Detached Ideas

The world premiere of Nathan’s Tenebrae, for harp and string quartet, will be March 31, 2011, at Lincoln Center. It is sponsored by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and will be performed by Bridget Kibby and the Jupiter String Quartet. Tickets go on sale August 2 here.

–Paul

With summer coming on, this seems appropriate:

From Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, played by the young Ukrainian accordionist Aleksandr Hrustevich. (via Alex Ross)

by Johann Sebastian Bach

The Cantata “Actus Tragicus”, BWV 106, is one of Bach’s greatest cantatas. Here is Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit (Part II), from a wonderful performance on period instruments by Joshua Rifkin and The Bach Ensemble.

actus.mp3

Recorded in 1985, Joshua Rifkin and The Bach Ensemble, with Ann Monoyios, Steven Rickards, Edmund Brownless, Jan Opalach. Decca

(via Instapundit)

–Paul

Verdi’s Otello is a work very much of its time, and this is true nowhere more than in its treatment of love and the erotic.  The simplest illustration of this may be found in the stark contrasts between the opera and its source.

Shakespeare’s Othello, more than any other play, is haunted by the theme of sexual disgust.  A.C. Bradley writes of the way in which “the matter of a play seems to go on working in Shakespeare’s mind and reappears, generally in a weaker form, in his next play.” [1] But the reverse process may also obtain, wherein a theme appears in one play in nascent form, only to be revisited on a far vaster scale in the next.  Thus the appalled fascination with sexuality in Hamlet, which lies behind both the title character’s ambivalent treatment of Ophelia and his famous castigation of his mother,

is echoed on a far vaster scale in Othello, taking root in the very first scene, in Iago’s mockery of Desdemona’s father, and growing until it all but dominates Othello’s mind.

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Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888) was a composer and virtuoso pianist who lived in Paris and knew both Chopin and Lizst. He was an orthodox Jew, and the legend is that he died when one of his bookcases fell on him (also a hazard in academic life).

This is Alkan’s transcription of the first movement of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto #3, in c minor. The piano plays both the orchestra and piano parts. I like how pianist Marc-André Hamelin, the master of this ferociously difficult repertoire, delineates the orchestral and solo voices. But the remarkable thing about this piece is clearly the extraordinary cadenza that Alkan wrote — it is bizarre and breathtaking.

The piano enters at 3:06, the cadenza begins at 11:34.

BeethovenAlkan.mp3

Live performance by Marc-André Hamelin at Wigmore Hall, London, June 1994

–Paul

During May and June I listened to the live webcasts of most of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition. I am not sure what to think about competitions in general — perhaps they are a necessary evil — but it was a good opportunity to hear wonderful young musicians and some remarkable performances. Early on, I was captivated by the music of 19 year-old Haochen Zhang of China, who eventually shared the gold medal. Here is his performance of the Beethoven Sonata in A flat, Op. 110:

ZhangOp110.mp3

In the semi-finals, Zhang programmed the complete Chopin Preludes, Op. 28. Here is the “Raindrop” Prelude:

ZhangRaindrop.mp3

and Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit from the finals:

ZhangGaspard.mp3

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octet1.mp3

My String Octet consists of four movements linked together to form one continuous arc. The piece is, in a sense, an extended cantata without words, and each move­ment but the second alludes, in a different fashion, to the forms of archaic vocal music. The first movement, marked Incipit, is much like the intonation that opens the Catholic liturgy; it begins with a meditation upon a single, elemental sound, which grows from near-silence into an austere, lonely chant.  This simple monody is joined by a second and then a third imitative line; the texture growing, at last, into a five-part motet, a dissonant and anguished shadow of the great sacred vocal works of Josquin and Palestrina. This leads directly into the second movement, marked Sinfonia in the sense that word held during the early Baroque period when it implied an instrumental interlude within a cantata or an oratorio. This sharp, violent music propels the piece toward the apex of the arc, the beginning of the third movement. Marked Recitative, it is a feverish soliloquy for the first cellist, accom­panied lightly by the rest of the ensemble, and ending in catastrophe. The dying sounds of the third movement fade finally into the fourth, a chorale, in which the music comes as if from a great distance, halting and enigmatic, retreating until it vanishes into the elemental sound with which the piece began.

