewing the score, he finds himself “dumfounded” (222) and in a later essay he apologizes for his previous “failure to discuss the actual musical composition” (226). This inability to talk about the piece stems from an unawareness of how to listen to it.

As if anticipating the befuddlement of his listeners, Berlioz has provided us with a program. The original program does more than simply tell a story; it tries to teach the audience what to listen for. In his description of the first movement, for example, Berlioz writes: “This melodic image and the [beloved ideal] it reflects pursue [the protagonist] incessantly like a double idée fixe. That is the reason for the constant appearance, in every moment of the symphony, of the melody that begins the first Allegro” (23). Perhaps the program, then, provides a clue for how to listen to Berlioz’s music. Unfortunately, Berlioz himself wavers on the importance of his program. The second edition of the program includes this note: “If the symphony alone is performed in a concert…one can even dispense with distributing the program, keeping only the titles of the five movements. The symphony by itself (the author hopes) can afford musical interest independent of any dramatic purpose” (32). In the end, the program is a tool for listening to the symphony, but a tool of limited usefulness. It is a metaphor for the music; an analogy but no more.

How shall we listen to Berlioz’s symphony, then? This is a difficult question, and one for which I do not have a ready answer. Certainly, he asks us to listen for new things, and in a new way. Perhaps we should listen for orchestration instead of melody. Perhaps we should appreciate that Berlioz’s music endures in the mind not because it is a beautiful dream, but because it is a disturbing nightmare. The genius of the Symphonie Fantastique lies in its subversion of listeners’ expectations; it makes us learn again how to listen.

Notes:
1. Fétis, Francois-Joseph in Franz Liszt "Berlioz and His ‘Harold’ Symphony” in: Source Readings In Musical History. Ed. Oliver Strunk, 1998: p.868
2. This and all ensuing page numbers refer to: Fantastic Symphony, by Hector Berlioz. An authoritative score, historical background, analysis, views and comments. Ed. Edward T. Cone. New York: W.W. Norton, 1971.

novelty post: late beethoven

2005-10-13T02:23:00.000-05:00

We've mentioned the late Beethoven quartets many times in class, and I just thought I'd point out that they're in the news recently. Appearantly a Philadelphia librarian discovered a previously lost manuscript of the (in)famous Grosse Fugue.

Beethoven is Huge

2005-10-11T22:13:00.000-05:00

Ludwig Von Beethoven is huge. He’s in the library, he’s on the Internet; he’s on my computer. He lurks about a third of the way down the playlist on my iPod Shuffle, like an extraordinary dinner party guest, strangely placed between The Beatles and Belle and Sebastian. He’s everywhere. And I just can’t stop thinking about him.

His Symphony No. 5 in C minor opens with possibly the most famous line ever written in Western Classical music – the sudden, ominous, dun-dun-dun-dun – a phrase that Beethoven himself described as “destiny knocking at the door,” (Tovey 143). But Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony has so much more going for it apart from that overused and often-appropriated phrase. The symphony’s many living elements are a testament not only to its structural complexity, but also to the myriad of musical moments that the composer creates. The 3rd and 4th Movements flow into each other with the poetic ease and monumental scope of a Greek Tragedy. And while the same themes return, each time they do so it is in a slightly different form, making them increasingly interesting to mull over in one’s mind for hours.

Brooding rock ballads and shiny Brit. Pop hits from the Nineties will often creep into my subconscious and stay there for days, but never has a piece of classical music occupied the number one spot in my mental Top 40. There are several nuanced themes, motifs, and melodies that float through my head on a regular basis from the 3rd and 4th movements alone. I want to say, “it’s just so catchy!” or “it’s just so musically complex,” but that would not explain it. Beethoven’s 5th symphony is a whole piece, a complete work. There is no cutting Beethoven into smaller, more digestible, segments; it doesn’t have the same effect. I recently tried using the 3rd and 4th movements as the soundtrack to an art video I made (much to the chagrin of my art video class). Upon screening, all that could be said about it was that the score itself was truly a masterpiece; the video, in comparison, definitely needed some more work. Of course, my work as a videographer will never be able to measure up to Beethoven’s talent as a composer.

That extraordinary talent is one reason Beethoven continues to resurface in our cultural consciousness. You can spot the references in such popular fare as the 1992 children’s movie about a dog that bears his name (Plot summary: “A slobbering St Bernard dog becomes the center of attention for a loving family but its vet secretly wants to kill him.”) (www1) He also appears on the soundtrack to Saturday Night Fever, amid incessant disco beats, Moog synthesizer sounds, and funky Wah guitar licks in a Walter Murphy track that shamelessly samples the famous, ominous opening phrase, calling itself (appropriately), “A Fifth of Beethoven” (Walter Murphy).

The song is indeed appropriately titled: for no art that attempts to imitate, sample, or borrow from Beethoven can hope to meet him on equal footing. Beethoven changed the way people think about music; even today, he continues to do so. I sit in awe, and listen.

Footnotes
Tovey, Donald Francis, “The Fifth Symphony,” Norton Critical Scores Symphony No. 5 in C minor, Ed. Elliot Forbes (New York: 1971), 143.
Plot Summary, “Beethoven (1992)”, Plot Summary, IMBd.com, The Internet Movie Database, http://imdb.com/title/tt0103786/.
Walter Murphy (based on Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony), “A Fifth of Beethoven,” on Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack (1977), Polydor 825 389-2.

(previously titled A Fifth of Beethoven)

--if--

2005-10-10T17:36:00.000-05:00

Clara Schuhmacher
28 September 2005

Somewhere – and I am not sure where, exactly – we seem to have lost sight of the beginning – of the music, really – and ended up in a tangled mess of words that attempt (dare I say, in vain) to smooth out the superficially incoherent elements characteristic of Berlioz and to place his Symphonie Fantastique in a neat [if boxy] category. The music as such – judgments of quality aside – has been obscured by a desperate attempt to theorize its existence, to qualify our labeling it as ‘problematic’. Still, Berlioz and his works continue to defy categorization, and apparently unacceptably so, judging from the countless words that have been thrown at La Symphonie Fantastique in an effort to hammer the work into something more familiar. Perhaps Boulez said it best when he said “Berlioz’s compositions exist in a sphere that is difficult to define, for they do not respect, and do not claim to respect, the usual conventions in the process of creation and transmission” (Boulez, 212). It is, of course, a natural impulse – this desire to define, and I suppose I should not judge such honest cultural attempts at understanding and appropriation too harshly. But even so I find that this long-winded discourse on definition borders on the ridiculous. Partially because it has become infuriatingly redundant, but mostly because – well, today, at least – the thought of applying to Berlioz but one label, of placing him within a single set of parameters, seems rather counterintuitive.

In his The Poetics of the Open Work, Umberto Eco argues that “a work of art gains its aesthetic validity precisely in proportion to the number of different perspectives from which it can be viewed and understood” (The Role of the Reader, 49). He continues with “every work of art, even though it is produced by following an explicit or implicit poetics of necessity, is effectively open to a virtually unlimited range of possible readings, each of which causes the work to acquire new vitality in terms of one particular taste or perspective or personal performance” (The Role of the Reader, 63).

