Hemiola: It's Not Just For Hemophiliacs!

I think my title is a pun in Greek! Hemiola and hemophilia both come from ancient Greek, but from different words. Hemiola comes from ἡμιόλιος meaning "one and a half" and it refers to the practice of putting three beats where there would normally be two. Hemophilia comes from the Greek haima αἷμα 'blood' and philia φιλία 'love' and refers to a medical condition where the blood does not clot properly.

So someone who was in love with hemiola would be a "hemiolaphiliac". Or something.

Hermiola is a very interesting rhythmic effect that comes from changing the grouping of beats. We first start seeing it in Spanish music in the 16th century. It usually occurs in triple time as follows. This is from a Baxa de contrapunto by Luys de Narvaez published in 1538:

 

The hemiola occurs in the third and fourth measures when tieing the A over the barline turns two measures of 3/4 into one measure of 3/2. This became a popular way of signalling a cadence in the Baroque. But the hemiola became quite ubiquitous in Spanish music. A famous example is this Canarios by Gaspar Sanz from the 17th century:

Instead of just appearing at the end or a cadence, this alternation between two groups of three beats and three groups of two beats, shown in the example by the changing time signature from 6/8 to 3/4, happens throughout the piece. We find this a typical rhythmic effect in Spanish music. It appears at the beginning of the famous Concierto de Aranjuez for guitar and orchestra by Joaquin Rodrigo:

There are a couple of nice things about this deceptively simple opening. First of all, it is a three-measure phrase, which is unusual. It has an urgency about it that comes from squeezing the last two measures of a theoretical four-measure phrase into one. The first two measures are a typical hemiola. The third measure is a compressed version of the same hemiola! Let's listen to that opening:

Very nice. Do you hear how that third measure throws us forward? The unusual rhythmic patterns of flamenco underlie a lot of Spanish music. The history of flamenco is somewhat obscure, but undoubtedly some of its unusual handling of rhythm and timbre, by European standards, comes from the long occupation of Spain--some 700 years--by the Moors. One hemiola-related pattern in flamenco is this one:

The two layers are often clapped, but for some reason, my percussion example didn't want to be embedded. As you can see the one player keeps a steady pattern that is in 6/8 while the other plays alternating measures of 6/8 and 3/4. The effect is quite remarkable. We find this kind of pattern in, for example, the bulerias:

This is Sabicas, a real master of the bulerias. He is not actually playing the pattern I have shown above, except in bits, but you will find that you can clap it along with him.

So, that's the hemiola.

Read more »

The “Dégringolade” of It All

Dégringolade is a French word meaning to tumble down, to decline. Jacques Barzun wrote a very large book titled From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life in which he traces the fortunes of Western civilization from 1500 until now and sees that great tradition as coming to an end. Far be it from me to disagree with Jacques Barzun, one of the most educated and sage scholars of the century. We may indeed be coming to the end of at least one great phase of the Western tradition. But as this has happened a few times before, perhaps it is not so much an end as a turning point.

There are two fundamental historic attitudes toward the arts: the urge to revive the 'classical' however one may envision it, and the contrary urge to strike out in new directions. These two urges seem to be present in all times and eras. Here, for example, is a quote that demonstrates the former urge:

“I, too, used to like modern buildings, but when I began to appreciate classical ones, I came to be disgusted with the former.” The Italian architect and sculptor Antonio Filarete, writing in the 1460s and referring to Gothic buildings.

And here is a quote that shows the latter urge:

In 1558 the Italian music theorist Gioseffo Zarlino published his Le istitutioni harmoniche in which he commented "At present it is hardly possible to find an instance of fugal writing that has not been used a thousand million times by other composers."

At any given moment one can bemoan that we are stuck in a rut and just regurgitating what has been done before and simply must find new approaches. Or one can bemoan that we are sinking into decadence and barbarism and must rediscover the classical ideals and values. The Renaissance, ironically enough, in an attempt to revive classical ideals, instead managed to start Western culture in entirely new directions. Attempting to revive the Greek practice of musical accompaniment to tragedies, they invented opera.

I think we are at a potentially very interesting and possibly fruitful moment in the history of Western music. After a century of constant innovation and breaking with tradition, I think now is the time to consolidate. This is not at all the same as being reactionary. One can never return to a previous era and every time you attempt to revive something, you probably end up inventing something new, just as many attempts to invent something new end up as tiresome repetitions of something that came before.

