Carter 102

Today is Elliott Carter's 102nd birthday. Readers of this blog are acquainted with my abiding interest in this composer and his music. On the occasion of his 100th birthday I posted a series of short notes on the pieces that have meant the most to me over the years, beginning here. Other posts on Carter, including links to CD reviews, can be found here.

For today, I leave it to Carter himself with a performance of Tintinnabulation (2009), for percussion ensemble, performed here by the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, under the direction of Peter Jarvis:

An American Heart

CD review, Sequenza21.

Meme!

Ann Powers commemorates the availability of The Beatles on iTunes by listing her 15 favorite tracks by the Liverpudlians. Alex Ross responds with his own list, and thus a meme is born. Here are my 15 favorite Beatles tracks, as least as of right now:

15. "Back in the USSR" (The Beatles). Beach Boys-influenced rock 'n' roll, with clever and darkly ironic lyrics.

14. "All You Need is Love" (Magical Mystery Tour). With its quotations and trippy, layered texture, this prescriptive anthem is almost a pop Hymnen.

13. "Getting Better" (Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band). The texture thins for most of the last verse of this plea for undertanding from a guy who's trying to change. After a list of transgressions, the band (led by Paul McCartney's driving bass) storms back in, arguing for redemption.

12. "For No One" (Revolver). Intense emotion and rigorous technique. Sounds like art to me.

11.. "I'm Down" (Past Masters, Vol, 1). Old school rock 'n' roll screamer, which McCartney does almost as well as John Lennon in

10. "Rock and Roll Music" (Beatles for Sale).

9. "Yes It Is" (Past Masters, Vol, 1). Gorgeous vocal harmonies in a song about the inability to move on.

8. "Julia" (The Beatles). Simple, direct, haunting.

7. "A Hard Day's Night" (A Hard Day's Night). As Alex said, there's that chord. Not only that, but an energetic song about being out of energy.

6. "Let It Be" (Let It Be). This entire project has been criticized for overproduction, but I really dig the prominent roles given to three very dixtinct keyboards. Make sure hear this version, because in some versions the fine guitar solos are buried in the mix.

5. "Help!" (Help!). Rounding out the trio of movie themes with Lennon's call for assistance.

4. "Something" (Abbey Road). It's always seemed to me that neither Lennon nor McCartney were half the songwriter alone as they were together. On the other hand, George Harrison.

3. "I Don't Want to Spoil the Party" (Beatles for Sale). I've always loved this song; can't give a rational defense. Note, however, the wonderful vocal harmonies.

2. "She Loves You" (Past Masters, Vol, 1). An ebullient expression of pure joy. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

1. "Ticket to Ride" (Help!). The percussionist in a musical organization is often the best musician therein. Ringo Starr makes his case herein. Note the different fills in front of the last two occurances of the tagline ("And she don't care") as well as how he recomposes the groove behind different verses. Also, again, the vocal harmonies.

Feel free to post your own lists in the comments (or links, if you have already posted somewhere else). Better still, some commentary on why The Beatles don't deserve the attentio would be very interesting.

An American Voice

CD review, Sequenza21.

The Jazz Hands of Love

What is now the Florida State University College of Music was founded 100 years age, in 1910. At that time the University was called the Florida State College for Women.

These two facts are the basis for the conception behind this weekend's production of Gaetano Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore ("The Elixir of Love") by the College's Florida State Opera. This production is the Opera's first in the newly renovated Ruby Diamond Auditorium. I'll have more to say about the Auditorium on another occasion, but for it's enough to say that the renovation is beautiful and the sound so improved that it is really an entirely new hall.

The production (by FSU professor Matthew Lata) replaced the military regiment of the original with the University of Florida football team and set the action in familiar FSU locations. Mr. Lata's productions always give you something to look at during arias, without distracting from the music. This production featured dances loosely modeled on dances of the period--very loosely, and the program notes begged pardon for the various historical inaccuracies. The resulting frisson between the music and the dancing heightened the playful atmosphere of this enchanting production. FSU Director of Opera Activities Douglas Fisher led the cast and the newly-enlarged (the pit is much bigger now) Opera Orchestra in a well-paced, lively performance.

In all the talk about the future of classical music, I've not seen much discussion of localizing the music, stressing place, etc. A production like this, with it use of school colors in the sets and costumes and the biggest rival's quarterback as the antagonist, would not travel, but the idea certainly would. Critics of concert music culture often talk about the music not having a direct relation to peoples' everyday lives (I'm not sure that's always a bad thing, but that's for another post), but this production celebrates an institution that is a part of the everyday life of most of the people in its audience, and it does so without compromising the work itself.

Very well done.

An American Mind

CD review, Sequenza21.

Amazing

It was a long time ago, and I remember very few of the details.

When I was an undergrad, I attended a recital by coloratura soprano Joan Sutherland. Among the details I don't remember is the repertoire, though if memory serves, it consisted of chansons and French arias. She was astonishing--the sound of her voice and what she was able to do with it was overwelming. She held a lsrge audience in the palm of her hand for the length of the evening. The spell wasn't broken (at least for me) until long after the performance had ended.

Ms Sutherland passed away on Sunday at 83.

The Shock of the Old

Review of Seraphic Fire Monteverdi disc, at Burning Ambulance.

Elegy

I've updated the Works page to include a piece I finished this weekend, an elegy for my Dad (who passed away this summer after a lengthy illness) called What stays with me IV: for W. E. Hicken. It's scored for bass clarinet, bass trombone, cello, and timpani. I like to think that he would have liked it, and I know he would have been amused that I tried to make an ensemble as deep as his voice.

P-P-Pages

Lisa Hirsch kindly points out that Blogger has added a feature that allows the publication of permanent pages (henceforth known as "përmapages") as part of blogs. These përmapages can contain unchanging or infrequently changing material which would, if they were as regular blog posts eventually disappear down the page into the webby mist. Lisa has posted a page recapitulating her recent series on publicity basics--something many of us will be referring to more than once.

Links to any përmapages I post will be listed in tabs across the top of the home page under the header. The first is a sinple list of my compositions. If you are interested in obtaining scores of any of these pieces, please contact me to make arrangements.

I'll post more pages as I think of appropriate material.

College Town

CD review, Sequenza21.

Of Echoes, Dreams, and Whales

CD review, Sequenza21.

Registering Agreement

CD review, Sequenza21.

Mirrors and Lamps

A. C. Douglas says composers should post this quote from Schoenberg above their desks:

There is still plenty of good music to be written in C Major.

ACD includes this admonition in a post whose central point (read it for yourself, of course) that composers should be more concerned with writing the most substantial music they can, and not be concerned about being (or finding) the Next Big Thing. His point isn't, I don't think, that composers should write tonal music, but that they should be open to everything that is of musical value.

Most composers I know and that I know of aren't looking for (or to be) the Next Big Thing. Many are looking for a Next Big Idea, but I can't see anything wrong with that,) What most composers are looking for is a way to find their voice, to find a way to say in music what they want to say. A more relevant Schoenberg quote may be this:

Once, in the army, I was asked if I was really the composer Arnold Schoenberg. 'Somebody had to be,' I said, 'and nobody else wanted to, so I took it on, myself.

My personal response to Schoenberg's  C Major comment is this: no shit. Really, if anybody despairs of hearing new tonal music they aren't looking very hard, or they expect it to be delivered to them automatically. The vast majority of composers, in and out of the academy, write tonal music of some kind or another. They always have and they always will. It's easy to find, even if it doesn't get the most publicity, even though it usually does. You can't demand that the public face of the music world to offer a reflection of your tastes or that the music press feature music that isn't pursuing new ideas. It doesn't work that way in music, or in any other field of human endeavor.

Art is a lamp that sheds light on our lives; it is not a mirror offering us a flattering reflection.

Here endeth the lesson.

Prize Possession

I’ve read Greg Sandow’s recent series1 of posts on the Pulitzer Prize in Music with a great deal of interest and no small incredulity2, and I am in complete agreement with Greg about one thing: the Prize process as it exists undoubtedly privileges concert music over other kinds of American music. Maybe you don’t care about the Prize at all but maybe you do kind of care about what the bias in the Prize process is and what it means.3

Greg points out how the language in the Prize guidelines reflects how composers and others involved in concert music think, to the exclusion of how people involved in other manifestations of music think about their artifacts. Specifically, the guidelines refer to “performances” and release dates of recordings. Submission of a score in support of a nomination is optional.

