John Cage: Third Construction (1941)

Readers of this blog know that I'm not usually a big fan of John Cage (1912 - 1992). Sometimes I cite him as an example of the questionably fashionable in 20th century avant-garde music. But the other day I heard a very interesting piece by John Cage that made me stop and listen to the whole thing.

In the years 1939 to 1942 Cage was working at the Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle, Washington and touring the West Coast with a percussion ensemble he and Lou Harrison had founded. He wrote a series of three pieces for percussion entitled First Construction, Second Construction and Third Construction. The third one, composed in 1941, has become a classic of the percussion repertoire. One site discusses it as follows:

John Cage's Third Construction, composed in 1941, follows a scheme similar to that the composer used in the First Construction (1939) and Second Construction (1940). Noting the effect of tonality upon traditional aspects of form (e.g. the central role of harmonic progression in a sonata-allegro or rondo movement), Cage sought to create an infrastructure that could similarly be applied to nonpitched percussion instruments. The result was what has been termed "micro/macrocosmic structure" -- that is, a structure in which the whole is reflected in the individual parts.

The First and Second Constructions were both built upon sixteen cycles of sixteen bars each. In the Third Construction, Cage employes a somewhat more elaborate scheme of twenty-four cycles of twenty-four bars each. Within this controlled structure Cage freely exercises other variables. While the length of sections is determined by the macro/micro principal, the rhythmic patterns within the structure create an intricate, multilayered web; Cage's singular timbral sense provides another source of variation and interest.

The four performers called for in the Third Construction play a large and varied battery of exotic instruments, including a teponaxtle (Aztec log drum), quijadas (jawbone rattle), lion's roar (a washtub with a small hole through which a rope is noisily pulled), and an assortment of cymbals, shakers, claves, tom-toms, and tin cans. By combining the endless possibilities of percussion colors and rhythms within a controlled, telescopic structure, Cage creates a work that is continually surprising yet holistically unified.

That certainly gives us some clues, but not quite enough to confirm what the ear hears: the piece seems to be constructed from rhythmic canons. One phrase seems to end with a distinctive triplet. But the structure is complex enough that it is unclear on a couple of listenings just how it is put together. There is a fascinating paper on early music by Cage by Jesse Guessford that discusses the structure of the First Construction and from it we learn that there are cycles, or 'circles' as Cage calls them, of rhythmic motifs rather than canons. The concept is perhaps Asian in origin. Here are some examples of rhythmic "circles" from the First Construction. The Third Construction uses the same kind of structures, but in larger patterns of 24 instead of 16 parts. UPDATE: For some reason, my example won't appear. It is on page 19 of the paper I linked to above, so you will have to go there. The example just shows short rhythmic patterns.

The notion of the 'circle' is just to indicate that if you have four motifs, 1234, you can repeat or retrograde the series, but you can't jump, say, from 2 to 4.

So Percussion are particularly accomplished performers of this music to the point that they perform it from memory! Here is a fascinating clip where they demonstrate a rehearsal technique: singing their parts instead of playing them:

There are three other clips in this series, but I will let you discover them on your own. I want to get right to a performance. It was this clip of So Percussion playing the Third Construction that caught my interest. Most percussion pieces are hard to listen to for very long. But this one kept my attention for the whole ten minutes. I even listened to other performances and was pleased to discover that there is a percussion group at McGill, my alma mater, that also does a fine job. The thing about this piece that interested me was the subtle range of timbres, the obvious structural unity and the delicacy of the sound. Here is So Percussion performing Cage's Third Construction:

Something almost unheard of is that So Percussion has done a number of other videos in which they discuss the piece in some detail. For example, here is the first player, Jason Trueting, discussing his part and the choice of instruments.

The Third Construction was written when Cage was a young man, in his late 20s. It is a period not closely studied by historians as it is his later works from his time in New York that attract more attention. In any case, I was delighted to discover this piece, a unique and worthwhile addition to the 20th century repertoire.

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Schoenberg, Berg, Webern

I left things hanging a bit with my last post on Schoenberg. Let me see if I can wrap things up, provisionally at least. My exploration of classical music in the early days was partly guided by reading some library books and the purchase of recordings. One led to the other, of course. For some reason, the tiny municipal library I had access to had several books on 20th century music. In retrospect the interesting thing about these books was their relatively uniform view on the ideology of 20th century music. From these books I took for granted both who were the important figures (Schoenberg, Webern, Berg) and the context for understanding why: technical progress in new ways of writing music.

