During the summer many people hitch themselves to each other in what earthlings call a wedding. As a musician, this is a saving grace for our dogged, unemployed days when all of the classical organizations are usually on summer break and all of the positions teaching, or performing at festivals are taken by the same elite set of players. Of all the weddings I’ve played at, I cannot think of one where I haven’t played Pachelbel’s Canon. If the lay-listener was to sit near the musicians before playing they’d likely be able to hear the incredible amount of disdain we have for the work. Why? We could start by asking the cellist, basso or continuo player, where their part consists entirely of of playing D-A-B-F#-G-D-A in half notes for several minutes. Alternately, you could ask all the players and the simplistic part, the lack of conflict (hopefully these marriages turn out like the piece) and boring harmonies could be what they cite (along with having to play it 21389238 times a year) as what kills the piece in their minds.
The harmonic progression, which is a sequence of falling fourths and perhaps the most common sequence in western music, goes, I-V-VI-III-IV-I-IV-V-I, and it doesn’t change once. While most composers use this sequence as a means to change key, or move to another section (like Bach would in an episode of a fugue) they often did it in far more interesting ways. Take the last movement of Beethoven’s 6th Symphony (~50 seconds in), where there are extended sections of this very same harmonic sequence arrayed with suspensions and all sorts of interesting textural machinations. This is in direct contrast with Pachelbel’s Canon, which might have an appoggiatura somewhere. If you are planning on having a wedding, put this on your processional, please, but if you hear some musicians groan, please understand.
This Video produced by the Digital Ethnography group at KSU has some really interesting things to say about cultural changes caused by web 2.0. I’ve critiqued in the past how some current applications are essentiallyover simplifications, but this video does a great job highlighting some of the best parts of our using these programs. Simplicity is certainly a good thing, especially if it clarifies (something the video does wonderfully I might add). But simplicity making complex ideas more accessible is not the same as simplifying complex ideas, which is one reason why I think writing compositions that are 60 seconds long is stupid.
In a compositional process, it is foolish to aim for a specific time frame because it limits where the process of composing may take you. In the end you get half ideas, clipped or meaningless statements, and in the 60×60’s case a patchwork that becomes nonsensical. The organization could get lucky and the accumulation of these short works might produce something significant, much like a school of fish creates a formidable mass, but in the end, the units are still tiny fish which when picked apart collapse into the tininess of their individuality. This is not to say 60 second works can’t be effective, but they have to end up that way after all the composing has been finished, not because that’s your timeslot.
I recently played for WAZ sounds, the folk-pop artist from LA. It turns out, in the crowd was a blogger from Short and Sweet NYC. Anyways, at least the first description of my playing in an esemple was positive. We “complemented” Mr. WAZ and in his hit “Mine to Remember”, our sound was “pulsing, longing”. Very cool. Here is the link to the full article.
On leave from Pete Yorn, WAZ recently let his music float through the air of The Living Room in NYC. The crowd was respectfully silent as his songs softly played out like lullabies. The hour long set featured his wife Jamie on piano and a string trio on loan from NYU, all of whom complemented WAZ’s honest, dogged guitar strumming and singing.
I’m sitting here listening to organ compositions whose writing dates span from the baroque all the way to some selections in pop (like the beginning of U2’s Where The Streets Have No Name), to jazz and blues works with the principal player playing electric organ (Herbie Hancock anybody?). It got me thinking about how the past two musical periods have lacked a significant amount of organ rep. This drought rivals the classical period in it’s ignorance of the instrument. For a sample of significant organ composers, take a look at what wikipedia has listed on it’s organ repertoire page:
As you can see if you were to place the points of birth of significant composers, the slope would be representative of the density of organ composers. The grey breaks in the graph presumably represent the different periods of music, with 1600-1750 being the Baroque, 1750-1800 Classical, 1800-1900 Romantic and 1900-2000 the modern and post-modern period. During the Baroque period the slope is nearly vertical with most significant composers writing for organ. When the classical period begins the slope becomes far less dramatic, organ music was all but forgotten. The romantics picked up the instrument up again, likely because of their own personal trend toward mysticism or religiosity and their desire to reflect that in their music.
