Greatness ramble

Thanks to A.C. Douglas for a link to this article from the Times that reminds us all that it is really difficult to find greatness when there are so many places where it could be found.

I think of the difficulty I have finding a pair of socks in my laundry basket and three drawers filled with odd socks (from many members of the family). If I really took care of my socks and carefully put them into pairs after washing them, I could keep track of them. Maybe one of these New Years days I will.

It is still far easier for me to find a pair of socks than it is to keep up with everything that I should be reading and listening to that has been proclaimed "great." How many times have I read a line in somebody's biography saying that he or she is the "greatest _______ of her or his generation?" It is rare that I have actually heard something that I would consider "great" from a person who has used that line in a biography.

I have my stable of musical "greats." Most of them are no longer alive. Those who are alive are mostly in their 60s, 70s and 80s, and many no longer play or sing, at least in public. A few of them are young and are active, but so many of the younger musicians I know have never heard (or heard of, even) the people I hold as musicians of real importance. Those people managed to make it into my pantheon by playing really well all the time, writing wonderful music, much of which people didn't proclaim as great when it was written, and doing what they could (and still can, if they are alive) to keep their legacy moving forward. They, after all, learned what they know from a lifetime of experience.

Now that we have so much in the way of musical choice, there is relatively little room for all that we are capable of mentally and aurally digesting. There is also, with all the stimulation we have in our lives, too little time to give due contemplation to what we hear (and by extension what we read and view). Even if we take time, there are so many elements that get in the way of actual concentration.

It's hard to know what to do with it all.

In my radio station days, when I spent four hours every day for 13 years listening to recorded music very intensely (that way I knew that there was at least one attentive listener), I used to play recordings of Gian Francesco Malipiero, who I always thought a tragic musical figure because he seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledege of music, which he put into everything he wrote. He was a composer without a specific voice because he was a composer who knew the voice of at least every Italian composer who came before him. He never made it to "greatness."

With so many resources at our fingertips, we are all in danger of becoming like Malipiero. I wonder if he wore matching socks?

Playing "at" and playing "to"

Back in my "know-it-all" twenties, surrounded by accomplished musicians of all kinds, both at Juilliard in New York, and in my own home, and playing an instrument that did not give me what I wanted, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what made listening and playing music pleasurable for me. I assumed that my feelings were universal, but time has proven that I was both young and, for the most part, wrong.

One thing that kind of stuck from my "lab" experiments was that there are people who play in a way that seems to be playing "at" an audience (no matter how small), and there are people who play "to" an audience. It kind of boils down to the relationship of a note being played to the meter of a piece. It also has a lot to do with the subtle contours of a given phrase, and its relationship to the piece as a whole, as well as the way a person responds to the acoustics of the playing environment and the responsive energy of the audience.

I believe that a good and well-prepared player is a person who presents a "finished product" to the audience. There are good players who present their finished product "at" an audience, much the same way a person can make a sales presentation "at" a captive audience, or an uninspired teacher can lecture "at" a class. I believe that a great player is a person who brings his or her own energy to the "stage," and allows that energy to interact with the energy from the audience--making every member of the audience feel a part of the performance; making every audience member feel connected to it, the composer, and to one another.

The difference is one of personality and intention, I suppose, but I don't know many musicians who want to be perceived as salesmen and saleswomen or as dull and uninvolved lecturers. There are ways of manipulating rhythm to make "playing to" an audience easier. It is similiar to the way an actor (and I use actor to mean both men and women who act) uses diction and timing to direct a phrase in a meaningful manner. A great actor manipulates rhythm in order to make the audience believe the text.

I have noticed, through practicing with a metronome and a tape recorder that rhythmic playing (playing evenly and holding notes for their full value) has, believe it or not, more potential to be connected with "to" playing than "at" playing, and truly rhythmic playing (understanding a particular note's place within the written meter or the larger meter of a piece) has the potential to go beyond accuracy and onto to the musical world that lies on the other side of precision. That's where musical freedom can begin, and that's the point where the real work for an interpretive musician begins. It is what happens on the other side of precision that is both wonderful and frightening. It is then that it is possible to take interpretive chances.

