Category: Music

In which I roll my eyes twice

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Just a couple of articles I wanted to respond to:

BBC: Why do people play music in public through a phone?

For many, teenagers playing tinny music to each other on public transport on their mobile phones can be intensely irritating. Why do they do it?

With mobile phones in many a teenager’s pocket, the rise of sodcasting – best described as playing music through a phone in public – has created a noisy problem for a lot of commuters.

First, stop using the term “sodcasting.” No matter how many times you repeat it in the article, it’s not going to take. Continuing,

“I don’t think it is intrinsically anti-social, what I would say is that it is a fascinating human phenomenon of marking social territory,” says Dr Harry Witchel, author of You Are What You Hear.

“With young people, usually loud music corresponds very strongly to owning the space.

“They are creating a social environment which is suitable for them and their social peers. But for those not in this group – a 50-year-old woman for example – instead of confidence, she’ll feel weakness and maybe even impotence as there’s nothing that she can do about it.”

I guess there’s some truth in that. The British legal use of the term “anti-social” has always struck me as really creepy, and it’s downright Orwellian in this instance. As with cameras, the best speaker is the one you have on you, and if that means that the only way you can listen to music with your friends is through a shitty phone speaker, that’s what you do. What could be a more social activity than that?

Bruce Haynes creates “new” Bach concertos by arranging cantata movements.

These so-called Brandenburgs are actually instrumentalized groupings of Bach cantata movements. The original idea was Haynes’s, a Bach expert who had already used Bach cantata movements to score a concerto for oboe and harpsichord obbligato in 1982, almost thirty years before starting this new Brandenburg project last year. Tragically, Haynes passed away on May 17, just over a month before the premiere of what will be the last of his projects.

Why would somebody do this, you ask?

Why new instrumental concertos, instead of vocal or solo pieces? Because the small number of chamber pieces by Bach that have survived has always frustrated musicologists and musicians. Bach gave his chamber music to Wilhelm Freidemann Bach, his favourite child. Unfortunately, W.F. was also a drunkard and lost most of the music. Compare this to the cantatas, which were bequeathed to another son, Carl Philipp Emanuel. Those were carefully preserved and indexed. Today, we know of six Brandenburg concertos and a few other Bach concerti. There were probably many more.

It was also a very well known practice in the baroque era to re-score cantatas without singers. “Several composers and writers mention this,” said Napper. She added while laughing, “No singer, no problem!”

No problem! Hahaha. Seriously. Fuck you.

I’m sorry that you love Bach’s music so much that you feel like you need to take those terrible vocal parts out. Oh no, definitely, the music is much better without them. Yes, it’s totally a good idea to rearrange 18th Century music to fit contemporary aesthetics. No, nobody has ever done that before. Okay, some people have tried that before. But we totally respect them for their efforts and play their “improved” arrangements all the time.

Right?

Right?

Sarcasm aside, the point that we probably hold too tightly to Bach’s scores and that he reused and rearranged his music all of the time is a valid and important one. But that’s not where the trail of breadcrumbs ends. The fact is, we know little about Bach’s personal attitude toward his music. We don’t know if he viewed the cantatas as artistic works or only as things he composed for his day job. There are remarkably few Bach compositions that seem to be deliberately intended for posterity or as an artistic demonstrations (these include, off the top of my head, the Mass in B Minor, the Art of the Fugue, and his French and Italian keyboard suites). Almost every aspect of Bach performance includes some speculation or artistic decisions, many based on aesthetic preference alone. Still, sticking to what actually survives on the page seems to me to be a perfectly reasonable line in the sand.

 

Digging Into Schubert

Matthew Eilar2 Comments

Alfred Brendel playing Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat, D. 960.

Over the past few months, I’ve been going through a little bit of a gloomy period, and I think a big part of the reason why I was feeling melancholic was that I wasn’t playing or making as much music as I had been, and not nearly as much as I’d like. One of my summer resolutions to change that is to start tackling a piano sonata that I’ve really fallen in love with, Schubert’s Piano Sonata in B-flat.

One consequence of not getting into classical music in a serious and studious way until I started college is that there are still large gaps in my knowledge of the canonical works and composers of the past, even as I try and nurture all of my interests in music. One of those gaps is Schubert. Outside of a couple of lied, I really don’t have much exposure to his music (as it turns out, however, my sister (also a pianist) has been working on an Impromptu that she presented in recital a week ago). I was introduced to this piano sonata through a school assignment, and discovered that Schubert’s piano writing calls to me deeply, both as a pianist and as a listener.

I’m not a great pianist. I took some time away from serious keyboard study in high school, which could have been a very productive and fruitful time of study. I have a very strong ear that I have to work to control, and so learning piano and learning to improvise have always gone hand in hand. I’ve also always had a great love for chords; if I had had different teachers or different exposure when I was younger I might have had a lot of fun playing jazz. I don’t want to equate myself and Schubert, but I can imagine that we might mess around at the piano in the same way, albeit at different levels of skill. Schubert’s piano music is almost entirely chords and chord voicings. There are long stretches of the sonata that are composed of nothing but melody embedded in chord voicings and arpeggios.

But how good are those voicings? It goes so far beyond chord inversions, or what the bass note of the chord is. To play his music is to realize that he had control of everything: what the root and bass note of the chord is, how much space needs to be around the melody for it to be heard within the texture, how much repetition can be used without becoming monotonous, how to arrange the intervals within a chord. And he does it with standard chord progressions and very controlled amounts of dissonance.