I think Greg overstates how the guidelines are biased towards concert music—you could change a word here and there and there would be no bias. I think his larger point, that the structure of the Pulitzer Prize is biased towards concert music, is manifest more in its administration than in its guidelines, in who does the judging. (I think Greg’s nomination of Greil Marcus as a judge would, if it came to pass, make his idea of a ban on Prizes to concert music unnecessary.)

All of this led me to ask my son, who has a couple of degrees in American Studies, what he though of all of this. He answered, without hesitation, that “popular music and classical4 music should be treated as entirely different artforms”. I don’t know that I would completely agree with that, but the more I think about it the more it makes sense. On the issue under immediate discussion, it would be easy to administer separate Pulitzer Prizes in popular music and non-popular music. The guidelines could refer to release dates vs. premiere dates, remove instrumentation and length requirements for popular music, etc.

But what about the bigger issue? Are popular and non-popular/concert music different artforms? They share an aesthetic medium (sound/silence, like fiction and poetry share words) so there’s no brick wall between them. But, as Greg points out, there are significant differences in how they are made and in how they are distributed.

What are some of the implications of thinking of them as different artforms? Can these differences be exploited to the benefit of everybody? I think it's worth talking about.

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1. The link is to the last of the series, which includes links to the first two posts.
2. How is making concert music ineligible for the Prize supposed to help it? Maybe we should be even more helpful and ban the performance of concert music for a similar period.
3. I’m pretty sure I don’t care about the Prize beyond noting who wins every year. As to the bias, read on.
4. Hey, it’s concert music, son; read my damn blog!

Picky

Tim Mangan of the Orange County Register lists ten recordings of works that serve as a newby's introduction to musical Modernism. It's a fine list, and I won't spoil it for you by reprinting it here.

In a his comment on a piece that interpolates sketches from a 19th century composer's music with the 20th century composer's original music, Mr. Mangan describes the original music as "atonal but exquisitely so". This is really picky, I know, but I wish he had not phrased it that way, unless of course he generally finds atonality less than exquisite. (The rest of the article doesn't read that way.)

I would rather have seen "exquisitely atonal" or "atonal, and exquisitely so". Again, I'm being picky, but I think it's better if we don't use negatively charged language in our attempts to promote our music.

[Edited on 8 Mar 14 to fix a typo.]

Bands Apart

Essay/review, Sequenza21.

What Mahler Tells Me

Today is Gustav Mahler’s 150th birthday.

My first encounter with Mahler was playing the bass trombone part in a performance of the First Symphony in North Carolina in the mid-1970s. The Symphony, with its themes of the newness of life, discovery, and triumph, was a perfect introduction for me at about 20 and at the very beginning of finding my way as a musician, composer, and human being.

To learn this piece from the inside, as it were, embedded in me just how entwined composing and performing are. It was the first time I had ever played in such a big, complex piece. So much of what I learned from it has been with me since then that it’s hard to say specifically what happened. But something did—something clicked.

I’ve probably heard the Second Symphony (“Resurrection”) performed more than any other piece of music (with Cage’s 4’33” a close second), and it’s always very moving, even when the performance doesn’t quite make it. The striving of an ensemble playing and singing near or even a little beyond its limits embodies part of Mahler’s poetic vision for this piece.

My favorite Mahler symphony is the Sixth, with its clear, rigorous form and content that strains at that form. Mahler’s was at his height as an orchestrator in the Sixth, and every page yields a revelation of orchestration and/or counterpoint. Many of the Symphony’s most effective passages are a result of the composer’s deft, imaginative orchestration of simple counterpoint, sometimes with as few as two voices. That such dark expression can come from such simple, clear means has always struck me as one of the mysteries of art.

“The symphony is the world; it must contain everything.” Mahler’s famous dictum* applies to his entire output even more than it does to individual works. Without drawing too fine a point on it, his symphonies and songs sketch out an artistic biography moving from the impetuosity of youth in the early pieces, through a thoughtfully fervent maturity, finally to the resignation and acceptance embodied in the last works, Das Lied von der Erde (“Song of the Earth”) and the Ninth Symphony.

The orchestras are as big in these last works as they were in the earlier symphonies, but here Mahler has reduced his art to its essential elements. The effects and climaxes are as stunning and as moving as ever, but the means are smaller, the brushstrokes finer. The emotions are raw, but expressed without histrionics. What we get from Mahler at the end, something he never had in his tumultuous life, is peace.



* A word on dicta. When an artist makes a statement like Mahler’s, he’s really just speaking for himself. He may want you to think he is prescribing an approach for everybody, but he isn’t; he’s describing his own, and hoping you’ll take it seriously. If you take these dicta too seriously, you end up with a headache, and a bad case of style wars.

Happy Fourth!

Carter: 16 Compositions

CD review, Sequenza21.

Paccione: Our Beauties Are Not Ours

CD review, Sequenza21.

On the Outside

I’ve been grazing through last year’s A New Literary History of America (Belknap/Harvard, 1095 p., edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors). This fascinating, informative, and sometimes moving book is a history of the United States told in essays about the cultural artifacts produced by Americans and, in a few cases, about America or Americans.

This broad definition of the “literary” is fleshed out in an Introduction:

Thus this broadly cultural history—a history of America in which literary means not only what is written but also what is voiced, what is expressed, what is invented, in whatever form. (p. xxiv)

“[I]n whatever form”? Strong words. Did Messers Marcus and Sollars write a rhetorical check their editing asses can’t cash?

The focus is on the whole range of all those things that have been created in America, or for it, or because of it: poems, novels, plays, and essays, but also maps, histories, and travel diaries, sermons and religious tracts, public speeches and private letters, political polemics, addresses, and debates, Supreme Court decisions, literary histories and criticism, folk songs, magazines, dramatic performances, the blues, philosophy, paintings and monuments, jazz, war memorials, museums, book clubs, photographs, comic strips and comic books, country music, films, radio, rock and roll, cartoons, musicals, and hip-hop: “Made in America.” (p. xxiv)

This list is pretty comprehensive—the essay on porn star Linda Lovelace can be included under “film”, for example, so let’s see if there are any form of literary artifacts “that have been created in America, or for it, or because of it” that are left out. (Hold on, I’m reading.) OK, no concert music or concert dance (ballet or modern), either. A reading of the Index shows only fleeting references to composers like John Cage, Charles Ives, and La Monte Young. And no choreographers, or at least none whose names I recognized.

There was no explanation of the omissions. Was it an oversight? I really don’t know. They could have covered both with a discussion of Appalachian Spring or with the work of Lincoln Kirstein’s Ballet Caravan or with the epic Cage/Cunningham collaboration. This not to mention what could have been contributed on either concert music or dance alone. I don’t know why they were not included.

Greg Sandow wrote this weekend about people who claim that classical music is inherently superior to other musics. Sandow need not worry about such claims, except to the extent that they are horrible marketing devices. It’s clear from this book as well as countless other cultural conversations taking place on and off the web, that concert music and its equally-unloved artistic sibling may be the least-important artforms going.

If concert music is on the outside looking in, and there’s plenty of evidence that it is, the ongoing conversation about the issue is extremely important. What I haven’t seen is a great deal of thought about what it means to be on the outside; to be, as Alex Ross has correctly put it, counter-cultural. Are there advantages to being on the outside? The disadvantages are clear, but aren’t there good things about it, too? Can part of our art be inside and part out? These are questions that should be asked, and suggestions tossed around. And now’s a good time to do it, since nobody’s paying attention.

If Only

In an essay discussing his experiences on a cruise ship ("A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again") David Foster Wallace talks about the "prettiness" of the Caribbean. Then this footnote (#73, on page 306 of the collection of which this is the title essay):

It is not "beautiful"; it is "pretty". There's a difference.

Imagine how much clearer, how much more telling our art criticism would be if we kept this crucial idea in mind.

Hersch: Cello Sonatas

CD review, Sequenza21.

Double Bar

I finished the first draft of my Percussion Concerto today. I'll let it stew for a couple of weeks or so, then run through it once or twice to touch things up. I anticipate delivering it to John Parks in early April, in anticipation of a fall premiere.

More regular blogging and reveiewing should resume soon.

David Rakowski, Études, Vol. 3

CD review, Sequenza21.

John Cage: Late Works

Audio DVD review, Sequenza21.

