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.
16.9.09
8.9.09
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.
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.
22.6.09
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.
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.
26.5.09
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.
19.5.09
18.5.09
29.4.09
20.4.09
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.
3.4.09
13.2.09
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.
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.
28.1.09
Free Music!
Alex Ross, writing in the 2 February 2009 issue of The New Yorker:
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?
________________________________________________
*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.
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?
________________________________________________
*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.
26.1.09
21.1.09
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.
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.
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.
19.12.08
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)
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)
17.12.08
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)
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)
15.12.08
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)
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)
13.12.08
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)
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)
11.12.08
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.
My series on Carter's pieces that have meant the most to me over the years begins here, and will continue shortly.
10.12.08
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.
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.
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