Schubert presents completely different problems for a pianist than, say, Bach or Beethoven. It’s much easier, in a sense. There’s little to none of the counterpoint that makes Bach difficult, and he doesn’t (in this piece) call for the virtuosic tricks that Beethoven might have wrote. In fact, I’m sure that there are many child prodigies that have the technique to conquer this piece. What they might not have is the hand span to do so. Six- and eight-note chords are common in this piece, and it requires a tremendous amount of control to play them evenly. It’s even harder to play them softly, as Schubert calls for. His practice of embedding the melody in large chords also means that the performer has to switch smoothly and often between wide hand positions, and I can see that this is going to be a big difficulty for me. Another difficult point of classical technique are his smooth, sweeping broken chords. They carry the melody as well, so there’s nowhere for bad technique to hide.

I’m pretty confident in my ability to get this under my belt, and I’m excited to dig into the piece.

 

Game of Tones

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Ahmad Jamal Trio with Gary Burton “One” (1981)

Gary Burton’s reflexes in this performance make me so jealous. Ahmad Jamal is actively trying to fuck with him and throw him off, and once he catches on to that, his responses are genius.

Oregon Represent

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Congratulations to all of the musicians of the Oregon Symphony, who have just finished their very first Carnegie Hall concert. Early word has it that the concert was a great success; Alex Ross tweeted “Triumphant Carnegie debut for the Oregon Symphony — best of Spring for Music so far. Eloquent Sylvan, explosive Vaughan Williams.”

David Stabler of The Oregonian has been covering the tour in exhaustive detail: preview of the concert program, departure of orchestra personnel and instruments, arrival in New York, first rehearsal on the Carnegie stage, pre-concert thoughts from music director Carlos Kalmar, concert post-mortem.

Violist Charles Noble writes about what it’s like to rehearse at Carnegie at his blog, NobleViola.

Audio of the concert will be available through NPR after 9pm PST on Thursday.

El Amor Brujo

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Miles Davis “Will o’ the Wisp” from Sketches of Spain

1. prologue

In a weird case of repeating myself, I had another revelation recently while trying to track down the origins of a Miles Davis tune. A few weeks ago, I described my journey of tracking down the origins of a particular combination of bass and piano chords from Kind of Blue. I had a similar kind of revelation this last week.

2. the hook

“Will o’ the Wisp” from Sketches of Spain was the track that most piqued my interest the first time I listened to the album. Like the rest of the album, it’s strongly driven by clipped Spanish rhythms, but there is something about the combination of catchy, modal melody and the slightly demonic harmonies in the verses that is just arresting.

After trolling YouTube, I finally realized that, like most of the tracks on the album, it is an arrangement of a piece of Spanish classical music, “Canción del fuego fátuo” from El Amor Brujo by Manuel de Falla (1876-1946).

4. a defense of ‘sketches of spain’

Sketches of Spain is one of Miles Davis’ best-known and best-selling albums, so in that respect it needs no defense. I think its accessibility means that it’s undeservedly treated differently. One album database site I visited categorized it as “easy listening!” What fascinates me about this album is the layers of subtext involved in the very creation of the album, a collection of jazz covers of Spanish classical music pieces.

Spain occupies a very strange place in the classical music economy. Although the country has a classical tradition as old as any other country in Western European, the “Spanish” sound in classical music has mostly been defined by French composers. Think Bolero by Ravel, or Iberia by Debussy, or the opera Carmen by Bizet. Part and parcel of this fascination with Spanish rhythms and folk sounds is the idea that Spain represents a liberated, and therefore savage, shadow of France. It’s the Spain of the Basque, of the Roma. It’s the Spain of Resident Evil 4. It’s the exoticized Mediterranean in the heart of Europe, and with the exotic there are always connotations of danger.

So it’s in this context that you get the music of the great 19th/20th Spanish composers, de Falla, Albéniz, Granados. Their music was nationalistic, but in a different way than is usually described by music historians. It was not an attempt to create a national identity against the forces of shifting borders, as Chopin, nor was it an attempt to establish a new musical tradition and sound where there had been none before, as Sibelius. Instead, it was an attempt to reclaim an authentic musical tradition from the realm of caricature, and to translate that tradition into the language, classical music, of the elites.

Jazz is also a musical project that gave a voice to a population that had previously only been represented in the elite culture by caricature. If you look at the language that was used to describe black musical culture and Spanish musical culture, it’s amazing how many of the same clichés surface: the music is more rhythmically obsessed, it’s more passionate, it’s vulgar. And in both cases, there was the fear that there was something corrupting in the music.

5. will o’ the wisp

Miles Davis engages directly with this web of associations on Sketches of Spain. There’s something a little…off about the arrangements. Remote. Tense. Far from easy listening. There’s plenty of idiomatic Spanish melodic and rhythmic content, and nothing of the easy caricature of French composers. I think this reflects some of Davis’ own engagement with the European classical establishment; one should never forget that he attended Juliard and there’s an alternate world where he was America’s greatest 20th century composer. There’s something about the web of oppositions that permeate the album that consistently fascinates me. It’s a mixture of two musical cultures, one white, one black, but both defined in opposition to the European classical tradition. At the same time, both the Spanish composers and Miles Davis in adapting their music decided to speak in the language of the elites.

I don’t have any answers to these apparent contradictions, however I do know that this album deserves a lot more thoughtful engagement than just dismissing it as an easy listening album of Miles Davis covering classical music.