EC101

Today is Elliott Carter's 101st birthday. To commemorate this day and what this composer's music has meant to me, here's a link back to a series of posts I wrote last year on the occasion of the composer's 100th.

In the long run,

we're all dead. (John Maynard Keynes)

But for some of us, our music will live on. Norman Lebrecht wants to know whose music (of composers living today) will be played 50 years from now. There have been responses at Mr. Lebreacht's blog and from other bloggers. If you are surprised that the leading vote getters are of a more-or-less minimalist/not-Modern bent, you haven't been reading about concert/non-pop music on the Interweb very much. In addition, this result shows one inevitable result of predictions--that what is happening now will continue indefinitely, and that the predictor's values/tastes will be confirmed.

With that in mind, I'd like to add two predictions of my own to this little exercise.

The first, and I'm damn confident of this one, is that some composer who dies 49 years from now will have a pretty good year, performance-wise, 50 years from now.

The second is that John Mackey's music will still be performed in 2059. Mr. Mackey writes very solid and very educational music for winds and percussion (mostly). I've heard a good bit of it, and it mostly works. I think band (for lack of a better term, and I don't think we really need a better term) music is an increasingly important part of the art's future (especially in the US), and Mr. Mackey's is as good as there is.

Veteran's Day 2009

Last year's Veteran's Day post says what I want to say.

End of an Era

In a way.

The development of the concert music blogosphere can be dated from when Alex Ross began blogging at The Rest is Noise back before the internet cooled. Now Alex has effectively closed TRiN and opened a new blog, Unquiet Thoughts, under the auspices of The New Yorker, for which Alex is the concert music critic.

I wish Alex well in his new corporate digs and I look forward to his blog posts, articles, and books, and I remember the words of Jean de La Fontaine: "People who make no noise are dangerous."

Lindberg Live

I don't know what it's like in the rest of the country, but the sound on the PBS broadcast of the New York Phil's opening concert here is awful--it's weak and full of pops.

On first hearing, Magnus Lindberg's EXPO does what its composer says it's meant to do--shows off the orchestra and set the stage for the remainder of a concert and a season.

Hello, It's Me

I've thought about us for a long, long time.

I've not posted in a while because I've been immersed in my Percussion Concerto. More on that soon.

Regular (or at least more regular) posting will begin again soon.

In C and Me

Sony Classical (in conjunction with Carnegie Hall) has released the original recording of Terry Riley’s epochal In C (1964, open instrumentation) in a digitally remastered version on compact disc (Sony 88697 45368 2). Countless musicians and artists, myself included, of all stripes have talked and written about In C, most often focusing on its liberating power.

A good deal of the talk about In C and its liberating power centers on how it and its popular and critical reception provided a new tonal alternative to an “hegemony” of pantonal and serial music in the prestigious music schools of the Northeastern United States. Enough testimony of this regional atmosphere exists to take it seriously and to understand how Riley would have been received by those looking for something different.

But in most of the country the atmosphere was very different—the majority of composers in and out of the academy (and concert programs) wrote tonal music of one kind or another. Even so, the appearance of In C had a similar liberating impact outside the major music centers as it did inside.

I had first been exposed to pantonal music in the summer of 1970, after a youth of listening to The Beatles and playing trombone in junior high band in North Carolina. The first pantonal works I heard and/or played, by composers like Lucas Foss, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Georgy Ligeti, Witold Lutoslawski, Iannis Xenakis, and Karlheinz Stockhausen were all over the pantonal map, style wise. I started writing music in the fall of 1972, and I feel confident that my exposure to In C, which came shortly thereafter, was in an eclectic context not dominated by any one style, tonal or otherwise.

I’m pretty sure, then, that In C’s tonal pitch vocabulary doesn’t account for the feeling of freedom, of something new, of liberation that I got from it on first hearing, and that I still get now when I hear this original recording, either on vinyl or on the new CD release. What does account for its effect is, I think, how the music is freed from the constraints one normally finds in tonal music. The pulse is still there; boy is it ever, but gone are phrases, meter, development, and all the other trappings of tonal music, the music I had grown up with. It was with In C that I learned that there was more to emancipation than dissonance. That compositional and performance freedom could be found anywhere, by many, varied means.

One last thought, on this recording in particular. It may be because this recording is how I learned In C, but it remains the only one so far that communicates the deeply innovative, at times transgressive nature of Riley’s masterpiece. More recent recordings have, to my ear, emphasized the one-from-many nature of the music. By this I mean the sound is very clean, with a shiny Kronosified gleam to the surface; that the meaning resides in the completely blended sound of the surface itself. In these performances I get the feeling that every note counts for what it adds to the overall texture. In contrast, the original recording is rough sounding, like a community of many individuals, where every instrument is clearly heard, and the meaning comes from the gathering of expressive individuals.

Twitterpated

In response to this post by the always thought-provoking Daniel Wolf, I've begun a set of prose scores called twitterpieces. They will appear at my Twitter page, www.twitter.com/stevehicken. Everything you need to perform them will be included in the tweet. The first will appear shortly after this is posted.

Carter: A Nonesuch Retrospective

CD Review, Sequenza21.

Carter: Quartets 2-4

CD Review, Sequenza21.

Elliott Carter on Naxos

Review, Sequenza21.

Steve Reich

Congratulations to Steve Reich, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Music. Mr. Reich won for his Double Sextet. His music was extremely important to my development as a composer, performer, writer, and listener. Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, Drumming, and Come Out (among others) were in heavy heavy rotation on the turntable when I was an undergraduate, I return to these pieces a lot and always come away refreshed.

Anything Goes

Theater review, Tallahassee (FL) Democrat, 3 April 2009

Gloria Cheng, piano

LUTOSŁAWSKI: Sonata; STUCKY: Four Album Leaves, Three Little Variation Pieces for David; SALONEN: YTA II, Three Preludes, Dichotomie. Gloria Cheng, piano. Telarc 80712. 72 minutes.

I'm a little late to the party on this, but I wanted to put in a good word for Gloria Cheng's disc of piano music by Witold Lutosławski, Steve Stucky, and Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Lutosławski's Sonata is a very early work, written in 1934 when the composer was only 21. The Sonata is a very skillfully composed, melodically rich piece in the Bartók-influenced style that marked Lutosławski's music until his encounter with John Cage. Some of the composer's musical trademarks are already present here: bright, ringing sonorities, free-flowing melodic expression, and rhythmic flexibility. Cheng's reading emphasizes these elements and reveals the Sonata as an important step in its composer's development and a worthy piece in its own right.

The character piece collections by Stucky and Salonen that make up the bulk of the program carry a debt to the mature Lutosławski. The Stucky I have heard has frequently reminded me of Lutosławski and the juxtaposition here underlines the similarities. I don't know Salonen's music nearly as well as I do Stucky's or Lutosławski's, but these pieces sound like they are descended from Lutosławski as well. They are well-written, idiomatic, and expressive.

It may be that Cheng's performances emphasize those elements that all of these pieces share, or it may be that I'm prone to hear similarities due to their appearing on disc together. In any case, Cheng's sensitive, probing, and exciting playing make this disc a rewarding experience, and fully deserving of the praise it has received.

Free Music!

Alex Ross, writing in the 2 February 2009 issue of The New Yorker:

The image of the classical concert hall as a playground for the rich is planted deep in the cultural psyche. When Hollywood filmmakers set a scene at the symphony, twits in evening wear fill the frame, their jaws tight and their noses held high. The monocle returns to fashion for the first time since the death of Erich von Stroheim. One day, an intrepid art director will come to a concert and discover that the classical audience is well populated by schoolteachers, proofreaders, students, retirees, and others with no entry in the Social Register. They can afford to attend because classical events aren’t nearly as expensive as most people assume, especially in comparison with the extravagant pricing schemes for élite pop acts.

Here in Tallahassee, there is an incredible amount of good concert music-making available for free or close to it. This is true of any city, regardless of size, that is home to a college or university with a major music school.

There is far more inexpensive to attend music here than there was in the far-more-populated Research Triangle area of North Carolina when I lived there. Even so, I'd be surprised if there wasn't at least a handful of free or near-free concerts every week of the academic year/music season.

To be sure, the music-making at a music school is not going to be world-class, though doctoral performance recitals can be very good indeed. At traditional music schools (like Florida State) the programming tends to be onthe conservative, standard repertoire side, though less so than when I was a student.