Finally, in our clipped sample and short hindsight of the 20th century, we have three composers of significance writing for organ. Messaien is quite the totem of a composer to have writing for organ though. Messaien’s organ works might come to rival Bach’s Preludes and Fugues for Organ, or Liszt’s Fantasy on Ad nos, ad salutarem undam, but his significance would be an extreme outlier when comparing the significance of compositions by modern composers to those of the Romantic and Baroque periods.
Why did this happen? I believe that most of the fault (I use this word without negative connotations) lies in the secularization of classical music. Most all art music from the renaissance up to and even through the romantic period was primarily supported by christian churches, whether it be The Church, or Protestants. Since the organ is a church instrument, it would make sense that these composers, who had the instrument at their disposal, would use it in their works. This is why I believe Messaien also wrote great works for the organ, he was the organ-master at the Église de la Sainte-Trinité for over 60 years. Since most composers are now taught in an academic setting through the university these days, and there being a trend of western intellectuals being less religious, the organ has been mothballed by the art form.
This is quite sad, as I appreciate the tone colors of the organ, and I don’t believe the electric organ is an adequate replacement for the pipe organ in European-style art music. It has cropped up in pop music (as I cited in U2 before), but it seems to be more of a synthed up, computer creation used to evoke a feeling of reverence in the listener (that’s not necessarily a bad thing). This is opposed to a composition where only the organ’s color could evoke the feelings or ideas the composer intended.
Yesterday I played for the band Princeton in their effort with a dance troupe. In between my stints of playing for the band’s rock songs and the collaborative dance work, the dancer put on their own pieces. Some were incredibly boring, but one that I thought was unexpectedly effective was a dance where a short passage by Virginia Woolf was stated aloud by one of the dancers. When a punctuation mark was in the passage such as , or ; the other dancer would make a motion imitating it’s shape or function. Maybe my judgment of the effectiveness is skewed by the room being filled with a bunch of English, egg-head post-graduate academics, but they seemed to really get the work and appreciate it. I can clearly remember gasps of awe at the dancer’s movement representing the period, where they would kneel down and firmly punch their fist against the floor. That room was so nerdy.
Otherwise, the band and orchestra played well and all the old professors (the liberal academic elites I suppose) seemed to enjoy Princeton’s songs.
Terry Riley may look rediculous, but he is one of the leaders of a principal post-modern avant garde movement.
I’ve been thinking a ton about where classical art music is going these days, and I consistently get drawn to looking back at prior avant-garde movements that developed into important musical movements. Consider the early modernist avant-garde movements in two different countries, France and Germany.
In France, the modernist avant garde was led by people like Edgar Varese, the musical Dadaists, and Darius Milhuad. This music was highly experimental in a different way from their counterparts in Germany, who following the lead of Schoenberg seemed to stick closer to the tradition of Brahmsian style and structure. The French composers of this time seemed a bit more adventurous rhythmically and with the tone quality of the instruments they used. They were far ahead of the curve in experimenting with electronic music and highlighting music as a function of sound in time.
The Germans on the other hand, had the Vanguard of the 2nd Viennese school with Schoenberg, Berg and Webern leading the pack. Their important contribution was the attempt at dissolving tonal harmony (they largely failed) along with the invention and propagation of the twelve-tone technique. As I said before, their music emphasizes structure and radicalizing pitch systems while sticking to traditional instrumentation , instrumental use and stricter form. These two schools developed, eventually, into the most prominent threads of musical thought, especially as we entered the post-modern era where a few new avant garde movements sprout up.