"To" playing is, for me, connected with taking interpretive chances, while "at" playing is safe. "At" playing is playing to impress, while "to" playing is playing to express. "To" playing is always involved with the music itself, while "at" playing is usually involved with the the performance. It is possible to observe "to" playing and "at" playing in solo work and in chamber music, but it is also possible to hear it in orchestral playing, particularly in solo situations. There it is the responsibility of a conductor to gesturally insist on the "to-ness" of an interpretation.

I have always wondered if anyone else has noticed this kind of thing.

Square-keyed Alto Flute

I was really excited to find this slide show that shows the process that Leonard Lopatin goes through in order to make his nifty square-keyed alto flute.

Tags: Alto flute, Leonard Lopatin, flute making

From the guy who gave us the metronome

There's a treat on BibliOdyssey today: drawings and this photo reconstruction (the original was destroyed in a fire in 1854) of Wolfgang von Kempelen's automatic chess player, which (I guess I can't say "who") was exploited to the fullest by Johann Mälzel, the friend of Beethoven's who got the patent on the metronome (he stole the idea from Dietrich Nokolaus Winkel). This machine played against Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte, and was one of the greatest hoaxes of the 19th century.

The most unwanted song

Michael sent me this article in Design Observer that has a link to and a description of what they call "the most unwanted song," made of elements that I guess people in a survey group said they didn't like in songs (atonality, bagpipes, accordion, banjo, etc). It's 22 minutes long, and is a kind of "rhapsody" of stitched-together elements, a musical collage, if you will. It certainly is annoying at times, but I did enjoy the the atonal parts, especially the singer's voice.

You can read more about it here. I guess I am one of the 200 people in the world's population (mentioned in the above link) who would like this: I'm partial to the accordion and the banjo (which my son practices all the time, and distracts me from my work because I really love listening to him play), I enjoy well-performed and well-written atonal pieces, and I don't have a problem with music that lasts more than 25 minutes.

Tags: unpopular music

Where music comes from

Roger Bourland has once again reached into the collective compositional unconscious and speaks eloquently for those of us who like to spend our time stacking and pasting together the notes and rhythms we find lying around the house.

The muse is not always female

I believe very strongly in the concept of the muse, but my muses are many, and they are rarely female, unless I am writing something for a female singer, or setting a text that was written by a woman. I do find it odd that in Ancient Greek culture, a culture that had very little regard for women in actual life, the inspiration for creative work was so often assigned to women, and each imaginary woman had exclusive charge over a particular domain. You know them well.

Calliope is the muse of epic or heroic poetry
Clio is the muse of history
Erato is the muse of love and erotic poetry
Euterpe is the muse of music and lyric poetry
Melpomene is the muse of tragedy
Polyhymnia is the muse of sacred song and rhetoric
Terpsichore is the muse of choral song and dance
Thalia is the muse of comedy and bucolic poetry
Urania is the muse of astronomy (I have never quite understood the need for a muse of astronomy, but I guess back in Ancient Greece the study of the cosmos was more artistic than scientific)

Plato named Sappho the tenth muse, and several others have named tenth muses (why are they not eleventh or twelfth muses?).

Patrick J. Smith, the writer of The Tenth Muse: a Historical Study of the Opera Libretto has a far more modern take on the concept of the muse. He gives credit to the scores of men who wrote excellent opera librettos from the 17th century through the 20th century, and served as muses to their composers.

My current muse is a gift from my daughter who knows that I am making a musical setting of a Hans Christian Andersen story about a teapot. Working on the piece makes me want to drink tea, so the teapot, which holds and pours inspiration into my cup, acts as my muse.

My teapot, which doesn't have any gender, has the name "Chantal" stamped on its bottom. "Chantal" means "stone" and "singer," so I think that it is a highly appropriate muse.

Tags: Hans Christian Andersen, muses, teapots

Happy Birthday

(Thanks for this one, Michael!)

Name That Tune

Tom Myron is at 33 of a series of 100 pieces in a contest to name various pieces from fragments of their scores. I know that I'm, pardon the expression, going to stay "tuned" to play (or watch other people play) the game. Today's was a real doozy: no key signature, G major (or G minor--or for that matter G flat major or G flat minor) chords being sustained by divisi strings, with a drop in the bass to octave Cs. Identifying the copyist's hand was probably the best clue.