If one is to take this concept as true, then our struggles to place Berlioz within a meta-narrative that would justify, or at very least attempt to contextualize, his existence are but wasted words, for what is important here is your interpretation of the work, and not how your interpretation stacks up against the interpretation of others, and not where your interpretation falls within musicological and aesthetic discourse. Furthermore, to squeeze Berlioz into a definitive category would be to do the composer a severe injustice, for denying the work its multiple readings would be to deny the work its “aesthetic validity”, to borrow a term from Eco. True, one cannot ignore the cultural when rationalizing a work of art, for what is a work of art if not a cultural product. But to read a musical text from a personal or contemporary slant is not to deny the cultural and historical elements that informed its musical production. Eco would argue that “a work of art is a complete and closed form in its uniqueness as a balanced organic whole, while at the same time constituting an open product on account of its susceptibility to countless different interpretations which do not impinge on its unadulterable specificity” (The Role of the Reader, 49). And I would have to agree.

And therein lies the Genius that is Berlioz (although I admit that by calling him thus I am assigning him to the very categories I would wish see done away with). By creating – unwittingly or by design – a work that defies categorization, Berlioz has created the ultimate open text, thus ensuring its permanent relevance. His music, then, is problematic only insofar as we allow it to be. Rather than pull at our hair over the semantics of a description, why not shed our antiquated concept of musical categorization – which has been tried and is not true, and furthermore is simply tired –and embrace Berlioz as a curious entity to be read as your moment dictates? I dare say it’d be more fun that way.

Berlioz – Symphonie Fantastique : Les Images Auditives

2005-10-09T21:17:00.000-05:00

Berlioz – Symphonie Fantastique : Les Images Auditives
Fitzhugh B. Karol – September 25th 2005

Music comes to our ears as sonic ether. Indeed notes and melodies exist as waves in space but we perceive and enjoy them in an entirely less scientific manner. Images and colour appear in sound often just as vividly as they do in painting. The notes of a symphony are painted on the perpetually unfinished canvas of the mind’s eye. These notes are received at once by our combined faculty; auditory vision. A case could be made that all music processes as colour and image but let us look at our poster child case. Let us also stir the cauldron pot of the Witches Sabbath and assume that we the listeners are instead observers and as such subject to all prescribed Freudian and Mulvenian scrutiny. (Joel’s Paper. Delivered 9/22/05) Hector Berlioz painted musically with a personal palate of stirring colour, brushing his fantasies and nightmares into one cinematic masterpiece; Le Symphonie Fantastique.
Just as any artist must be rooted in theory in order to sensibly extrapolate emotion through their medium, Berlioz creates what may have seemed like chaos, from order. It is only from an understanding of rules that a successful abstract representation may be made. A creator must understand the manner in which they go about challenging their respective canon – as Berlioz did.
The images put forth by Berlioz in his phantasmagoric executions’ staging have our eyes as well as ears on the march. Is it too obvious now to mention the dark tonalities and shades of grey lingering like a fog around the scaffold? The blade waits in unhurried suspense at the end of the fourth movement’s visionary scene. Just as “the beloved” idée fixe flitters once from the background of this section the guillotine also has a musical shine to it. How can we not be blinded by the sun’s brief refraction from that heavy blade as it falls? Isn’t it easy to see the growing haze emitted by the underworld’s beckoning horns as the procession rhythmically pounds towards the city’s square? What should we think of Berlioz if he could not have provided us with such vivid landscapes through which to fly? This is programme music and it should show. There is no doubt that Berlioz must have also been influenced by the aesthetic debate of the mid 19th century surrounding realism and the desire to mimic emotions and reality in art.
In examination of this synaesthesia, that is to say, “the production from a sense-impression of one kind of an associated mental image of a sense-impression of another kind.” finding colors and images attached to specific orchestral sounds is in fact quite common. Some composers have even documented their associations between color and key. Just as painters like Kandinsky and Whistler affixed musical titles like, “Nocturne” and “Improvisation” respectively, to their works, Berlioz himself in his Treatise of Instrumentation refers to “colouring the melody.” (Oxford Companion, Ninth Ed. p. 200)
Berlioz the painter seems destined to work in a palate not so soothing to an untrained viewer’s eye. His subject matter becomes increasingly dark and fantastic as his reveries continue. The pith of his confusion and love-worn insanity bears itself in a not so French manner. The traditionally German genre of dark and storm shrouded moors becomes Berlioz’s haunting ground. It wouldn’t surprise to find Nosferatu, Dr. Caligari or any number of early German cinematic characters lurking in the shadows behind the witches of the fifth movement. And so the composition finishes. Brush down.
The beautiful thing about Berlioz’s painting style is that it’s representational and wholly abstract at once. Music is the ultimate abstract art, existing in theory until its’ moment of interaction with the world. The listener as viewer is then provided with what exactly? Is the music actually Berlioz’s image encoded for us to reconstruct provided we have this auditory visual sense? At what point do we become the viewer? These personal judgments make musical mockery of the concrete. Even the most conceptual of visual arts is definite compared the hall where Berlioz’s painting hangs.

Berlioz // Mulvey : Rozen

2005-10-08T15:16:00.000-05:00

In the years since its 1830 début at the Paris Conservatoire, a great many critical knives have been brandished over Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and what its purist detractors might characterize as compositional and harmonic weaknesses. As the paradigm has shifted to modernity, however, formalist rules have simultaneously slackened, in a sea change that has rendered contemporary grievances against the piece if not obsolete, then insufferably conservative sounding and dogmatic. And yet, an aesthetic quandary remains: How might one account for the subtle yet indisputable anxiety experienced by the modern listener when subjected to Berlioz’s masterwork? The listener who, blind to the tonal intricacies of classical form, can only rely on the composer’s narrative imprint to steer him through the symphony?

In a restricted amount of space, this brief essay intends to lay out the theoretical groundwork for a more elaborate psychoanalytic assessment of the listener’s grief. Drawing from the discursive models (but not verbatim premises) of heterosexual desire established by Freud in his Three Essays on Sexuality – and later implemented by Laura Mulvey to describe cinematic coding in her "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" – it will identify the Symphony fantastique as a purveyor of sensual confusion and, by extension, a catalyst for a certain unconscious, psychosexual crisis.

For the benefit of the argument, two preliminary relationships must be examined: 1) that of the spectator with any visual representation, and 2) that of the listener with music. Freud asserts “ego libido” as one of the heterosexual male’s attempts to differentiate himself from the female other, an unconscious pleasure instrumental to his sexual maturation. From this, Mulvey extrapolates a masculine dependence on visual codes – that is, men must see sexual disparity in order to rationalize their attraction to women. Citing the symbolic fear of castration Freud had once attributed to all men, she attempts to classify the psychological pleasure they experience at the cinema or before any narrative visual representation, where the spectator’s aggressive gaze serves as a buffering agent against the subjective threat posed by the woman as visual icon. If this account is to be taken seriously, it stands to reason that the visual medium aids the spectator (male or female) in overcoming the psychic threats engendered by the female presence.