Most of the over 450 concerts given at Florida State every year are free, but the publicity for these concerts and recitals would require a serious upgrade to be graded "poor".* Part of a music school's responsibility these days is to teach students how to market themselves and the music they perform, using the new media that are very likely familiar to these students in their personal lives. In addition to teaching these ideas and techniques, the schools should model more aggressive marketing strategies for their students. Concert music is, as Alex Ross demonstrates in his article, generally less expensive to hear in performance than the more popular mainstream genres, but we have to let people know it's here. How else will potential audiences become actual audiences?


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*A particular bugaboo for me is that it is extremelt difficult (damn near impossible, in fact) to find out in advance of a concert exactly what music is being performed. The fact that an event is a flute recital will draw flute fans. If it was publicized that the program includes Density 21.5, the Varèse fans would be there, too.

Parker String Quartet

Concert review, Tallahassee (FL) Democrat, 26 January 2009.

Best

A. C. Douglas writes that he had a hopeful dream in which Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man (brass and percussion, 1942) preceded the palying of "Hail to the Chief" at President Obama's inauguration. (I like "Ruffles and Flourishes" so I was happy; the less said about John Williams' contribution to the proceedings, the better.)

ACD mentions in passing that the Fanfare is the "best thing [Copland] ever wrote". This comment made me think about the idea of a composer (or any other artist) having a "best" best work. How do you determine what is best? What are the criteria?

Is a composer's most perfectly-realized work the same as his or her best? I consider Igor Stravinsky's In Memoriam Dylan Thomas (tenor, string quartet, four trombones, 1954, lasting about 7 minutes) as close to a perfect work of art as I've ever encountered, but it's not my favorite Stravinsky, nor would I consider it his "best" piece (I don't think I would, anyway). Maybe scale or ambition plays into it--a piece has to have a certain "heft" to it to be a composer's "best". I don't know.

Listing

Listen has been included on a list of the "Top 100 Musicology Blogs" at Distance Learning Net, which seems to be a clearinghouse for distance learning programs.

I'm pleased to be included in such august company. I want to caution anybody visiting this blog while doing research, or for any other reason for that matter, not to take what is posted here as gospel. What's here is mostly my opinion, and should be taken as such, regardless of the urbanity, felicity, and eloquence in which said opinions are couched.

Carter at 100: Part 11

Bonus Tracks

There are lots of notes in Carter’s music. Lots of them. But for my development as a composer and listener, the passages (or entire movements) where Carter allows one note to carry the entire musical argument or at least the expressive content have been most telling.

The seventh Etude of Eight Etudes and a Fantasy (woodwind quartet, 1950) is a study on one note. The expressive arc of the piece is described through dynamics, accents, and changing instrumental colors. After composing his Brass Quintet for the American Brass Quintet in 1974, Carter gave them a Christmas gift called A Fantasy about Purcell’s “Fantasia upon One Note”. Carter’s arrangement of Purcell’s viol piece emphasizes the drone that sounds throughout the piece with changing colors and dynamics.

Carter’s Piano Concerto (1964) is a dramatic work exploring the relationship between an expressive individual (the soloist) and an oppressive group (the orchestra). Late in the Concerto’s second, and final, movement, the orchestra gradually builds a chord that leaves only one note in the middle silent, and the piano is “forced” onto that note at the climax of the work. In the Oboe Concerto (1988) the orchestra keeps coming back to the somber, sustained music that it plays at the beginning. Eventually the soloist repeatedly honks her lowest Bb (the lowest note on the instrument) repeatedly, in an attempt to get the orchestra on to another expressive mode.

Carter’s use of one-note passages in widely divergent expressive contexts has been a valuable lesson to me, not only in technical terms, but as a direct lesson in how important context is in determining the meaning of musical events. Additionally, I’ve thought of it as something of a bridge to my equal love of music that is more thoroughly built on limited means, like that of Morton Feldman and John Luther Adams. The commonalities between seemingly incompatible styles is often much more important than the differences.

Part 1: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Part 2: Night Fantasies (1980)

Part 3: Enchanted Preludes (1988)

Part 4: Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1996)

Part 5: Boston Concerto (2002)

Part 6: Clarinet Concerto (1996)

Part 7: A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975)

Part 8: String Quartet No.5 (1995)

Part 9: Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961)

Part 10: Concerto for Orchestra (1969)

Carter at 100: Part 10

1. Concerto for Orchestra (1969)

By the last part of the 19th century, the make-up of the symphony orchestra was largely standardized. The core of the orchestra was a large body of strings. The woodwinds and brass were in pairs, sometimes three, and the percussion consisted of a timpanist and maybe one or two additional percussionists, depending on the piece being played.

The music composed for the orchestra naturally reflected its make-up (and vice-versa), with the chief melodic burden carried by the strings. More specifically, the violins carry the melody most of the time because tonal harmony was built from the bass up. The orchestral music of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss shook this model up some, as they frequently put the winds in the role of melody-carrier for the bulk of a piece, with the strings more in the background. Much of the orchestral music of the first half or so of the 20th century was cast in the strings- or winds-centric tradition or treated the orchestra as a collection of chamber groups, rarely using the whole orchestra.

Claude Debussy went further than many composers in imagining an orchestral sound not based on strings, or on the opposition of strings and winds. He proposed seating orchestras so that winds sat near the strings that were in their same register—for example, flutes would sit near the violins. When Carter was asked to write a piece for the 125th anniversary of the New York Philharmonic, it seems appropriate that he took that particular occasion to rethink the orchestra along those Debussian lines.

Carter wanted to celebrate the ability of the modern orchestra with this commission. (One of the salient facts of the history of the orchestra in the 20th century is its explosive virtuosity. There are some effects in Strauss’ music that were written to be blurs; he knew the orchestras of his day could not play them precisely, whereas today’s student orchestras can and do.) Accordingly, Carter wrote a concerto for orchestra, rather than symphony. He wanted to portray the orchestra as a group of individuals—highly skilled, expressive members of a functioning society—so almost every member of the orchestra gets a solo or at least a prominent moment.

Given that Carter’s music was no longer thematic in nature nor was it composed along tonal lines, he took Debussy’s notion and used instrumental register as the organizing basis of the form of the Concerto for Orchestra. The Concerto is in four sections (the music is continuous), each one featuring instruments in a given range. The first section is scored for tenor-register instruments (cellos, trombones, bassoons, etc). It is written in decelerating phrases that start faster and get slower at each appearance. The second is written for soprano-register instruments like flutes and violins. It is fast music in even note values that slows down over the course of the piece. And so on.

Not surprisingly, the sections don’t appear one after the other in order, though it is true that the first one dominates the first quarter of the piece, the second the second-quarter, etc. Rather each movement is briefly interrupted by the other three according to a structural polyrhythm of 10:9:8:7. There is something cinematic about how Carter cross-cuts between different kinds of music, music that develops over the course of the entire piece.

The Concerto came near the end of Carter’s exploratory period. Writing an orchestral work with fairly thick textures presented a problem for the composer—how do you write chords for substantial groups of orchestral instruments without resorting to octaves? (Octaves tend to emphasize a pitch and make it sound like a tonal center.) In the Second Quartet Carter assigned intervals to each instrument. In this Concerto he assigned intervals to each group, and piled up these intervals into chords of as many as seven notes. In this way each group has a large repertoire of chords that are used to give each section its own distinctive sound.

Each orchestral group has a particular three-note chord fixed in its characteristic register—the four trichords add up to a twelve-note chord that represents a kind of home base for all of the harmonic materials of the Concerto. This chord appears at important structural points like the cross-cutting of the sections.

Midway through composing the Concerto Carter read Vents (“Winds”) by the French poet St. John Perse. Vents is an epic poem about America being swept by great winds of change. The colorful, ebullient music Carter was writing seemed to him to fit the broad ideas of the poem as well as the tenor of the times. The Concerto fairly sings of the turmoil and passions of the 1960s and places them and American concert music, in an artistic and cultural context.

The first several measures of the Concerto for Orchestra are concerned with setting the stage for the work. The percussion plays long rolls on drums and cymbals while the notes of the “home base” chord are introduced. Once all of the chord’s notes have appeared, a harp glissando triggers the whirling activity that leads up to the beginning of the first section. After the winds sweep through the orchestra during the main body of the piece trombone glissandos (only the second glissandos of the piece) signal the beginning of the raucous Coda. The Coda is marked by ringing bells, as if heralding the new world the winds have brought to life. The bells die away, the piece ends quietly. We have our new world, what are we going to do with it?