–Nathan

God created the integers; the rest is the work of man.

– Leopold Kronecker

I.

What are we saying when we talk about music?

This question captures the paradox that lies at the heart of musical theory. Put in its most basic form, the problem that has dogged musical theory since Boethius has to do with the relationship between reason and the esthetic sense. The earliest theories show that the coexistence between the two was never an entirely easy one:

In the final analysis, it was to this that the Pythagoreans’ harmonic analysis of the universe led: the discovery of incommensurables. And no matter how they might juxtapose the numbers, no matter to what lengths they might extend their mathematical circumlocutions, one fact remained, a fact that has ever since proved resistant to mathematical rationalization: there is no fraction m/n that will divide the whole-tone into two equal parts.[1]

The Pythagorean construction of music was an attempt at reconciling the rational and the beautiful — at showing that they are, indeed, one and the same. In this sense it was a corollary to the impulse behind the Parthenon: the Athenians believed that the golden ratio, applied to every dimension of a structure, would create something that was beautiful precisely because of its mathematical perfection.

In music, as mentioned in the previous quote, this dream was quickly shown to be illusory. While the Parthenon was constructed ex nihilo, and could perfectly mirror the rational dreams of its designers, the Pythagorean theorists of music were con­fronted from the beginning with a stubborn fact: there were pre-existing and deeply engrained notions of what constituted the proper and beautiful in music — the whole tone, the semi-tone, the modes, the tuning of the lyre — and, although they hovered tantalizingly close to the realm of reason, they ultimately eluded its grasp.

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It is important to have heroes.  When I was young Van Cliburn was one of my heroes. This performance, with Kirill Kondrashin in Moscow in 1962, came four years after his victory in the Tchaikovsky Competition — an event that precipitated a cultural thaw in the cold war.  Notice Nikita Khrushchev applauding at the end.

The thirteenth Van Cliburn Competition is May 22 to June 7 in Fort Worth — with live webcasts here.

Over the past decade the identity of Spengler, the pseudonymous Asian Times colum­nist, has been the subject of considerable speculation. Last week, Spengler finally revealed himself to be David P. Goldman — classical musician, philo­sopher, conser­va­tive economist, and senior financial officer for Bear Stearns, Credit Suisse, and Bank of America.

Spengler’s columns are dense, oracular, and provocative — it is prudent to ingest them in small quantities. They are remarkably erudite, and show an impressive command of cultural and religious history. Although I might take issue with particular conclusions, the scope and intensity of his thought is invariably bracing.  By his own esti­mate, the Asian Times columns reached a million readers, and the high level of pub­lic interest is evidenced by the 5000 or so registered participants in the Spengler Forum.

Some interesting Spengler essays to try are:

Overcoming ethnicity
Socrates the destroyer
Tolkien’s Ring: When immortality is not enough
Benedict XVI is magnificently right
This almost-chosen, almost-pregnant land

The most recent Spengler column is about the Susan Boyle phe­nomenon.  He says:

Meanwhile, in China, 60 million children are learning Western classi­cal music under the gimlet gaze of strict teachers. East Asian singers, parti­cularly Koreans, are working their way up the ranks of provincial opera companies, and every one of them sings better than Boyle. Who do you think is going to run the world 20 years from now? As the Italians say, we’re bolliti, “boiled”.  Now we can spell it with a “y”.  I hate to always be the one to say this, but the hope is fatuous. No, you can’t.

These talent spectacles, Spengler observes, betray an undercurrent of self-worship; we choose to pay homage to what is like us rather than what is above us.

David Goldman has a new home as associate editor at First Things.