Exploring the ways in which a visual narrative might work against such neuroses, Freud recognizes two avenues of escape. Fetishistic scopophilia represents a summation of the viewer’s isolated pleasure in looking at woman. In addition to isolating man from woman, scopophilia is interpreted by Mulvey as a worshipping impulse, a wishful substitution of the female image for the lost phallus. The second, which confers to the male viewer a more voyeuristic role, finds a correlation between visual narrativity and sadism, for as the female image is “investigated” by the viewer, an implicit subtext of guilt is projected onto the female icon. Alluding to classical narrative, Mulvey senses a trend in the masculine spectator’s desire to “ascertain [the female icon’s] guilt, and then subjugate [her] through punishment or forgiveness” – a thematic construct exploited to mixed effect, for instance, by the Romantic movement. Thus, the narrative thread of the story enables the viewer to derive sadistic pleasure from a visually enacted exculpation.

If Mulvey’s interpretation of the visual would seem to endow the heterosexual male viewer with disproportionate primacy over a passive (female) image, perhaps extrapolating sexual meaning from a converse sense would rectify the imbalance. In her article, “Music as a Gendered Discourse,” Susan McClary traces the semiotics of music over several centuries, only to discover a longstanding – though entirely arbitrary – tradition in the West of feminizing aural representation. Predicating her theory on the historical dominance of male musicians during the classical period, McClary blames little more than their arch reactionism (i.e. fear of “seeming effeminate”) for the sexual metaphor. However, she succeeds at problematizing this fallacy by challenging the notion of the aural as a differentiating mechanism similar in function to the visual. In turn, the ramifications of this theoretical shift have paved the way for a modern re-assessment of female representation in music – with the psychoanalytic equivalent to Mulvey’s visual-narrative work still constituting uncharted terrain.

Nevertheless, the implications are clear: Whereas the visual pleasure in narrative cinema suggests the discourse of a determining, masculine gaze on the passive female image, its counterpart, the aural pleasure in narrative music (“symphony” perhaps better completing the analogy), might have just the reverse effect. By McClary’s logic, the aural pleasure to be derived from the symphony would appear to stem from the listener’s passive desire to be differentiated as the external other – or, to put it bluntly, penetrated – by a masculine sound. This gendered interpretation of the symphony–listener dynamic would likely have infuriated Berlioz’s more sensitive contemporaries, many of whom preferred to regard their craft as virile ascendancy over sound, but nearly two centuries later, psychoanalysis would evoke a schism of the senses: a determining eye with no mention of a determining ear.

With the unconscious in mind, it is no wonder that the Symphonie fantastique would present the listener with a confused map of conflicting sexual codes. A narrator in the grand cinematic tradition, Berlioz partitioned his “movie” into five epic, imagistic scenes. His hero (or “alter-ego”), the “young musician of morbid sensibility and ardent imagination,” also serves a perfect ego libido for the spectator, the narratival trope of sexual romanticism (“uneasiness of mind, aimless passion”) yielding numerous opportunities for the viewer’s self-projection. As Mulvey would have it, the feminine icon (his “object of adoration”) is introduced almost immediately in the first movement as an apparition, an idée fixe – for there is no point to the turbulent tale without at least a measure of sadism – and the rest of the plot locks into place.

In a whimsical, waltzing interlude, she appears again, lingering quietly and luring him out of the ballroom and into a third movement. For all its fanciful pedantry, the “Pastoral Scene” imparts little more than Berlioz’s flair for the sentimentalist cliché: Signifying escape into a feminine realm of nature, the oboe/English horn pas-de-deux conjures the vixen's impulse to divert her Werther’s mannish, urbane good sense – if only for a little while – and seduce him between the trees.

But retribution is imminent, for in a fourth scene’s “March to Execution,” he dreams he has killed the strumpet, and – in a final, mordant juxtaposition of D flat and G minor chords – the figurative castration has been ideated. The final curtain, an apotheosis set in hell, can be the only possible dénouement to this grim fable: as the ego libido contemplates the death of its other, a Witches’ Sabbath begins to brew. As the composer choreographs it, “the Beloved Melody enters again, but she has lost her noble modesty and has become a vulgar dance-tune.” Her role, this time assumed by an E flat clarinet understudy and now an unbecoming foil for the Dies Irae, is officially that of the temptress – a stunning validation of the hero’s sexual anxieties.

This would all make for great cinema in the Freudian sense; the signifiers are all in place. What is missing is the spectacle. Even without its mise-en-scène, the work attempts to encourage the passive listener to dominate and “gaze upon” the music as he would a visual narrative. Berlioz’s audience is thereby psychically placed in a very difficult position, at the locus of two divergent discourses, to the discomfiting end that neither can be fully appreciated.

Taking it to Eleven

2005-10-06T20:02:00.000-05:00

Loud, hyperbolic, and at times frustrating, the ending of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony has provoked a range of responses from critics over the centuries. Where E. T. A. Hoffman heard “bright, blazing flames”, Ludwig Spohr heard only “empty noise”. The luminous imagery of the former interpretation invokes the idea of the Romantic sublime, the contact with the infinite that heroic art, and most especially heroic music, can give the audience. Once can certainly see this in the finale, the booming C chords of which provide a fitting counterweight to the symphony’s famous opening motive. Hoffman’s interpretation of Beethoven operates within the dominant interpretative strategy of his time, Romantic criticism. I emphasize this because the reception of the finale has changed greatly since its premiere as the musical episteme has changed from one age to the next. We listen to music not only vertically—for depth of meaning—but also horizontally, approaching any given work from with a particular interpretative strategy. In this essay, I argue for a listening of Beethoven under the criteria for experiencing the popular music of our time: rock ‘n’ roll.

After the age of Romanticism, the ostentatious ending of the Fifth Symphony became ripe for parody. Eric Satie, himself a symbol of the anti-Romantic French art scene during the turn of the century, parodied the finale’s multiple endings in his 1913 piano piece “Embryons desséchés.”
The light and witty piece ends with a monstrously grand ending of cadences and repetitions of the I chord that take explicit aim at the end of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. Though Satie criticizes the Fifth Symphony’s grand finale, he does not do so by joining Spohr and calling it noise devoid of content. Rather, Satie rejects its content just as it was understood by critics like Romantic critics like Hoffman because of his anti-Romantic approach to art.

I cannot help but hear ending of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony with the ears of some one raised in the age of rock music. The symphony’s finale certainly offers a lot in the way of rock ‘n’ roll. The use of trombones, the signifiers of the underworld in Beethoven’s time, invokes the kind of triumphant Satanism so key to rock mythology. More importantly, however, the trombones turn the music “up to eleven”, providing the kind of volume that is prerequisite for truly rocking out.