Part 1: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Part 2: Night Fantasies (1980)

Part 3: Enchanted Preludes (1988)

Part 4: Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1996)

Part 5: Boston Concerto (2002)

Part 6: Clarinet Concerto (1996)

Part 7: A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975)

Part 8: String Quartet No.5 (1995)

Part 9: Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961)

Carter at 100: Part 9

2. Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961)

Between his 80th and 100th birthdays, Carter completed some 40 compositions, from occasional pieces for solo instruments to two of the biggest pieces of his career, the Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (47 minutes) and the composer’s only opera to date, What Next? (1997, ca. 40 minutes). Between his 40th birthday in 1948 (the date of the Cello Sonata) and his 60th in 1968, he completed nine works.

Those 20 years found Carter exploring the nature and potential of musical materials—especially those relating to pitch and rhythm. In the Cello Sonata, the First String Quartet, Eight Etudes and a Fantasy, the first six of the Eight Pieces for Four Timpani, the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord, and the Variations for Orchestra (all of which were composed between 1948 and 1955), Carter conducted these explorations in a mostly tonal environment, and where the rhythmic innovations could still be readily heard within the context of a beat or of multiple underlying beats.

Carter’s explorations bore decisive fruit in the two works he composed at the same time in the second half of the 1950s: the Second String Quartet (1959) and the Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano with Two Chamber Orchestras (1961). In the Second Quartet, as we have seen, Carter applies his researches to the idea of establishing a distinct musical character for each instrument.

The request for a piece for harpsichord and piano immediately presented Carter with problems of a distinctly sonic nature. The piano is much louder than the harpsichord and has a much wider dynamic range; the harpsichord, through the use of stops, has a wider range of colors available; the piano sound can resonate for quite sometime, while that of the harpsichord cannot. The solution that Carter chose was to give each instrument a small orchestra that would soften the differences between the soloists—for example, three of the four brass instruments are assigned to the harpsichord’s orchestra, to make up for the difference in volume.

Each orchestra includes two percussionists playing a large battery of unpitched instruments. Both solo instruments have an element of percussion in how they produce sound, so the narrative of the Double Concerto comes, in part, from the soloists bridging the gap in their own ensembles between pitched and unpitched instruments. The music moves between extremes of percussive noise and pristine chords in the winds and strings.

The Double Concerto begins in noise. Carter’s research into pitch and rhythm led him to link them in ways very different from those adopted by the serialist composers working at about the same time. The cymbal and drums rolls of the beginning move in waves whose durations are related to specific intervals—in this way pitch and rhythm are tied together but not in a mechanical way. As the intervals are gradually introduced the waves of percussion meet in works first climax, which dies away and joins to a movement featuring the harpsichord, with piano commentary.

At the center of the work is a chorale for the winds and strings. At the same time the soloists and percussion whirl around the chorale in phrases that accelerate and decelerate against the steady music of the winds and strings. The climax comes at the end of the chorale with single high notes on antique cymbals (the only pitched percussion in the entire piece).

Carter has described the Double Concerto as being analogous to a world coming into being from chaos (the noise at the beginning) and functioning as a working living organism. After final spectacular solos from both the harpsichord and the piano, the music pauses. Then a great percussive crash signals the beginning of the Coda, which is really an extension and composing-out of that crash. The music moves back towards noise while quietly dying away. Carter has said that he took inspiration from poems by Pope and Lucretius about the beginnings and endings of worlds, but the music is really much more direct: From noise you came and to noise you will return.


Part 1: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Part 2: Night Fantasies (1980)

Part 3: Enchanted Preludes (1988)

Part 4: Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1996)

Part 5: Boston Concerto (2002)

Part 6: Clarinet Concerto (1996)

Part 7: A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975)

Part 8: String Quartet No.5 (1995)

Carter at 100: Part 8

3. String Quartet No. 5 (1995)

One of the hallmarks of postmodernism is art about art. There has always been meta-art, though more often than not the references to art-about-art were localized within a given work, but recent decades have seen the idea raised to a controlling principle in a great number of works in all artistic media.

The string quartet, as both medium (the combination of two violins, viola, and cello) and as genre (pieces for string quartet that make full musical statements, as opposed to occasional pieces), has been an important part of Carter’s development for most of his career. In the Second (completed in 1959) and Third (1971), Carter pushes the genre in new (for him) poetic directions.

The four players in the Second Quartet are given distinct musical characters and expressive styles, which are derived from individual interval content and rhythmic characteristics. The drama inheres in how these four individuals communicate—and how they don’t. In the Third Carter reconfigures the ensemble into two duos and asks that they be seated as far apart on the stage as possible. He then gives them a different number of movements to play (one of the duos has six movements, the other has four) and arranges them so that each movement of one duo is played simultaneously (at some point in the piece) with every movement of the other duo.

In the Fifth Quartet Carter takes this idea of anthropomorphizing the instruments into characters acting out what Carter has called “auditory scenarios” to the meta-art level. Here the instruments/characters are members of a string quartet in rehearsal. The Quartet is structured along lines that are a familiar part of Carter’s late late style—a kind of returning music alternates with contrasting movements, which are more or less fully developed. In this piece, as opposed to the returning “rain music” of Boston Concerto, the links between movements consists of fragments. The fragments consist of snippets of previous movements, hints of what is to come, and brief improvisatory phrases based on each instrument’s interval repertoire.

The links convey the feeling of being in a rehearsal. As the ideas are tried out and lines “practiced”, agreement is eventually reached on what kind of music to rehearse. The Quartet’s six movements are examples of most of Carter’s characteristic textures and modes, especially from his quartets. These include “scorrevole” (“scurrying”, one of Carter’s favorite, regardless of medium), energetic, slashing chords, and serene chorale phrases.

A favorite narrative strategy of Carter’s is overlapping forms. This is a natural outgrowth of his interest in structural heterophony. I mentioned that the duos in the Third Quartet have different numbers of movements and that all possible combinations of movements between the duos occur over the course of the piece. The most telling moments of the piece happen when a new movement starts in one duo while the other duo continues playing its own movement.

This strategy is pervasive in the Fifth Quartet. The fifth, and final, Interlude is dominated, for the most part, by the fantastic, aggressive phrases of the first violin, while the rest of the group attempts to “rehearse” other parts of the piece. Finally, the rest of the ensemble begins the last movement (“Caprriccioso”) several measures before the first violin finishes her own capricious playing.

This final movement is a dance played entirely pizzicato (plucking the strings instead of bowing them)—the pizzicato playing in the other instruments is one reason the overlap is so apparent here. The strumming and plucking continues to an exuberant climax and a brief relaxation, only to suddenly build to another climax. This is followed by a very brief (less than three measures) bowed section—it moves to a kind of resolution. The rehearsal ends.

Part 1: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Part 2: Night Fantasies (1980)

Part 3: Enchanted Preludes (1988)

Part 4: Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1996)

Part 5: Boston Concerto (2002)

Part 6: Clarinet Concerto (1996)

Part 7: A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975)

Happy Hundredth

As you may have heard, today is composer Elliott Carter's 100th birthday. If his appearance on Charlie Rose last night is any indication, he will be around writing music for quite a while longer.

My series on Carter's pieces that have meant the most to me over the years begins here, and will continue shortly.

Messiaen

Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of the great French composer Olivier Messiaen (he died in 1992). What stays with me about his music is its brilliant color and the sheer exuberance of it, bordering on ecstasy, and often crossing that border.

One of the great privileges of my life as a musician was to lead a performance of the composer's Oiseaux exotiques (Exotic Birds) with the extraordinary John Salmon as pianist. The short concert (the rest of the program was given over to chamber music of Morton Feldman, who produces his own kind of ecstasy) was held in the sanctuary of the Episcopal Student Center in Tallahassee--the design of which is kind of a Scandanavian Modern, with lots of stone and curved walls. The reverb was intense and Messiaen's birds had plenty of room to take flight.

An article I wrote on Messiaen's Quatuor pour la fin du temps ("Quartet for the end of time"), can be found here.

Alex Ross has details of Messiaen 100 celebrations here and here.