But what an incredible storehouse of styles, idioms and techniques the 20th century has left us! There is so much there that can be explored and rediscovered. As a very modest example, when I set out to write a song on a poem by the 8th century Chinese poet Li Po, one line in the poem made me choose a technique often used by John Cage: the preparation of one string of the guitar so as to make a bell-like sound. The result is a piece with an unusual flavor:

Another example might be this piece by Osvaldo Golijov, titled Tenebrae which is a reinterpretation of music by François Couperin:

There are so many possibilities. I feel that what is important is reviving aesthetics rather than technique as a guide. So much of the last century was a frantic search for the new, regardless of whether it was good or bad, that now it is time to sort it all out--in individual ways, of course. Time to re-examine styles and ideas of the past, seek out interesting juxtapositions and relearn the aesthetics of music.

Here is another example: a piece for violin and piano titled Aria by Kevin Puts that combines a violin line that tends to the romantic with a minimal piano accompaniment. The result is neither romantic nor modern but something else. It is that aesthetic "something else" that is interesting, I think.

Read more »

Respect for Musicians

Now that I am retired as a professional performing musician, I think I can speak up for them without it being categorized as "special pleading". I really hate special pleading which Wikipedia defines as follows:

Special pleading, also known as stacking the deck, ignoring the counterevidence, slanting, and one-sided assessment, is a form of spurious argument where a position in a dispute introduces favourable details or excludes unfavourable details by alleging a need to apply additional considerations without proper criticism of these considerations. Essentially, this involves someone attempting to cite something as an exemption to a generally accepted rule, principle, etc. without justifying the exemption.

This is, of course, a standard way of argument among salespeople, corporations in general and politicians. I guess they all failed to notice that it is a spurious argument!

But now I think I can speak up for musicians who do not have an easy time of it. In the past, while it was always a difficult vocation to follow, there was at least a fundamental respect for classical musicians. At least that was my impression growing up. Nowadays that seems to be fading. I cite two recent events. From Slipped Disc:

Customs officials at Frankfurt Airport have now stopped a Chinese violinist, Feng Ning, and confiscated the 1721 Stradivarius he was carrying. He is facing a demand for 19 percent of its value, approximately 700,000 Euros.
The seizure has made headlines in Bild, reinforcing the impression that musicians of Asian extraction are being targeted at one particular airport. This is the fourth known incident in less than six months, clearly no coincidence.
Musicians are advised to avoid Frankfurt Airport until the German customs authorities conform to the guidelines practised elsewhere in the EU.

From The Strad:

A rare Heinrich Knopf bow belonging to Alban Gerhardt was damaged by security officers as he entered the US. In what the cellist called ‘an act of brutal and careless behaviour’, the bow stick (left) was snapped in two, over the bridge of the cello, by air security staff at O'Hare International Airport, Chicago, as they examined the case’s contents.

According to Gerhardt, ‘The bow must have somehow moved halfway out of its cover (the tip was still in the cover), and when it was halfway out, [Transportation Security Administration workers] forced the case shut and the bow broke.’ The incident occurred on 6 February, a day before Gerhardt was due to perform Prokofiev’s Symphony–Concerto with the Madison Symphony Orchestra in Madison, Wisconsin.

Gerhardt had also brought a Baroque bow in the case, for a subsequent concert in New York, but for the Prokofiev he was obliged to borrow a bow from Uri Vardi, a cellist and teacher at the University of Wisconsin School of Music.

We have a photo:

I'm sure every string player reading this feels the pain of seeing a fine instrument mistreated

Musicians must spend many years of selfless dedication to learn their craft. Then they must somehow acquire an expensive instrument to perform on. And after all this, most musicians earn only very modest salaries. A few superstars earn seven figure incomes, while 90% of musicians consider themselves lucky to earn the equivalent of a low-ranking civil servant's pay.

Why do they do this? The main reason is out of a love of music. A secondary reason might be that a musician's life, while often insecure, is more interesting and challenging than that of a worker in a more typical job.

Musicians really deserve our respect for the effort and dedication they put into what they do. But I sense that this is less and less true. Don't the two incidents above demonstrate this? Sure, they are somewhat isolated and anecdotal, but indicative nonetheless. As classical music occupies less and less of public space, the level of respect diminishes. Fewer and fewer people even know what classical musicians do and how they do it.

Maybe we need to speak out.