–Paul

Artur Bieleki characterizes the Fantasie, Op. 49, as “one of the pinnacles of Chopin’s creative art.” According to Niecks, “Chopin’s genius had now reached the most perfect stage of its development, radiating with all the inten­sity of which its nature was capable.”  The Fantasie begins with a mys­ter­ious march-like preamble, followed by an astonishing free-form expo­si­tion. The middle section consists of a beautiful chorale, which abruptly gives way to a recapit­ula­tion and a slight wisp of a coda. The music is wayward and power­ful. The performance is by Hannah:

fantasie.mp3

I.

To analyze Josquin is to confront, head on, the incommensur­ability between analytical systems and true artistic greatness.  There is a sense in which approaching him with modern tools of dissection is catching sand in a sieve; no tool of deeper analysis — of the sort favored by composers and theoreticians from the common practice period to the present — will ever yield an entirely satisfactory understanding of his music.  The analysis may indeed provide insight into the less fundamental levels of a works’ structure: motivic parsing may yield a facile understanding of the linear building blocks of a work, and the study of fugal techniques might explain, simply enough, the manner of their deployment. But all of this is on the surface. At the basic, “skeletal” level, an ordinary structural analysis turns up strangely blank. When we ask the most important question—the question of what gives the work meaning, direction, unity—the answer proves opaque.  The explanation why follows an obscure path outward, through questions that are technical, linguistic, and finally philosophical.

There are probably three fundamental paradigms through which the deeper structure of music can be approached.  These I will term, for the sake of this argument, the Schenkerian, the Schoenbergian, and the architectonic.  Each must be carefully turned over, its relevance to the music of the early Renaissance deciphered, and the rest, for the moment, thrown out.  From the remnants, and from a largely unguided study of the score of Josquin’s Missa L’Homme Armé Super Voces Musicales, I will attempt to construct a method which is technically and philosophically coherent with Josquin’s music.  This, hopefully, will itself provide further insight into the score.

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This video has been viewed 38,694,747 times on YouTube.

They should have cut it after 2:30.

–Paul

In the literature on Schoenberg, there is surprisingly little material that deals comprehensively with his relation to the broader intel­lectual trends of fin-de-siècle Vienna.  We are provided with snap­shots, from this angle or that; the full picture remains elusive.

The contemporary interpretations we have of Schoenberg’s relation to his Viennese milieu fall, broadly speaking, into two categories.  These categories reflect two competing interpretations of his broader musical significance, which themselves correspond to two distinct and occasionally contradictory sides of Schoenberg’s nature.  These interpretations we may call the rational-technical, and the ethical-religious.  There are also, notably, a small number of works that attempt to synthesize these two approaches, but as of yet none do full justice to their subject. It is in this field—the consideration of Schoenberg in his sometimes paradoxical totality—that the richest work remains to be done.

———

The first school of interpretation, and that which was predominant for much of the mid-twentieth century, is the rational-technical.  This itself is intimately related to the school of technical analysis which tends to address itself exclusively to the linguistic and formal elements of Schoenberg’s musical language.

The rational-technical interpretation of Schoenberg might also be called the positivist interpretation.  Those who endorse this view of Schoenberg tend to see him, where they relate him to contemporary intellectual phenomena, predominantly in the light of the logical positivism of the Wiener Kreis, or Vienna Circle, a discussion group that grew up around the philosopher Moritz Schlick.  They also, concordantly, place considerable emphasis on Schoenberg’s relation to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, the most important philosophical document of the period, and one by which the logical positivists set considerable store.

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Hannah will be playing with violinist Robin Scott in Weill Hall, Sunday afternoon, December 14 at 3:00 PM. They are playing the Schubert “Duo” Sonata in A, D.574.

Shelley and I are planning to go.  If you are in New York, please come.  It should be a nice afternoon of music; on the same program with Hannah and Robin, Lisa Stepanova and Dina Nesterenko are playing the Beethoven Violin Sonata in G, Op. 96, and the Cha Dan Trio is playing the Beethoven Trio in G, Op. 1 no. 2. 

Unfortunately, it costs money — tickets are available here.

–Paul

Update:  It was indeed a nice afternoon.  Here are the first two movements of the “Duo” — recorded a month or so earlier: 

allegromoderato.mp3

scherzo.mp3