Carter at 100: Part 7

4. A Mirror on Which to Dwell (1975)

Carter has always been a literary composer. He majored in literature as an undergraduate, and read and studied the works of the first wave of 20th century American Modernists (including, Eliot, Pound, Frost, Stevens, and Williams) as they appeared. He was friends with some of the poets of the second wave, Robert Lowell in particular.

More directly, many of Carter’s major works from across his entire career have literary backgrounds. Carter’s note frequently point to literary works and images that either guided his work or came to him after a composition was completed, and the allusion could performers and listeners find their way into a piece. Carter’s early career is filled with choral works and pieces for voice and piano. It’s a little surprising then that nearly thirty years elapsed between vocal works, after the appearance of Emblems (chorus) in 1947.

A Mirror on Which to Dwell was commissioned by Speculum Musicae (“mirror of music”) for soprano Susan Davenny Wyner. Since the commission was for a woman’s voice, Carter wanted to set the words of a female poet. Lowell pointed Carter to the work of Elizabeth Bishop, a rough contemporary of Lowell’s whose poetry turned out to appeal to the composer very much.

Bishop’s language is precise and abstract, much like Carter’s music. By “abstract” I don’t mean that her words and images are untethered to experience. Quite the opposite, in fact—her images are very much grounded in the world as we observe it. Her images reflect the way an observant mind works; she puts together things and ideas that would seem not to go together. After she has shown us that they do, we wonder how it was we never connected them ourselves.

One of Bishop’s lifelong concerns was with the borders that separate us, one from another, and from fully experiencing the world. This seems to me to parallel Carter’s interest in simultaneous streams of music—streams that occur at the same time, but something keeps them apart.

The six poems Carter sets in Mirror are not connected; this is not a song cycle as such but a collection of lyric pieces. Carter has arranged them so their focus narrows from general at the start to more specific at the end. The collection nature of the piece is emphasized by the instrumentation, which is different for each song. The vocal line tends to be angular, but the words come through clearly, as the rhythms are very much like those of spoken American English.

Carter’s settings are really more like expressively annotated readings than they are song or recitative. The musical materials are directly related to the poetic content of the poem, from the skittering oboe music in “Sandpiper” to the musical entropy that mirrors the diminishing energy that characterizes “Anaphora”.

Music in performance is an intensely collaborative artistic endeavor. Composing is much less collaborative, though working with a given performer or an ensemble when writing for them is certainly a collaborative effort. Setting pre-existing texts written by someone whom you may never have met, who in fact may have lived long before you read their work, is a special kind of collaboration. When there is artistic sympathy, a deep understanding of the words and what can be done with them, borders are crossed; connections are made.

Part 1: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Part 2: Night Fantasies (1980)

Part 3: Enchanted Preludes (1988)

Part 4: Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1996)

Part 5: Boston Concerto (2002)

Part 6: Clarinet Concerto (1996)

Carter at 100: Part 6

5. Clarinet Concerto (1996)

Given two of Carter’s nearly career-long interests—in structural heterophony and in writing music that plays to the strengths and musical personalities of the performers—it isn’t surprising that solo (or duo) concertos make up a significant portion of his catalog. In the Piano Concerto (1965), for example, the soloist can be heard as representing expressive individuality, as opposed to the orchestral mass, whose massed forces surround her. In the Piano Concerto Carter gives the soloist a seven instrument supporting concertino, which plays the same kind of music as the soloist, against the more monolithic music of the orchestra.

In the Clarinet Concerto, Carter reimagined the relationship between the soloist and orchestra, resulting in a soundworld and formal layout that came to be characteristic of his recent music. The Concerto was composed for Pierre Boulez’ Ensemble intercontemporain (and its clarinetist Alain Damiens), and the Ensemble’s unusual instrumentation—13 winds and percussion and 5 strings—created a balance problem that Carter saw as an opportunity.

The structure Carter devised for the Concerto is a collage; it consists of seven short sections, each scored for a small subsection of the orchestra. Each, that is, except the last, which is the only tutti section in the piece. More important, the tutti section is the only part of the Concerto that has the orchestra playing in opposition to the clarinet. In the first six sections, which are short, self-contained musical character-statements, the clarinet is accompanied by small concertinos, as in the Piano Concerto, which offer support rather than opposition. The only orchestral tuttis occur in short links between the movements, while the soloist moves from one concertino to another—this movement from small group to small group is a visual cue that the clarinetist is a partner with the groups that play each section.

The backbone of this Concerto is the clarinet melody, which spins out over the course of the entire work, changing mood and character as the soloist joins a new concertino group. The melody is not built from scales or from collections of notes (a practice Carter uses frequently, but not here). The melody is instead built from a small collection of intervals Carter assigns to the clarinet—the other intervals are assigned to the orchestra, but the general practice in the orchestra is to build chords from the intervals. The clarinet melody is extremely free, therefore, and gives the impression of improvisation, especially in the sections that have a slightly jazzy feel.

This freedom of expression characterizes most of the solo parts in Carter’s concertos, regardless of whether the orchestral forces are with helpers or hinderers. In the Clarinet Concerto, the soloist even has the last utterance, a loud final note. Not the still, small voice, to be sure, but the last word nonetheless.

Part 1: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Part 2: Night Fantasies (1980)

Part 3: Enchanted Preludes (1988)

Part 4: Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1996)

Part 5: Boston Concerto (2002)

Carter at 100: Part 5

6. Boston Concerto (2002)

Carter spent the 1960s and 70s developing his musical language (mostly) outside of mainstream musical institutions and without resorting to trends like serialism, minimalism, and neo-Romanticism. Since that time he has written a series of pieces that have seemed to flow almost without effort and with what many observers hear as a new lucidity and transparency of texture and of musical discourse.

One vehicle for this transparency has been the composer’s frequent use of a kind of alternating form reminiscent of the baroque concerto grosso form. In a concerto grosso, sections of recurring material are played by the full orchestra (tutti). These tutti sections tend to be fuller and weightier than the sections that link them.

In Boston Concerto Carter reverses this idea—the tutti sections echo these lines from William Carlos Williams’ “Rain”:

As the rain falls
So does
your love

bathe every
open
Object of the world –

Seven watery, ephemeral tutti sections alternate with six brief (the longest is just under two minutes and the whole piece lasts but seventeen) “movements” scored for sub-divisions of the orchestra. For example, a movement marked “Lento, sostenuto” (Slow, sustained) is scored for the brass section after that section had been silent for the preceding tutti. With its constantly changing scoring, the color of Boston Concerto is kaleidoscopic in nature. The piece, like so much of Carter’s recent music, offers references to musical procedures of the past, colorful, virtuosic, and transparent instrumental writing, and collage-like forms in which musical characters appear and disappear before becoming fully developed.

After the final movement, “Maestoso – molto espressivo” (Majestic – very expressive), angular, craggy (in the finest New England tradition) lines for violins and cellos, comes the concluding tutti. Instead of a climactic peroration of the material of the concerto, this ending is quiet, slightly lingering, like a soft rain.


Part 1: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Part 2: Night Fantasies (1980)

Part 3: Enchanted Preludes (1988)

Part 4: Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1996)

Carter at 100: Part 4

7. Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei (1996).

The symphony is typically a four-movement orchestral work that stands as a musical whole. The ways it can be made whole are tremendously varied—there can be a key scheme that holds it together, there can be thematic relationships between the movements, etc. The vast majority of symphonies have a first movement that makes a rigorous musical argument in what is called “sonata-allegro” form, a form whose properties are not at all relevant here. They also have last movements usually end in triumph (cf. Beethoven’s Fifth) or in resignation (Mahler 9); in either case, things get wrapped up.

Carter’s Symphonia: Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei is more of a triptych than a symphony, though it has the heft and size of a symphony. The composer takes his inspiration (and his subtitles) from Bulla ("The Bubble"), a poem (in Latin) by the 17-century British metaphysical poet Richard Crenshaw in which a bubble “represents” change and all that change means for life and art. The subtitle (“Sum Fluxae Pretium Spei”) means “I am the prize of flowing hope”.

The piece is suffused with irony, Carter’s favorite artistic mode—after all this is a 47-minute symphonic work about a bubble. The first movement (though “panel” seems more appropriate) is Partita (“I am the star of the sea, as it were, the golden wit of nature, the rambling tale of nature, the brief dream of nature”), which is not a reference to the baroque suite form, but rather the word is taken as it is in Italian, to mean “game”, as in a soccer match. There is no “form” as such, and the music does take on the aspect of something happening on the fly, as in a game. Partita is fast, rambunctious, and urban—the fast pace of much of Carter’s music is as direct an expression of modern life as there is in art. It is colorfully and clearly orchestrated, with virtuoso episodes for virtually every section in the orchestra. It embodies experience as explosively alive and vibrant.