Here is the cellist whose bow was broken, Alban Gerhardt, playing the first movement of the Dvořák Cello Concerto. The soloist enters at the 3:30 mark:

Read more »

Active vs Passive

I just ran across this fascinating quote on the Ghost of a Flea:

"But the problem with readers, the idea we’re given of reading is that the model of a reader is the person watching a film, or watching television. So the greatest principle is, 'I should sit here and I should be entertained.' And the more classical model, which has been completely taken away, is the idea of a reader as an amateur musician. An amateur musician who sits at the piano, has a piece of music, which is the work, made by somebody they don’t know, who they probably couldn’t comprehend entirely, and they have to use their skills to play this piece of music. The greater the skill, the greater the gift that you give the artist and that the artist gives you. That’s the incredibly unfashionable idea of reading. And yet when you practice reading, and you work at a text, it can only give you what you put into it. It’s an old moral, but it’s completely true."
- From an interview with novelist Zadie Smith on KCRW's Bookworm program

Yes, yes, exactly! Anything worth reading you are going to find yourself interacting with in this way. Take a dialogue by Plato, for example. The Euthyphro is a good one. The only way to read it is to engage with it. And with music, for example, when I listen to music it is always a more superficial activity than when I play music or study the score. Sitting down and playing through a piece of music is a very engaged activity as is reading the score.

Those clips on YouTube that include the score are quite a nice idea...

Read more »

Instinctive Composition

One of the most interesting and puzzling questions about music composition is whether it is instinctive or planned. A great deal of what we do in music is rehearsed in meticulous detail. As a visual analog to this, just look at the dancing in a recent music video:

Every detail is precisely calculated in both the dance and the song itself. But of course there was inspiration as well in the original kernel of the idea of the song, "single ladies" and in the decisions about the bare synthesized arrangement. But once these few creative choices were made, the rest was largely execution.

I'm writing about this because of an interesting comment left on my post "Long Lines of Winter Light", which was about a piece of mine for guitar orchestra. The commentor mentioned a fondness for "instinctive" music, which my piece certainly was. I can't trace how I wrote it (it was quite a few years ago), but I do know it was not planned out. I just had the idea of writing a lot of short little ideas, putting them in boxes and arranging them like a flow chart. The most planned part was how I conducted it because I rehearsed the orchestra in different ways until I found a way of organizing the piece that was musically satisfying. The score for that piece is just a box of tools that you can use to create a piece.

But the instinctive way doesn't always work. I probably have boxes and piles of instinctive scribblings that never gelled into a piece. Out of five pieces I write, or start to write, probably four are failures. I keep them, in case a little idea or motif can prove useful in some other context.

So that's me. What about other composers? A lot of them, like Stravinsky, either don't reveal much, or lie a lot about what they do. Others, like Bartók, are pretty clear about what they were doing. In his case, the influence of folk song and some mathematical ideas like the Fibonacci sequence are traceable in how he structures a piece. Others, like Schoenberg in his later music, are all too planned out. The 12-tone method is really a way of achieving theoretical unity through intense planning. His early music seems to be instinctive, but one cannot be sure...

Beethoven's way of working is one of the most interesting. He sketched and sketched and worked on and hammered out themes for years sometimes. There are whole books written about Beethoven's sketchbooks--many of which have been preserved. Here is a little sample:

When I do this, it usually results in a turgid mess. But it worked for Beethoven. Somehow, he could work on a piece exhaustively without it sounding belabored. Most of my music is better if I don't over-work it. I was reading about a composer who seems to represent the opposite extreme from Beethoven: he simply writes and writes and writes, never going back and never correcting. Apart from recalling he was English, I can't remember the composer's name.

Let's listen to some music by Beethoven. His Diabelli variations were written in two sessions, first in the spring of 1819. But then he ceased work on them in early 1820 and only picked them up again in mid-1822. They were finished in 1823. Again, whole books have been written on this piece of music and the process of composition. Here are the Diabelli Variations: one hour of simply terrifyingly brilliant music performed by the great Grigory Sokolov:

Mozart, on the other hand, just seemed to write down perfect music as if angels were dictating to him...

Read more »

Bach vs Beethoven

Most lists of the greatest composers start with two names: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 - 1750) and Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 - 1827). Usually Bach is first and Beethoven is second as in the list that the music critic for the New York Times came up with a few years ago.