Schoenberg Spricht

Thanks to Alex Ross for posting a link to the Schoenberg spricht archive of the Arnold Schoenberg Center. The texts from all of the recordings--even the long ones--are clearly transcribed. Someone put a lot of work into this, and I intend to put a lot of time into reading the transcriptions.

By the way, the date that Alex Ross calculated as the 100th anniversary of atonality, December 17, 2007, is also the 237th anniversary of Beethoven's baptism, though his birthday is celebrated on December 16th. I guess, like the actual birth of atonality, we really don't know exactly when Beethoven was born. But it is interesting to have some kind of measuring device, like a dated manuscript (which could have been written on the 16th, or even earlier, but was dated on the 17th).

Huh?

Musicophilia

Before reading Oliver Sacks' Musicophilia, I thought that everyone heard music in pretty much the same way. I knew, of course, that some people could hear with greater degrees of structural understanding because of experience, and some people could hear with a greater degree of pitch sensitivity than others, but I never knew that there were actually people who "see" music in colors. I thought it was just something that people talked about in abstract terms, but in Sacks' chapter about synesthesia he writes at length about people who actually experience music in color the way I experience the world that I see in color.

I had a difficult time reading his chapter on musical hallucinations because every time Sacks would mention a piece of music I knew, I would hear it in my head. I can't say that I "suffer" from musical hallucinations, because I really enjoy having them. People often comment that I seem happy when they see me. It is probably because when I am out and about I always have something wonderful going through my head. I often dream about pieces of music, or I work out problems with something I'm writing by playing passages over and over in my head until they are fixed. I guess I am pretty lucky because I can control my musical thoughts and auditory hallucinations pretty much at will. There are people who cannot.

This book is a great companion to This is your Brain on Music (Sacks quotes Levitin often), because it explains to the non scientist in clearly-explained physical and neurological terms what actually happens in differently-wired people's brains when confronted with musical situations. Sacks writes as a neurologist, but he also writes and as a passionate music lover as well as a skilled amateur musician.

Tags: Musicophilia, Oliver Sacks

Musical Mountains

Last night I played a performace of the entire Handel Messiah in the German re-orchestration by Mozart. Most violists would agree with me that the original orchestration is not much fun for our section. Handel (or maybe one of his copyists, who knows?) gave the violists little to do on many of the solo numbers, and the parts we do play are filled with awkward passages and annoying string crossings.

Mozart not only gave us a viola part (and a challenging one at that), he even gave us divisi parts once in a while. We get to accompany the duet "O Tod, wo ist dein Pfeil" ("O death, where is thy sting?") in the third part of the work by ourselves--the violins get the number off. Clearly Mozart was thinking and acting with the mind and heart of a violist. Mozart also added parts for winds and brass, simplified some of the alternating tutti and concertino exchanges, and updated the voice-leading. The result is kind of like the way someone would modernize an old house by putting in indoor plumbing and electricity: making it easy to live in, and making it easier to appreciate the brilliance of the work.

It is like two having two musical mountains rolled into one.

After my Haydn Seasons experience of last weekend, I feel as if I have been creeping around at the feet of giants, and because I have been able to play the viola parts, I have been able to look at the inner workings of their musical minds.

And now I am in the process of writing program notes for Verdi's Otello, a mountain that is just as high, and kind of similar to the Mozart Messiah since it is a translation and an operatic re-thinking of a play by Shakespeare.

Needless to say, I might not be posting for a while.

Tags: Mozart, Messiah, Otello, Verdi

Wolfgang Windgassen in the final scene of Verdi's Otello

While thinking about writing program notes for a performance of Verdi's Otello, I found myself at a completely drained emotional loss by this performance by Wolfgang Windgassen, a tenor who is best known for his Wagner roles. I thought I'd share the experience here.

Tags: Otello, Verdi, Windgassen, Opera

Composer as "he" sightings: #1 in a series that I hope will end soon

This article by William Kraft deserves 3 "he"s: one for Bernard Holland, whom he takes to task, one for himself, and one for President John F. Kennedy, who Kraft quotes at the end of the article.

What is the plural of "he" anyway?

Tags: gender equity, music criticism