The second panel, Adagio tenebroso (“I am the glass of the blind goddess”) is in stark contrast with Partita. Where the former is full of life, its changes and surprises, Adagio tenebroso seems haunted. It is a slow, irregular but inexorable march—Carter employs his structural polyrhythms closer to the surface here, sounding like an approaching army unsure of its course. The music builds and recedes in waves, promising resolution but withholding it. Withholding it, that is, until a big noisy passage right before the end, after which, the music dies away, with brief snippets of what had come before.

The first two panels of Symphonia deal, respectively, with light/life and dark/death. How does Carter resolve these two irreconcilable world views and give his work its proper symphonic conclusion?

The answer was the third panel, Allegro scorevole (“I am the brief nature of the wind. To be sure, I am the flower of the air.”). As the title (“fast, scurrying”) and subtitle implies, Allegro scorevole flies up and down through musical space with incredible speed, interrupted from time to time by episodes of sustained lyricism. The predominant mood of the piece is that of thoughtful lightness, with music that flows and tends to be soft rather than loud.

The trajectory of the scurrying music is upwards, while the contrasting lyrical passages are rather more earthbound. After a climax of the lyrical material, a coda briefly combines the lyrical and the scurrying until a lone piccolo in its highest register quietly ends the piece.

So maybe Carter does resolve the tension of the first two panels, in his own ironic way. An answer to the 20th century’s increasing urbanization and its attendant alienation, as well as the century’s seeming love of death, may be an ancient one: the still, small voice.


Part 1: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Part 2: Night Fantasies (1980)

Part 3: Enchanted Preludes (1988)

Carter at 100: Part 3

8. Enchanted Preludes (1988).

“Above all, I hope to have shown that there is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know that there is a lightness of frivolity. In fact thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy” –Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

Carter used the phrase “thoughtful lightness” as part of his title for Con Leggerezza Pensosa (clarinet, violin, cello; 1990) but the philosophical and aesthetic point-of-view Calvino’s statement articulates could apply to most of the music Carter has written since the late 1980s. Many of these pieces are relatively short and have a textural transparency that was new to the composer’s music, except in special circumstances.

Carter’s career has been marked by periods of intense exploration, where new techniques and resources were discovered and studied, followed by periods where the advances in resources are explored and developed. The former periods are characterized big pieces that took the composer a long time to write. The latter periods include shorter, occasional works along with the big pieces.

Carter’s late late period is definitely one of the latter types. Since the late 1980s new compositions have appeared quickly—in fact, the pace of new works from Carter’s desk seems to be accelerating even now. One reason for this increased output since around the time he turned 80 is that the composer’s explorations have given him a set of resources (a limited number of chord types, for example) and techniques (structural polyrhythms and twelve-note all-interval chords, among others) that have proven to be versatile and flexible.

One of the first products of Carter’s late late period is Enchanted Preludes. It is scored for flute and cello and is in one short (about six minutes) movement. The music plays out as a series of high-spirited scherzo-like episodes. It is tempting to hear the cello in a secondary role, but I don’t think that’s the case. Most of the music lies in the cello’s upper register, to be sure, and it is more difficult to make the instrument speak as forcefully there than in its lower register, but the part is as nimble as the flute’s and as expressive.

Enchanted Preludes is built around a twelve-note all-interval chord (as opposed to the 88 such chords used in Night Fantasies), and the intervals are partitioned between the two instruments. For example, the flute is assigned the perfect fourth, while the cello plays perfect fifths, which are inversions (upside down) of perfect fourths. The instruments share the tritone, which is half an octave (six half-steps), and can’t be inverted.

The overall pace of the piece is set by a 45 (flute);56 (cello) structural polyrhythm, and the flute plays primarily in triplets and the cello in 4s. Most of the piece is, not surprisingly, fast, and it is very light on its feet. That is probably one reason the cello plays in its upper register most of the time.

The sprightly sound world of Enchanted Preludes is heightened by the frequent use of slightly extended performance techniques like flutter-tonguing in the flute and harmonics in the cello. These effects, along with the short phrases made of skittering notes or the little bursts of repeated notes that occur throughout Enchanted Preludes, give the piece that quality of “thoughtful lightness” that Cavino mentions. In fact, there are no emphasized downbeats in the entire piece—it never even touches the ground.


Part 1: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Part 2: Night Fantasies (1980)

Carter at 100: Part 2

9. Night Fantasies (1980)

By the time Carter wrote Night Fantasies in 1980, the structural heterophony of the Sonata and Duo was an integral part of his musical personality. Night Fantasies was commissioned for four prominent pianists—Paul Jacobs, Gilbert Kalish, Ursula Oppens, and Charles Rosen—each of whom experience with the composer’s mature style, having played the solo part in either the Double Concerto (harpsichord and piano) or the Piano Concerto, so they were well-versed in Carter’s style.

Writing for four distinctive artists, each of whom would play the piece in terms of their own personalities, seems to have given Carter to express the multiple musical characters of his earlier works through one instrument. The metaphor through which Carter realizes this internal heterophony is that of “fleeting thoughts and feelings that pass through the mind during a period of wakefulness at night”.

The musical “thoughts and feelings” of Night Fantasies are indeed fleeting. The ca. 20 minute, one movement piece is composed of dozens of contrasting, highly-characterized episodes. These character-episodes appear like unbidden thoughts, only to vanish and reappear later, altered and juxtaposed with different episodes. The expressive arc of the piece moves rapidly between moods and contrasting shades of light and dark.

Night Fantasies is a treasure trove of techniques that came to occupy Carter during his late period and his current late late period. The harmonic world of Night Fantasies is built on a collection of 88 twelve-note all-interval chords. These chords are made of one of each of the twelve pitch-classes (All C#s are members of the pitch-class C#, for example; therefore, an twelve-note, all-interval chord would contain one-and-only-one C#) deployed in musical space so that there is one occurrence of each interval (there are eleven intervals between a unison and an octave, ranging from the minor second [one half-step] and the major seventh [eleven half-steps]). These chords span five-and-a-half octaves, which is less than two octaves shy of the range of the piano, accounting for one of the sonic characteristics of Night Fantasies—the music moves over the range of the piano at a dazzling rate. It glitters in the piano’s upper register while the shadows loom in the lower.

While the use of twelve-note all-interval chords facilitate the rhapsodic placement of character-episodes in different registers when they reappear later in the piece, Carter’s use of a large-scale structural polyrhythm provides a temporal grid (note that the “grid” is one of the most potent metaphors in Modernism) on which to project the fantasies of the music. A cross-rhythm of 216 beats against 175 beats plays out over the 20 minute span of Night Fantasies—every beat sounds, but almost none of them are emphasized. Since the beats move at slightly different speeds, the temporal relationships between them are constantly changing, so the relationships between the various character-episodes are always changing.

None of this is meant to be “heard” on the surface of the music, like themes and motives would be. Rather, the chords and the cross-rhythms provide an underlying structure for the 20 minutes of flights of fancy and nocturnal rumination. It is often in this tension between technique and inspiration that one finds the frisson of artistic discovery.


Part 1: Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974)

Carter at 100: Part 1

Many readers of this blog know how important Elliott Carter’s music has been to me, and as we approach the composer’s 100th next week, I began thinking about which of his pieces have meant the most to me, and why. Naturally, that thinking has led to a list. So, beginning today and running through the 11th, the composer’s birthday, I’ll post an annotated list of the ten Carter pieces that have meant the most to me over the years. Some of them because of what I’ve learned from them, others because I heard them at the right time, and all of them because I just like them as music.

10. (Tie): Sonata for Cello and Piano (1948)/Duo for Violin and Piano (1974).

OK, so there are going to be 11 pieces in this top 10.

An important element of Carter’s music throughout his career has been the raising of heterophony (a textural term dealing with the presence of two or more more-or-less equal musical voices or lines) to a structural/dramatic value. In many of Carter’s works two or more streams of intensely contrasting music proceed simultaneously. The drama is in how they relate to each other as their foreground/background relationship shifts over the course of a piece.