Syncopation is used prominently from measure 322 through the Presto at 367, and syncopated parts of the flutes and violins, respectively, have two-note grace notes leading up to their off beats, which brings to mind the note bending sloppiness essential to rock performance. The finale 60 bars of the symphony consist entirely of the orchestra vamping on C major with several V to I cadences thrown in, demonstrating the harmonic sophistication of your average rock and, more importantly, the rock ‘n’ roll ethic of playing what sounds good for as long as you can, as loud as you can. There are many great rock songs that consist mostly extended endings—“Hey Jude”, “Free Bird”, and “The End” from Abbey Road all come to mind. The symphony final is powerful and almost tastelessly loud, and more importantly, it is about being loud. As a rock and roller, I embrace the finale precisely for the same reasons critics like Spohr have rejected it.

Enjoyable though it may be, this rock ‘n’ roller’s take on Beethoven has its limitations. Such an interpretation is at a loss to describe the expressive subtleties of the symphony and is largely oblivious to the theoretical richness of the piece. Yet, I believe that judging high art by the criteria of popular idioms can yield great benefits to the extent that, as in the finale of the Fifth Symphony, the art lends itself to such evaluation. A rock ‘n’ roll listening gives the modern listener a way to enjoy Beethoven’s music in the age of irony, when the excesses and naïveté of the Romantic vision so easily lends itself to parody. The critical standpoint of the rock ‘n’ roll generation vulgarizes the lofty ambitions of the Fifth Symphony, but only through this vulgarization can a popular audience accept the piece’s grandiosity in this day and age. For a rock ‘n’ roll listening of a Romantic work to be valid, I have to oppose the hierarchized approach to listening implied in Fetis’s musings on instrumental music, since the criteria of rock ‘n’ roll privilege the sensual and dispense with much of the need for “artistic insight”. If we allow for a plurality of critical standpoints, rather than think of listening as a hierarchical process in which particular kinds of technical knowledge are directly correlated to the listener’s ability to understand a piece, we will find more possible meanings in music and enjoy of music more overall.

elective affinities

2005-10-01T13:02:00.000-05:00

The term "elective relationships" appears in the translation of an excerpt from Wagner's Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft [1850), found in Oliver Strunk's Source Readings in Music HIstory (NY, Norton, 1950), p. 888. This is almost certainly a translation of the term Wahlverwandschaften, which was the title of an 1809 novel by Goethe. The term may well come up in future readings as well. Here are two short definitions of the concept. The first is from the description of a recent conference at the University of Pennsylvania:

Our title has been borrowed from Goethe's 1809 novel Elective Affinities . In the novel, the chemical term “elective affinities” extends to human relationships, both intimate and political. Like the alkalis and acids of which Goethe's characters speak, words and images, though apparently opposed, may have a remarkable affinity for one another. At the same time, as one of the characters in the book objects, such affinities are problematic, and “are only really interesting when they bring about separations.”
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/affinities/

The second was written some years ago as an informal response to my request for a definition. Its author is Ruth Ann Crowley, who received her Ph.D. in German studies from Stanford in the 1970s and remains one of the most brilliant people I have ever known:

Wahlverwandschaften:

In Goethe’s work it’s a term borrowed from chemistry to account for the attraction between certain individuals. The use of natural forces (magnetism, which merged with hypnotism in some manifestations, think of mesmer; or here, what Goethe called chemistry, if I recall, but what we would call a kind of particle physics, probably) to account for human behavior--getting at an elemental, subrational, occult cause of behavior--as prevalent in the Romantic period. I think ‘elective affinity’ is commonly used to mean a strong preference that conveys something about the chooser’s occult self.

A Nietzschian Look at Berlioz

2005-09-29T15:57:00.000-05:00

Lizzie Vieh
MU0132
9-29-05

Opposing Elements in Symphonie Fantastique
If there is one thing that music critics disagree about more vehemently than the musical merits of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, then it is surely the wisdom of including a narrative program to accompany it. Critics react violently to the program, either lauding it as an innovative way of combining music and narrative, or condemning it as a defilement of pure instrumental music, a tacking on of useless words that music in its purest essence neither needs nor benefits from. The general trend in criticism runs toward two extremes: either the program restricts the power of the music by limiting the listener’s imagination to Berlioz’s written images, or the program rescues the music from obscurity and chaos by giving the audience a series of images to make sense of an otherwise chaotic, unmelodious score. Debating the simple pros and cons of the program seems irrelevant though, when one looks at the larger artistic question posed by its inclusion in Berlioz’s work. How does the program change the essential nature of the musical presentation? Does its inclusion fundamentally alter the nature of the symphony, transforming it from instrumental music to a new hybrid form of music and the written word? And if so, why does this new form seem, in the opinion of critics such as Pierre Boulez, so woefully unsatisfying and incomplete?
Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy provides a template to attack these questions. His theories of the dualistic realms of art help explain why the Symphonie Fantastique provokes such violent reactions, and why, in many ways, it doesn’t live up to its potential.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche proposes that all art can be classified into the opposite yet complementary realms of two Greek gods: Apollo and Dionysus. Apollo, the god of light and prophecy, presides over art that is associated with visible forms, images, and rational knowledge. His influence is strongest in the plastic representational arts of painting, sculpture, architecture, and epic poetry. Apollonian art emphasizes the distinct moral individual and the power of knowledge and beauty. Dionysian art, on the other hand, is concerned with that which is formless: namely, music. As the god of wine and frenzy, Dionysus is associated with the dissolution of individuals into an essential, primordial Unity. Because it is neither rational nor representational, music is the supreme Dionysian art. It is not “understood” in the traditional sense of the word, but felt on a deep essential level that is older and more profound than anything humans create in the plastic, Appolonian world.
Nietzsche proposes that Greek tragedy represents the pinnacle of human art in that it finds a balance between the Dionysian and Appolonian elements. I would propose that through its synthesis of Dionysian music and Appolonian writing, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique strives toward a similar union, but one which is ultimate unbalanced and imperfect.
If one listens to the Symphonie Fantastique without any knowledge of who wrote it or what it is about, the experience is similar to hearing a person scream in a foreign language. Something powerful and deeply emotional is happening, but the listener can only feel it and cannot in any way attach a specific meaning to it. In this way, Berlioz’s symphony is highly Dionysian. It resonates on a primal level that neither images nor narrative can penetrate. But this state of emotion is artistically unsatisfying. The average listener needs to see something, needs to identify in some way with the music, in order to appreciate it on a rational level. Here is where the program tries to insert some Appolonian aid. Berlioz throws his program to the audience like a sailor throwing a life raft into dark, impenetrable waters. Unfortunately, his life raft doesn’t extend far enough to rescue those who are truly “drowning” in the sea of his music, and it only infuriates the Dionysian listeners who relish swimming in his choppy emotional waters.
Berlioz’s attempt to produce a unified piece of art is admirable to be sure, but predictably fails to satisfy many listeners due to the restrictive modern conventions that relegate music to one realm and the written word to another.