J. S. Bach

Ludwig van Beethoven

I've been writing a lot of program notes lately and every time I have to write notes on Bach or Beethoven I try to write something different. It keeps bringing me back to who these two composers are, what makes them stand out. They are very different figures. Bach is the master craftsman. To this very day, music students study how Bach handled harmony. A decade or so after he died, in 1764, people (among them the scholar F. W. Marpurg and Bach's son C. P. E. Bach) started putting together a collection of Bach's chorale harmonizations. The collection, revised many times over the years, finally comprised 371 chorale harmonizations and 69 chorale melodies with figured bass. The melodies were not original with Bach, but traditional Lutheran hymns; Bach just contributed the harmonies. This collection has remained in print ever since and I have a copy on my desk as I write this. I suspect it is the longest-running music publication ever, now almost in its 250th year. It is still in print because Bach is universally recognized as the great master of harmony.

Beethoven is rather a different figure. Rather than summing up, perfecting, gathering together all the musical traditions of his day, as Bach did, Beethoven challenged every tradition, delved into the depths of the structure of music and reconstructed it from the ground up. Bach was the master craftsman, Beethoven the perpetual revolutionary. Bach built towering edifices of music, brick by brick. Beethoven created dynamic structures where every element is being constantly dissolved and re-created. Let's find some examples before my prose spins off into the mystic!

Here is the chorale "Jesu, joy of man's desiring" from Cantata 147 by Bach. It is one of his most famous pieces, a setting for choir and orchestra of a traditional hymn.

Beethoven creates an entirely different kind of musical world. Here is one of his most famous pieces, the first movement of his piano sonata op 27 no. 2, nicknamed the "Moonlight":

The feeling of solidity, of mastery, is also evident in more expansive pieces by Bach, such as his Magnificat. Here is the opening section:

While the dynamic energy of Beethoven, that always seems about to tear the music apart, is also evident in larger pieces. Here is the first movement of his 5th Symphony as an example:

Ever since Beethoven's example, the "composer as revolutionary" model has tended to prevail. Most 20th century composers saw themselves as revolutionaries, not master craftsman. This may be about to change as perpetual revolution tends to lead to chaos and fewer ticket sales! My personal feeling is that I am inclined, as a composer, to look back at all the crazy things that were done in the last hundred years and see what interesting things can be adopted or salvaged. For example, in my setting of a poem by Li Po for voice and guitar, I took my cue from a mention of "bells of frost" in the poem to use an idea from John Cage. I have the guitarist put a paper clip on the sixth string of the guitar which creates a very unusual and unexpected sound, much like a bell. This single element gives the song another dimension. Here is the result:

Read more »

Townsend: Long Lines of Winter Light

Way back in September 2011 I put up a post called "History of a Composition" that discussed a piece I wrote for guitar orchestra. I have just come across a recording of that piece so I have prepared a clip of it. The original inspiration was simple need: I had a large guitar ensemble and it was so difficult getting them to play exactly together that I thought I would write a piece where they never had to!

I knew about "moment form" so I wrote a piece called "Forms" that consisted of a series of boxes arranged like a flowchart. You started at the top and followed the lines. There were ten numbered levels so you could just go through playing each level in sequence. Most levels had options: you could choose from three or four different musical ideas. Since I conducted the piece, that allowed me to make choices as well. By signaling I could tell specific players to play specific levels. For example, the first level is a snare-drum effect. By crossing the two lowest strings over one another and strumming, you can make the guitar sound a lot like a snare drum. What I liked to do was to recall this level later on in the piece, so it sounds like chaos is going to overcome. Of course, every performance will be different, but the conductor can shape how it unfolds in various ways. The score is like a toolbox for building a piece and the conductor--with the players--can build a different piece every time.

About the title: as I said, the original title was just "Forms". I had an inspiration one day walking by the ocean and looking at the late afternoon light shining on the Sooke hills. Sooke is a village and adjacent wilderness area near Victoria, British Columbia, on Vancouver Island. My idea was a piece for "string quartet" of mandolin, banjo, guitar and double bass and the title that came to mind was "Long Lines of Winter Light Falling Gently Across the Sooke Hills"! Well, I never got around to writing that piece, so I appropriated the title for this piece.

A few years ago a Swedish publisher put out an edition of three pieces of mine for guitar orchestra which included this piece. On the clip I have the front cover of the publication, the two pages of the score of this piece and three pictures of the Sooke hills. Oh, and a photo of me about the time I wrote this piece. Here it is:

Read more »