The Sonata for Cello and Piano is Carter’s first thoroughgoing essay in structural heterophony, as well as an accessible and challenging piece for performers and audience alike. Carter was still writing music based on tonality at the time of the Sonata (it was completed on his 40th birthday in 1948), so the characterization of the cello and piano is based largely on rhythmic behavior patterns and the expressive style of the two instruments.

The beginning of the first movement is a direct statement of the idea of structural heterophony as well as the first example in Carter’s music of what would become an obsession with him. In this opening statement the piano moves in regular beats (what the composer would come to call “chronometric” time) and the cello plays irregularly expressive phrases with no specific link to any meter (“chronoametric” time). This passage echoes through the rest of Carter’s career.

The Duo for Violin and Piano dates from 1974, 24 years after the Sonata, and well after Carter’s massive stylistic change that was, I believe, triggered by the Sonata. The contrast between the violin and piano parts—Carter’s music was, by that time, pantonal, and the musical materials are partitioned between the two instruments by two-, three-, four-, and five-note sets as well as by the chronmetric and achronometric rhythmic personalities of the Sonata—is so integral to the musical content of the piece that Carter’s performance note suggests that the players be as far apart on the stage as possible.

In addition, much of the expressive drama of the Duo is created from the simple acoustic reality that the piano, as an instrument, is characterized by the fact that the performer has little control over a note once the key is struck while a violinist exerts a great deal of control over a note—including the ability to make it grow louder, which the piano cannot do, except by rapid repetition. The Duo, then, is a superposition of two distinct and expressive personalities, much like a marriage. (The piece is dedicated to Helen Carter, the composer’s wife, who died in 2003.) As in the Sonata, the Duo stakes out its poetic territory from the beginning, with the impassive tolling of rich, dissonant chords on the piano juxtaposed against mercurial phrases from the violin. Carter has compared this opening to “a man trying to climb a glacier”.

The Duo is one of the most “difficult” pieces from a composer known for his difficulty. It’s just this difficulty that has, in recent years, drawn more and more performers to Carter’s music—they see it as an artistic and technical challenge; a challenge worth accepting. When heard through the notion of two contrasting personalities trying to make a go of it together, the difficulty becomes part of the pleasure and the poetry.

Briefly Noted (II)

What "Briefly Noted" is.

Elmar Oliveira gives authoritative performances of substantial violin concertos by Ernest Bloch and Benjamin Lees (Artek AR-0042-2). Both of these works, while providing plenty of opportunities for virtuosic workouts, are in the serious, concerto-as-symphony-for-soloist-and-orchestra. The accompaniment of John McLaughlin Williams and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine matches Mr. Olivieira's impassioned playing and provides for him a solid foundation.

Isabel Bayrakdarian sings songs transcribed by Gomidas Vartabed, "the most important figure in Armenian music history" (from Atom Egoyan's notes) on a lovely release from Nonesuch (511487-2). The songs, arranged for orchestra or piano by Serouj Kradjian (who plays the piano accompaniment) are generally introspective and pensive. Ms Bayrakdarian, a Canadian-Armenian soprano, sings them with warm expression.

Neeme Järvi leads the Scottish National Orchestra and its Chorus (with contralto soloist Linda Finnie) in rousing performances of music by Sergey Prokofiev, on a digitally remastered release of late 1980s recordings on Chandos 10482 X. The big piece here is the Suite from the score to Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky, which I've described elsewhere as "a big, friendly, kind of stupid, fluffy dog of a piece". I find it a little less so in this duskier reading, but I think it's still an apt metaphor for the composer's music in the out-sized mode of Nevsky and of the other works on the disc, the Scythian Suite and the Suite from The Steel Dance.

Johannes Moser plays the complete works for cello and orchestra of Camille Saint-Saëns with the Radio-Sinfonieorchester Stuttgart des SWR, Fabrice Bolton conducting, on hänssler classic 93.222. This is not is my wheelhouse, repertoirely-speaking, but I enjoyed it more than I thought I would. I particularly like the First Concerto (a minor, Op. 33), with its taut, convincing one-movement form. Moser is a fine musician--he really digs in to this music, playing with understanding and panache.

Richard Stoltzman has been one of the world's premiere clarinetists for years. With Tashi, he made a definitive recording of Messiaen Quatuor pour la fin du temps. A new disc from Navona (NV5801) has him playing short pieces by Carl Maria von Weber (Concertino), Giovanni Bottesini (Duetto, with Richard Frederickson on bass), and Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Herbstlied, arranged for clarinet and string quartet by Toru Takemitsu). In addition Stoltzman gives a commanding performance of Weber's second Clarinet Concerto (Eb, Op. 74). The highlight for me, though, is his richly expressive reading of Claude Debussy's Premiere Rhapsodie (1909-10). The Rhapsodie is a great introduction to the composer's work, with its long lines and lanquid harmonies. Stoltzman emphasizes the piece's melodic content, and Kirk Trevor leads the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra in sensitive preformances of all of the music on the disc.

Veteran's Day 2008

We celebrate Veteran's Day in the United States on 11 November because that is when the Armistice that ends the First World War was signed.

There are lots of reasons World War II is studied more than World War I--most of them are legitimate and some (more footage, for example) are because the Second World War is easier to study.

I've never been able to shake the idea, however, that one very big reason World War I is not talked about is that it is an utterly pointless war--nothing was won, nothing was decided, millions were killed, and the stage was set for greater carnage and unspeakable horror.

And being utterly pointless, it's a typical war. The Civil War and the Second World War decided great issues and produced substantive victories. That's not the norm for war--most of them are exercises in murderous nihilism, the result of mistakes and tragic errors.

So, we study the "good" wars so that when somebody looks at us the wrong way, the image the populace has of war is that of a great endeavor, of national purpose played out on the world stage. That way, it is easier to convince the people that war is necessary.

And it is, obviously, the men and women of the service that pay the biggest, sometimes the ultimate price for this. The committment it takes to sign up for the military is beyond most of us, and those that can serve deserve our respect, and they deserve our effort in understanding the reasons they are called to combat, not passive acceptance of the call. It's really the least we can do.

Reading for the day:

Richard Powers, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.

Listening:

Benjamon Britten, War Requiem.

Cage: Number Pieces

Audio-DVD review, Sequenza21.

Liberality of Spirit

The critic John Leonard died earlier this week, at 69, of lung cancer.

When I first started writing music criticism I read everything of his I could get my hands on, and eagerly awaited his appearances on CBS' Sunday Morning, where he usually reviewed television shows. He was a fine stylist--his long, looping sentences were characterized by Whitmanesque lists and elegant punctuation.

The title of this little post is taken from A. O. Scott's appreciation in yesterday's New York Times.

FSU Opera: Clemenza di Tito

NOTE: Due to a dispute between the paper and Florida State University, this review was not printed in the Democrat.

An opera lives and dies by its music. A production of an opera, taking this truism a step further, lives and dies by the singing. If Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito (1791, libretto by Caterino Mazzolà after Pietro Metastasio) depended on its story (spoiler alert: the title gives away the ending) we likely wouldn’t see it performed outside of completist Mozart festivals.

Clemenza contains some of Mozart’s most beautiful music, however, as was demonstrated in the Florida State Opera’s production this past weekend at Opperman Music Hall. Stage Director Matthew Lata and Scenic and Lighting Designer Peter Dean Beck provided a talented cast with a vital setting from which to project the music, music that goes far deeper into character and its expression that the story demands.

JamisonWalker was a convincing and charismatic Tito, emperor of this production’s mid-20th-century Rome. He got off to a slow start, having a little trouble with pitch in his early scenes, but he recovered nicely for his central role in the second act. Tito’s right-hand man Publio was sung and acted with authority by Young Ju Lee.

Emma Char (as Sesto) and Rachel Hendrickson (Annio) gave solid performances in their difficult “trouser” roles (male characters played by women), and Rebecca Shorstein was radiant in the supporting role of Servilia.

But the evening belonged to Christina Villaverde as Vitellia, the driving force of the story. Ms. Villaverde has a very strong, attractive voice and compelling stage presence to go along with it.

The chorus was solid and well-prepared. FSU Director of Opera Activities, Douglas Fisher, seems to have Mozart in his blood. He led the Opera Orchestra in a well paced, tightly-knit performance. Of special note was the clarinet playing of Julie Schumacher, whose many solos were delivered with flair.

4 Nov 08

Happy Days Are Here Again!

One of the most moving nightas of my life.