Music is Visual

2005-09-28T22:19:00.000-05:00

Music, in performance, is a type of sculpture. The air in the performance is sculpted into something.

-Frank Zappa

Perhaps some of you have come across this quote in your past musical wanderings. I recall it seemed quite life affirming at one point - now I just like it.

Brahms's First Symphony and September 11, 2001

2005-09-25T20:13:00.000-05:00

Here is a beautiful piece of writing about a piece of music. The writer is Bernard Holland of the New York Times; the music is Brahms's First Symphony. It is as far from a blow-by-blow description as one could get. And yet it captures the quality of the temporal flow of that work; and for anyone familiar with the transition to the last movement of that symphony, Holland's analysis of its effect could not be more precise.

Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

September 15, 2001 Saturday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section B; Column 5; Arts & Ideas/Cultural Desk; Pg. 11

LENGTH: 854 words

HEADLINE: CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK;
As Brahms Goes By: It's Oddly Comforting

BYLINE: By BERNARD HOLLAND

BODY:

As television viewers surfed from one disaster coverage to the next on
Tuesday, they might have come across a performance of a Brahms symphony in
midswing. The juxtaposition was startling, the shock palpable. At one moment,
experience of the world seemed to spread exponentially: questions breeding more
questions, anxieties unresolved and trailing away into new anxieties. With three
measures of music, indeterminacy and the unknown condensed suddenly into a
small, dense, unreal ball of certainty. Brahms in the midst of exploding
buildings was gloriously irrelevant, a foreign world. One could not bear, or
afford, to dwell on it and so surfed on. Yet to know that it had been there was
comforting.

Music's relation to good and evil is misunderstood, because at heart
there is no relation at all. People can write moral messages and set them to the
music. People can surround music with stage pictures and come up with deeply
ethical operas like "Fidelio." But no matter how much we want to associate our
favorite art with the best instincts of humanity, the person who helps the old
lady across the street will be no more genuinely moved by a Haydn string quartet
than the person who kicks her into the gutter and steals her purse. It's not the
kind of thing we want to hear, but this is a time for clearheadedness.

In ancient times, pop tunes shared scurrilous doggerel and the most holy of
biblical texts. SS officers wept at the beauties of the Schubert C major
Quintet. Dreadful men like Richard Wagner composed some of the most
soul-stirring music. Virtue has no lock on musical beauty.

So how do we explain the shock of this interloping fragment of Brahms? It did
not endorse good nor did it reject evil, but for a moment it fundamentally
rearranged our minds. In the turmoil around us, there had been shady beginnings
and no ends in sight. Situations changed minute to minute. Here was the process
of life itself contracted and multiplied in intensity but in the end the story
of us all. We essentially dangle through life. Our control over it is illusory.
We have little idea of where we go or what will befall us. French executioners
until recent times crept sock-footed along death row, startling the condemned in
their cells and dragging them out. How different are our own deaths from this?

Those few moments of televised Brahms dangled as well, but with a difference.
Sonata form is essentially the struggle to reconcile opposing forces, but this
particular struggle was well under way as we tuned in. We did not hear where
these several chords came from or where they would end. But in another way we
did. We knew the piece, had heard it hundreds of times, so that superimposed on
the uncertainty of the moment was also the knowledge that everything would turn
out well. What so startled the listener in this moment of turmoil was to come
across something that would end in a way already known to us.

People have been asking "What is art?" for a long time, but here is a modest
proposal. Art is our small, fragile claim to control over our lives. Terrorism
offered us only uncertainty. Brahms brought the chill of uncertainty soothed by
the knowledge of an outcome. Aristotle's dictum -- that art has a beginning, a
middle and an end -- may sound simple-minded, but it is deeply profound. No
statement ever penetrated to the significance of a novel, a painting or tone
poem more efficiently.

The artist plays god, and "play" is the significant word. For the artist in
us is also the child, and the Brahms First Symphony is one of the games that is
played. Suddenly creation is in our hands. We are the authors of our own Big
Bang. We line up the experiences along the way, and it is our will that brings
things to a stop. Outside the studio (or the playpen) time drags us helplessly
along; the composer manipulates the clock at will. In the bigger view of things,
the artist's effort to give limits to what we see and hear is ephemeral. The
Brahms First is a toy we have made. Once it leaves our ears, we have no more
control over our fates than we did before it started. Art may not change the
world, but for a few minutes at least it makes us feel good.

If we use different words, music may after all have some of the moral
qualities we want so much to assign it. Change "good-evil" to "order-disorder"
and the proximity starts to narrow. Think of your body, for example, in terms of
political virtue. We remain healthy so long as our livers and kidneys function
as the orderly bureaucrats they are trained to be. Disturb their routines, and
you are in trouble. Spray paint a Braque painting, and again you have replaced a
calculated plan with chaos. Bomb a city, and the equation of evil with disorder
becomes even closer.

This is what that fragment of Brahms said to us. Heard in peaceful times, it
would have been one more reassurance that God is in his Heaven and everything
below will be all right. What surrounded Brahms on that day, I am afraid, made
its solace real but fleeting. Music is a form of protective gear against sudden
violent death. It is thin and penetrable, but it may be all we have.

URL: http://www.nytimes.com

GRAPHIC: Photo: Johannes Brahms (Camera Press)

LOAD-DATE: September 15, 2001

Wagner's Tannhäuser scandal in Paris

2005-09-25T19:43:00.000-05:00

In the Norton Critical Score of Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, (NY, 1985, p. 32), Robert Bailey mentions the scandalous three performances of the revised version of Wagner's Tannhäuser that appeared in Paris, 1861. Below are two versions of what happened. The first, very short one, is the way in which that scandal is usually described today. (Surprisingly, this particular version was written by Andrew Lloyd Webber as background information related to his Phantom of the Opera.) The second, longer one, is part of a still longer account given by a man who actually attended the Paris premiere in his youth.

http://www.thephantomoftheopera.com/the_show_history_paris_opera.asp

"The Show / The Paris Opera House"

By Andrew Lloyd Webber, September 1986
Key also to Paris formula was the ballet. This was usually at the start of Act III. The gentlemen could dine before arriving at the theater in time to see their various young ladies in the corps de ballet. Wagner's Tannhauser caused uproar with the Jockey Club because its ballet was placed too early in the production for their members' convenience.

http://users.belgacom.net/wagnerlibrary/articles/ne0404.htm

Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris, 1861
By Edward H. House