In the Post-modern era, which I’ll loosely define as 1945-present(?), the avant garde of the past became the central musical movements, albeit far more radicalized. Total serialism of the likes of Milton Babbitt seems to be an extension of the 2nd Viennese school. Music that explores non-traditional use of traditional instruments and seeks to create radical new colors like Xenakis and Penderecki, on the other hand, reflects the French avant garde. People like Boulez and Stockhausen draw from both movements, while John Cage writes music that becomes the ultimate definition of sound in time. The music is of these composers are edgier than anything heard before, but seem to be more of a further development of past practices.
Another avant garde thread that popped up in the 1960’s is Minimalism. Largely kicked off by Terry Riley’s In C. The minimalist movement uses a more tonal approach but emphasizes repetition. In Minimalism there are quick surface changes that repeat over and over (and over and over and over) to create a macro-texture that changes very slowly over time.
Hindsight is 20-20, and it gets even easier to distinguish musical periods and movements as we become further removed (temporally) from them. I’ll do the best I can to extract from a small portion of music I’ve been listening to what current the avant garde is.
World music would be an almost too easy claim. But, I’d rather say that it isn’t the avant-garde because it has already reached, or is near a mainstream status in the art-music world. I’ve taken a sample of the music that New Amsterdam Records puts out, and they seem not to have any world music at all in their sample recordings. What I’ve found from this tiny sample size is a reliance on folk (fiddling), jazz and pop music. In a way this music is an undercurrent that I’ve heard called Indie-Classical, which incidentally, the recording company uses as a label to promote their current performance series. The “indie-classical” music seems to take some of the coloristic qualities explored in the past 50 years but then attempts to use them in a way that is overtly expressive and referential or intentionally accessible, which can’t be said for much of the music I’ve discussed before. That young composers are rejecting the aesthetic of their teachers is an interesting reaction. I am sure I’m not the only one who is happy that when my own teachers tell me of a time in the 70s or 80s, where if you weren’t writing serial music you weren’t a composer, it is a thing of the past.
In this upcoming transitional period, we (upcoming composers) would do well to caution against turning against the use of the ugly and depressing in our music because music that is dogmatically sublime in the view of the human condition is just as bad as music that unilaterally damns us.
Here are the parts to Hoffmeister’s Op. 7 comprised of six short string quartets. I have no idea how they sound. If anyone plays through them be sure to let me know.
Since coming to New York City, world music has begun to take off as a central movement in the traditional art music scene. It is interesting because of how long it took to arrive at this point. Back in the early and mid-nineties was when the seeds for the now adolescent world music scene came to be. Classical music was a wreck, orchestras folding and interest in it declining. I can point out why the car wreck of the art form I love most occurred, but that’s another post for a day when I have lots of time. World music had been around before, I can point to Hetor Villa-Lobos, some of Bela Bartok’s more musicological works, or even Philip Glass’ Satyagraha from 1980. Still, these tendencies weren’t what I would say constituted the singular movement it is now. These were disparate threads reflecting parts of the composers’ lives, which they thought would be interesting to explore.
Back to the 1990’s. Osvaldo Golijov, the prominent Argentinian composer, had his first “major” recorded work on a Kronos quartet CD in 1994, while Zhou Long, a composer who writes music reflecting his ethnic Chinese background, didn’t have his career take off until the mid to late nineties. Still, the movement really didn’t make a ton of noise until the early 2000’s when Golijov started scoring big hits in the classical scene, Yo-Yo Ma recorded his first Silk Road Album, or when Philip Glass revisited world music, this time more thoroughly, with Orion.
Now, when I go listen to a new music concert, there is at least one work that is world music. I am currently playing with the Manhattan Camerata which has programmed (essentially) an entire concert of world music. Here, the heads of the organization, Lucia Caruso, Pedro de Silva and Ramon Catalan have built (are building) their classical careers on world music.
I think that world music is exciting and a ton of fun to listen to, but I have a hard time feeling profound ideas expressed by the music. This may be my orientalist view of the world as an American, or it could just be my ontological distance from what the music might mean. But, I feel that world music, no matter how much it has resurrected the classical genre, cannot replace the serious European art music style in expressing the chilling or profound. I hope to be proven wrong on this though.