New England Magazine
Volume 4 Issue 4
Pages 411-427
Published in 1891

Original Page Images at Cornell University Library

I was early in my seat on the fated night, and watched attentively the gathering of the audience. It did not appear to differ in character from those I had seen at the rehearsals, though it was slower in arriving, and when the opening bars of the overture sounded, the house was only two-thirds filled. But the adverse element was undoubtedly in force from the beginning. The box habitually retained by the young furies of the Jockey Club, close upon the stage, at the left of the spectators, was crowded. In earlier years it had been known as "la loge infernale," and on this evening it proudly sustained the ancient character. The overture was passed by in silence, or at least with so few manifestations of disfavor as to cause no interruption. Before it was finished, the vacant spaces were all occupied, and the assemblage was ready for its work. The curtain rose, and, almost simultaneously with the first notes that followed, the assault began. Before the introductory scene was half through, the uproar had reached such a height that the actors upon the stage and the orchestra in front were alike inaudible except to those who sat nearest the proscenium. There was not even a pretence of waiting to form an opinion. The order of battle was laid out on a more destructive scale. "Tannhäuser" was not to be deliberately condemned; it was simply not to be endured. What qualities it possessed, lofty or degraded, noble [426] or vicious, the Parisians were not to learn. If any, by chance, desired to acquire that knowledge, it was the will of the majority that they should not do so. And thus the performance proceeded, or was supposed to proceed, revealing nothing but a succession of fine scenery and a mass of picturesque costume. While these passed in unintelligible show before the public eye, the public ear received only a continuous cacophony of shrieks, howls, shouts, and groans, diversified by imitations of wild beasts which would have blushed at the brutality of those who mimicked their cries, and stimulated incessantly by aristocratic ruffians in the conspicuous boxes, whose favorite instruments of offence were huge keys, by means of which they filled the air with hissing shrillness, like so many whistling devils. It was a pitiable business,—infinitely more disgraceful to those who actively participated than to any who suffered by it. Further details would serve no good purpose. The chief incidents are recorded in French lyrical annals, but I imagine that those who once gloried in them would now be very willing to sink them in oblivion.

An interesting inquiry into the causes of the "scandal" appeared, soon after Wagner's death, in a leading American magazine, in the course of which it was intimated that the opera was so badly performed as to justify in some degree the angry violence of the audience. I do not think this charge can be seriously sustained, nor do I see, indeed, how any evidence in support of it could possibly be produced. I doubt if any individual ever was in a position to say whether "Tannhäuser" was well or ill interpreted, because not a bar of it could be heard. No living soul knew anything about it. At the rehearsals—at least those which I heard, and which were practically, though not nominally, public performances,—there was certainly no ground of complaint. And if the amateurs of the French metropolis attended in an honestly critical spirit, prepared to pronounce judgment with integrity, the question arises,—why did they carry with them those remarkably constructed door-keys, which, at that or any other period, constituted no portion of the personal adornment of the fashionable gandin? The truth is, that the work was foredoomed,—condemned to ignominy and outrage, because the composer was hated. The rancor was so pronounced that I believe the victim would have suffered bodily injury, as well as vicarious insult, if the wildest of the mob could have laid hands on him. I hardly ventured to look toward the box where I fancied he might be; though when I did turn in that direction, his face was not to be seen. Exactly where he passed that evening of torment I do not know, but it was my fortune to meet him once again, for the briefest moment and for the last time. After the curtain had finally fallen, I went out slowly with the crowd, and turned homeward, taking a course which led me by the large courtyard upon which the back of the theatre opened. As I waited, with a companion, to look at the brilliant toilettes of those privileged dames who were permitted to make a speedy and easy exit by this private way, I beheld the composer hastily crossing the area, toward the gate by which I stood. He opened the door of a vehicle in which a lady was already seated, but before entering, turned sharp around and held out his hand, which I took without speaking a word. Deeply agitated by indignation and compassion, I knew that my voice would fail me. He also was silent, but to my surprise, his countenance betrayed no strong emotion, nor was his expression perceptibly different from that which he had worn on the other occasions of our meeting. As well as I could observe, there was the same patient, engaging smile, with the air of partial abstraction which always conveyed the impression that his imagination was straying beyond or above the realities of the immediate hour. That was my farewell to Richard Wagner. In another moment he entered his carriage, and was driven rapidly away. How little I pretend to know of the man himself, those who have followed me in this reminiscence will understand; but as I recall his unchanging aspect and demeanor in the several interviews, the quiet graciousness and the serene composure which [427] governed his speech and action, even to the trying end, it would require stronger evidence than I have yet discovered, to persuade me that these, rather than a petulant irritability and a vainglorious intolerance, were not the most trustworthy and genuine manifestations of his real nature.

Ph

Boulez on Wagner and the English horn

2005-09-20T00:04:00.000-05:00

On p. 222 of the English translation of his book Orientations (Harvard UP 1986),Boulez closes his discussion of Berlioz with the ingenious idea that the use of the English horn (a pastoral instrument) in the third movement of the Symphonie fantastique forms a link between Beethoven's Sixth ("Pastoral") symphony (the concert tradition) and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde (the theater tradition). The latter reference is to the use of the English horn immediately after the the prelude that opens Act III. Here are two short references to that moment in Wagner's opera:

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2005/Aug05/Wagner_tristan_5580062.htm

Act III opens with one of the darkest and most spectacularly despondent performances of the Prelude I have heard. The sense of desolation is palpable

review of recording
Richard WAGNER (1813-1883)
Tristan und Isolde (1865)
Nina Stemme (sop) ... Isolde
Plácido Domingo (ten) ... Tristan

review by Mark Bridle;

and from a complete libretto:

http://www.impresario.ch/libretto/libwagtri_e.htm

[after prelude of Act III]
Tristan lies asleep on a couch in the shade of a great lime tree: he is stretched out as if lifeless. At his head sits Kurvenal, bending over him in grief and listening intently to his breathing. The sound of a shepherd's pipe, sad and yearning, is heard.

[shepherd then talks to Kurvenal about Tristan]

Boulez on Mallarmé

2005-09-19T23:56:00.000-05:00

Pierre Boulez, on p. 217 of the English translation of his book Orientations (Harvard UP 1986) refers to the French poet Mallarmé,and to Mallarmé's poem,
“Un Coup de dés." (The full title of the poem could be translated thus: A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.") Here is a small clarifying reference to that poem:

[from The World Book, 1983):

“His last poem, “Un Coup de dés jamais abolira le hasard” (1897) , expresses the confrontation between the chaos of the universe (le hasard) and the desire of people to shape their own destiny (le coup de dés).´(Anna Balakian)

tovey's background

2005-09-19T23:49:00.000-05:00

Here is a bit of usseful background on Tovey, from the online version of the New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd ed.):

http://www.grovemusic.com/index.html?authstatuscode=200

In July 1914 he was appointed to the Reid Chair of Music at Edinburgh University, which to some extent resolved the conflict that had gradually been developing between his various activities. But he never came to regard himself as a scholar, disliked the company of mere musicologists, and looked upon most of his writings as the work of a popularizer. In 1914–15 he promoted a series of historical concerts at the university and in 1917 he founded the Reid Orchestra which soon played and has continued to play a notable part in the musical life of the city. It was for the Reid concerts that the extensive series of programme notes were written which subsequently achieved a more permanent form as Essays in Musical Analysis (1935–9). The penetrating insight of many of these essays gives some idea of his qualities as a teacher, for which he was revered by his pupils. Teaching, lecturing and editorial work consumed most of his time after World War I, but he appeared as a pianist in the USA in 1925 and in 1927–8 and performed in Edinburgh with many of the finest executants of the time whom he numbered among his friends – Joachim, Casals, Suggia, the Buschs, Jelly d'Arányi, Julius Röntgen and others. However, the Edinburgh public took comparatively little notice of the opportunities he created for such artists to be heard.

MICHAEL TILMOUTH/R

[R means + editorial revision]

Another view of Romanticism

2005-09-16T06:37:00.000-05:00

What struck me in the passage below was a view of Romanticism that I do not remember
seeing in any account of musical Romanticism. I include the context of the reference to Romanticism here in order to give you a sense of the impression it made on me when I first read it.

Source:
Ian Buruma, “Lost in Translation: The two minds of Bernard Lewis”
(under “The Critics: Books”)
The New Yorker , June 14 & 21, 2004, p. 190:

“Thus it is not really the masses—who would presumably love to be liberated by the United States—but the fundamentalist leaders who are enraged. So, of course, are some of the Christian fundamentalists waiting for Armageddon on our own television screens. In fact, the war on modernity, often associated with the Jews, or the West, or the United States, goes back centuries. German Romanticism, which later curdled into a murderous ideology, began as a reaction to the French Enlightenment, whose ideals were promoted with armed force by Napoleon’s Grande Armée. Nineteenth-century Slavophiles in Russia resisted the modern ideas of the Westernizers and extolled the Russian soul. German Fascists in the nineteen-thirties denounced ‘Americanism.’ Japanese chauvinists in the forties embraced the idea that Japan was fighting a holy war against the wicked West.
Islamist extremists, it is plausible to conclude, have been drinking from that same poisoned well. Lewis rightly points out that their targets are the secular, corrupt, and oppressive governments in the Arab world, as well as the more enticing symbols of the West."

Berlioz's confidence & George Bernard Shaw on style

2005-09-15T06:17:00.000-05:00

Here are two tiny excerpts from texts included in the Norton Critical edition of Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (ed. Edward Cone), p. 282:

From Mendelssohn (a letter to his mothr dated March 15, 1831:
"And when you see the composer himself, that friendly, quiet, meditative person, calmly and assuredly going his way, never for a moment in doubt of his vocation, unable to listen to any outside voice, since he wishes to follow only his inner inspiration, when you see how keenly and correctly he evaluates and recognizes everything, yet is in complete darkness about himself--it is unspeakably dreadful, and I cannot express how deeply the sight of him depresses me. I have not been able to work for two days."

Aaron Copland (from "Berlioz Today," in
Copland on Music, 1960--the article 1st appeared in 1960.) The passage in question appears on p. 298 of the Norton Critical Edition:

"Berlioz was undoubtedly influenced by Beethoven's evocation of nature, but his special genius led to the introduction of what amounted to a new genre--the theatric-symphonic--and there was nothing tentative about the introduction."

Now compare a famous definition of style given by George Bernard Shaw. I have found a web reference to it but have not yet tracked down the original published source:

http://mynptv.org/musicFeat/composer/cmhandel.html#top

HANDEL'S CREATIVE PERSONALITY

The nature of Handel's music is confident, deft in drama and characterization, and directly expressive. In terms of Baroque style, which focuses on establishing a single affects per movement of a work, Handel's genius is unquestioned, although by later standards his works are sometimes seem lengthy through repetitive insistence on basic musical ideas.

Although it was written in the bad old days when only a few of Handel's works were known, words by George Bernard Shaw remain one of the greatest tributes to Handel's genius and insightful penetrations of the essence of Handel's style:

It was from Handel that I learned that style consists in force of assertion. If you can say a thing with one stroke unanswerably you have style; if not, you are at best a marchand de plaisir; a decorative litterateur, or a musical confectioner, or a painter of fans with cupids and cocottes. Handel has this power. When he sets the words "Fixed in his everlasting seat," the atheist is struck dumb; God is there, fixed in his everlasting seat by Handel, even if you live in an Avenue Paul Bert and despise such superstitions. You may despise what you like, but you cannot contradict Handel. All the sermons of Bossuet could not convince Grimm that God existed. The four bars in which Handel finally affirms "the Everlasting Father, the Prince of Peace," would have struck Grimm into the gutter, as by a thunderbolt. When he tells you that when the Israelites went out of Egypt, "there was not one feeble person in all their tribes," it is utterly useless for you to plead that there must have been at least one case of influenza. Handel will not have it: "There was not one, not one feeble person in all their tribes," and the orchestra repeats it in curt, smashing chords that leave you speechless

heinrich schenker, miles davis, & technical knowledge

2005-09-15T05:58:00.000-05:00

Here is a passage from Heinrich Schenker, included in the Norton Critical edition of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony (ed. Elliot Forbes), p.171. (Original source is Der Tonwille, I (1921) (27-37).

"How happy the listener would be if he could share with the master his long-range hearing, and tgavel and soar with him over distant paths! If only he could! Then his fear that better hearing might encroach somewhat on his pleasure would give way to rapture."

And here is a quote from Miles Davis's Autobiography [full cite to
be added--I believe the page is 61]:

"Another thing I found strange after living and playing in New York was that a lot of black musicians didn’t know anything about music theory. Bud Powell was one of the few musicians I knew who could play, write and read all kinds of music. A lot of the old guys thought that if you went to school it would make you play like you were white. Or, if you learned something from theory, you would lose the feeling in your playing. I couldn’t believe that all them guys like Bird, Prez, Bean [Coleman Hawkins], all them cats wouldn’t go to museums or libraries and borrow those musical scores by all those great composers, like Stravinsky. Alban Berg, Prokofiev. I wanted to see what was going on in all of music. Knowledge is freedom and ignorance is slavery, and I just couldn’t believe someone could be that close to freedom and not take advantage of it. I have never understood why black people didn’t take advantage of all the shit they can. It’s like a ghetto mentality telling people they aren’t supposed to do certain things, that those things are only reserved for white people.”

Berlioz, "Bloksberg scene" in Goethe's Faust

2005-09-13T06:38:00.000-05:00

This reference, which puzzled me, appears on p. 65 of Berlioz's book, "A Critical Study of Beethoven's symphonies."
Here is a site that offers an explanation:

http://www.harryprice.co.uk/Famous%20Cases/brockenbyharryprice.htm

esp.