Welcome To June Everyone. Today I have the Mendelssohn Octet for you along with its original manuscript rehosted from IMSLP. Here’s what Wikipedia has to say about the work:
A typical performance of the work lasts around thirty minutes, with the first movement usually comprising roughly half of this.
The scherzo, later scored for orchestra as a replacement for the minuet in the composer’s First Symphony at its premiere, is believed to have been inspired by a section of Goethe’sFaust entitled “Walpurgis Night’s Dream.”[1] Fragments of this movement recur in the finale, as a precursor to the “cyclic” technique employed by later 19th-century composers. The entire work is also notable for its extended use of counterpoint, with the finale, in particular, beginning with an eight-part fugato.
The work is unbelievable. The counterpoint enviable. The sound reminds me of the Op. 13 quartet, which is sprightly in the same sort of way. This should be of no surprise, though, as both were written in the same period of his life. (When he was very young). If I could write the type of counterpoint he did when he was 16, I’d be a made composer. Enjoy the parts below the fold. Also, check out the Emerson quartet’s recording of the octet that they made by themselves through overlay:
One of the important facets of post-modernism over the last 50 years is our art’s focus on bringing the audience’s attention to what they are doing, the setting they are in, what they ate for lunch or what they wear. This is an important goal to achieve, as it de-limits what can be done. The problem with this is the works that are most effective as an idea are not necessarily the most communicative to a non-educated audience. There is nothing fundamentally wrong with that either, but to create the cultural changes needed to break down a convention, an idea needs to be easily communicable as well as well-founded and thought out.
Take John Cage’s ideas on unorganized sound:
But when I hear the sound of traffic, here on sixth avenue for instance. I don’t have the feeling that anyone is talking*. I have the feeling that sound is acting, and I love the activity of sound. What it does is it gets louder and quieter, it gets higher and lower, and it gets longer and shorter. It does all those things, I’m completely satisfied with that. I don’t need sound to talk to me.
*He stated earlier that listening to organized sound (music) is like hearing a conversation or relationship.
Mr. Cage’s idea that sound is beautiful is all fine and good (and so very true), but that doesn’t make the sounds we interact with in our daily lives, or even speech, art. Cage is reacting to these sounds (traffic) as aesthetic objects, like most people would react to the beauty of the Giant Sequoias. This does not make his traffic noise art work. Not until he creates the sound space for these random sounds in 4:33 do they take on the intentionality required for something the be “art”. The million dollar question is whether this is effective art. Take a listen:
After the first performance of the work, Mr. Cage had this to say about the reaction of the audience:
They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began patterning the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out.
We view these trees as beautiful aesthetic objects, not art.
I believe this is the absolute worst thing any artist can say. Laying the blame on the audience for their ignorance is not the answer for the composer’s inability to communicate an idea. It is not that the audience didn’t know how to listen, but rather that Cage didn’t know how to tell so that the audience would listen. Maybe this is the best way that the idea of “listen to your surroundings” can be conveyed, but if that is the best we can do, the late explanation does not help his case (I personally believe Cage was trying hard to press buttons, and the philosophical underpinnings of the work are only half the inspiration). It’s like the famous psychology white shirt experiment with the guy in the gorilla suit walking through unbeknown to the viewer.
This is an issue of misdirected attention on the part of the cultural institution. The audience arrives expecting to hear traditional European art music, but instead gets a guy with a time piece opening and closing the piano lid intermittently. No one is going to “get it” the first time around because they haven’t been told what to look for. In reflection, but only in the context of reflection, does 4:33 become a master stroke. This is not because it highlights what would normally be viewed as aesthetic objects by John Cage in his loft on 6th Ave, but because it highlights our focus on the institution of concert music. Great art music? Maybe… Something I’d like to listen to? No. A work that deserves to be talked about? Well, I just did.