Goethe made an intensive study of magic and witchcraft, and his classical scene of the Walpurgisnacht in Faust has done much to immortalise his 'divine comedy'. That Goethe studied the original of the Bloksberg Tryst is almost certain, as several correspondences between the old MS. and the Walpurgisnacht are apparent.
-------------------------------------

(The Walpurgisnacht scene is a famous depiction of a sexual orgy, staged to tempt Faust--the only thing I understood in a performance of Faust, Part 1, that I saw years ago in Austria. Below is a short description.)
-------------------------------------

http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/arts/al0117.html

The temptations the devil offers Faust are three: gluttony, lust, and power. The carousing with students in Auerbach's pub in Leipzig . . . a traditional Faustus motif Goethe retained . . . only bores Faust, so Mephistopheles realizes he must resort to stronger stuff: sex. Here too there are three facets. Faust is tempted first with Gretchen, who represents the epitome of pure, innocent German maidenhood, then with raw lust at its most orgiastic in the Walpurgisnacht scene, when the devil holds his annual conclave with all his witches . . . a motif Goethe borrows from German folklore . . . and lastly with Helen of Troy, the epitome of classical beauty, whose shade Faust conjures up from Hades. Faust rejects the debauch with the witches; he is not so crude as to be gotten at by such means. But with Gretchen and Helen it is a different story, and Mephisto almost succeeds. "Almost" because it is not only lust that consumes Faust.

tovey, robert louis stevenson, and beethoven

2005-09-12T19:35:00.000-05:00

Here (at least temporarily) is an excerpt from The Ebb Tide, a work that Tovey says
made the "destiny" theme of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony especially famous. According to the following website
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/rlsteven.htm
The Ebb Tide was a novel written in 1894 (the year Stevenson died), condemning European colonialism. Tovey's reference to this work appears in the Norton Critical Edition of Beethoven's Fifth, p. 143.

EXCERPT FOLLOWS (I almost ended it at "Providence"!):

http://www.sharebook.co.kr/stevenson/ebtid10.htm

Chapter 3. THE OLD CALABOOSE - DESTINY AT THE DOOR

'Have a weed,' said Davis. 'It's all in the bill.'

'What is up?' asked Herrick.

The captain fell suddenly grave. 'I'm coming to that,' said he.
'I want to speak with Herrick here. You, Hay--or Huish, or
whatever your name is--you take a weed and the other bottle,
and go and see how the wind is down by the purao. I'll call you
when you're wanted!'

'Hay? Secrets? That ain't the ticket,' said Huish.

'Look here, my son,' said the captain, 'this is business, and
don't you make any mistake about it. If you're going to make
trouble, you can have it your own way and stop right here. Only
get the thing right: if Herrick and I go, we take the beer.
Savvy?'

'Oh, I don't want to shove my oar in,' returned Huish. 'I'll
cut right enough. Give me the swipes. You can jaw till you're
blue in the face for what I care. I don't think it's the friendly
touch: that's all.' And he shambled grumbling out of the cell
into the staring sun.

The captain watched him clear of the courtyard; then turned
to Herrick.

'What is it?' asked Herrick thickly.

'I'll tell you,' said Davis. 'I want to consult you. It's a
chance we've got. What's that?' he cried, pointing to the music
on the wall.

'What?' said the other. 'Oh, that! It's music; it's a phrase of
Beethoven's I was writing up. It means Destiny knocking at the
door.'

'Does it?' said the captain, rather low; and he went near and
studied the inscription; 'and this French?' he asked, pointing to
the Latin.

'O, it just means I should have been luckier if I had died at
horne,' returned Herrick impatiently. 'What is this business?'

'Destiny knocking at the door,' repeated the captain; and
then, looking over his shoulder. 'Well, Mr Herrick, that's about
what it comes to,' he added.

'What do you mean? Explain yourself,' said Herrick.

But the captain was again staring at the music. 'About how
long ago since you wrote up this truck?' he asked.

'What does it matter?' exclaimed Herrick. 'I dare say half an
hour.'

'My God, it's strange!' cried Davis. 'There's some men would
call that accidental: not me. That--' and he drew his thick
finger under the music--'that's what I call Providence.'

'You said we had a chance,' said Herrick.

'Yes, SIR!' said the captain, wheeling suddenly face to face
with his companion. 'I did so. If you're the man I take you for,
we have a chance.'

'I don't know what you take me for,' was the reply. 'You can
scarce take me too low.'

'Shake hands, Mr Herrick,' said the captain. 'I know you.
You're a gentleman and a man of spirit. I didn't want to speak
before that bummer there; you'll see why. But to you I'll rip it
right out. I got a ship.'

'A ship?' cried Herrick. 'What ship?'

'That schooner we saw this morning off the passage.'

'The schooner with the hospital flag?'

'That's the hooker,' said Davis. 'She's the Farallone, hundred
and sixty tons register, out of 'Frisco for Sydney, in California
champagne.

SCORE-READING

2005-09-11T23:32:00.000-05:00

SCORE-READING

A few of you have apologized privately to me for the limited state of your musical expertise, especially in the domain of reading music. These confessions have set me thinking about the role that musical literacy actually played in the writings on Western art music—a written musical tradition—that you will be reading in the coming weeks.

All of the writers in question were (or are) professional men of music. The adjacency of the two terms “professional” and “men” here is not a mere happenstance. Although music-making of a kind that required musical literacy—especially piano playing—spread rapidly and widely through middle-class Europe during the nineteenth century, and although woman played a dominating role in both the performance and the ethos connected with this movement, women music-makers during this century were overwhelmingly amateurs. Their musical domain was the home. The critics whose ideas about music found their way into print were overwhelmingly men with a professional expertise in music. Their professions required of them a highly developed ability to read scores: composers, conductors, analysts.

This ability had a practical importance to critics in the 19th century, when a score was sometimes easier to come by than a live performance, and when opportunities to rehear the music of a performance could be very scarce. If a critic could put his hands on a score, and if he could decipher that score, he had a lasting, albeit abstract, foundation on which to build and test his written observations.

On the other hand, scores could be difficult to come by, especially if the music in question was written for an orchestra. Orchestral scores were expensive to publish and had a limited public. (Orchestral players themselves, of course, performed from parts, not from scores.) Far more common were reductions of orchestral works for 2- or 4-hand piano. Many amateurs could indeed perform such reductions; it was precisely for amateurs that such reductions were printed. And the availability of such playable reductions gave critics something akin to today’s recordings: a way to re-hear previous music. But obviously such reductions could not convey more than a portion of an original orchestral experience. To use them effectively as a basis for writing criticism, a critic needed either to have listened carefully at some earlier time to a full orchestral performance of a piece; to possess an exceptional ability to imagine the full range of effects to which a piano reduction pointed; or both.

But even when a writer had everything possible that could put a given piece of music in his ears—a carefully observed performance and an adequate score—questions still arise about the relationship between the critic’s literacy in music and his effectiveness as a critic. In what ways, and to what extent, did his ability to read music serve his writing about music? And above all, to what extent did the most effective aspects of his writing depend on musical literacy?

In the weeks to come, I hope you will give some attention to specific ways in which score-reading played a role in the criticisms you read. You could start by asking yourself, for example, whether the questions that seem to interest a given writer most passionately are in fact questions that require attention to a score; and whether the ability to read a score in fact provides a given writer with a useful authority in an exploration of issues that are not related to the score. To these two questions, I suspect you will be able to add many others of your own.

Test

2005-09-08T09:49:00.000-05:00

testing testing