I accepted this paradigm for a long time and only much later did I really started to doubt it. I think the first inkling of a problem came in undergraduate music when I was in the listening library one day sampling some new music recordings. I happened to put on a disc of some Stockhausen for multiple orchestras (Carré or something) and followed it with Drumming by Steve Reich. The Reich was much more interesting and made a larger impact for me because it was not maximalizing dissonance and complexity! Well, according to the aesthetic parameters that I had learned regarding 20th century music, that was just wrong!

Technical progress in writing music is a very problematical concept as soon as you start to unpack it. For one thing it tends to place music in the same realm as science: research and development of new musical ideas. Milton Babbitt is the locus classicus for this viewpoint; another prominent practitioner is Pierre Boulez. Let's listen to some Babbitt. Here is his Composition for Four Instruments from 1948:

How are you supposed to listen to that? Are you supposed to hear the structure? Do you have to listen with the score? Should you study the score first? What kind of aesthetic experience could you have? Also, I have to point out that, there are a distressingly large number of pieces in this genre that all sound the same to me: the disjointed, fragmentary rhythms, the wide leaps in the melody, the huge changes in dynamics, the chopped off phrases--it all adds up to the same aesthetic effect. For me.

This is music that seems to be focussed only on the process of creating it. The syntax of it. The aesthetic effect is somewhat secondary. But it wasn't always so. If we go back to Schoenberg, Berg and Webern, two of the three always seemed to have also have a semantic or content side as well. In his early works such as Verklärte Nacht or Pierrot Lunaire or even the Six Little Piano Pieces, op 19, Schoenberg has a great deal of 'content'. Later on, he seems to have less and less, though there are exceptions such as his unfinished opera Moses und Aron. Some of his content seems to be related to issues surrounding his Jewish identity and the rise of anti-semitism in Nazi Germany. In other words, extra-musical events.

Schoenberg's student Alban Berg seems to have even more leaned towards the 'content' aspect and away from the structural aspect. His Lyric Suite for string quartet, long thought to be simply abstract music, turned out to have a rather detailed secret program referring to an affair between Berg and Hanna Fuchs-Robettin. Here is the first movement to give you a sense of the music:

While written using 12-tone procedures, that music certainly has an expressive 'content' in the sense I am using the word. Berg, as the author of two successful operas, Wozzeck and Lulu, has a strong sense of theater in his music. This has not ever been discussed to my knowledge, but his Violin Concerto contains instructions to the orchestra to perform certain actions onstage--again, the result is a kind of theatre. Mind you, I have not noticed any orchestras actually enacting these instructions! But they are there.

Anton Webern went in quite the opposite direction: he has the least 'content' of the three and his music seems to be the most concerned solely with the technical aspects of composition. It is hard to imagine a 'secret program' in any of Webern's pieces! Here is his String Quartet, Op 28:

I think you can hear how that is going to lead directly to Babbitt and Boulez. After the war the choice was made in places where composition was being taught, like Darmstadt, to follow the example of Webern and not the example of Berg. We might speculate that with the just past horrors of the war, the last thing anyone wanted was aesthetic content! On the other hand, this didn't seem to stop people like Shostakovich from writing content-full music after the war. But in Western Europe and North America, the ideology of music composition was to take Webern as a model and stress the syntax of music while ignoring the semantic. Even though this model has begun to break down there are still places that turn out composition students who seem to follow it.

If I might inflict on you a metaphorical way to distinguish Schoenberg from his students I could compare Schoenberg himself to a hearty dish like wienerschnitzel which would make Alban Berg a Sachertorte and Anton Webern, well, schnapps!

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Schoenberg and Pierrot Lunaire

I was talking about Schoenberg with a friend yesterday and mentioned that a) he is a very important figure historically and b) that his music has often been known to drive away audiences. My friend clearly had difficulty reconciling these two things! The reason is that the role of music in society in the early 21st century is radically different than it was at the beginning of the 20th century. What with all the fuss over the 100th anniversary of the Rite of Spring this year, I'm almost surprised that more mention has not been made of this. "Almost" surprised because it is pretty clear that we live in a time that has little historical awareness.

The 'a' and 'b' of Schoenberg are difficult to reconcile for us because we can't really imagine someone being musically important who doesn't sell a lot of records. This has largely been the standard since the Beatles. I love their music, most of it, but I recognize that they were instrumental in shaping the changed musical world we live in where popularity is the most important criteria for the evaluation of musical quality. If you don't have a 'hit', your aesthetic worth is seriously in question. Stravinsky knew this and made sure to have some 'hits' including the Rite of Spring. But Schoenberg was coming out of a quite different aesthetic tradition. Born in Vienna, he felt the great weight of the Viennese tradition in music. He carried on his back, his entire career, the burden of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and before them, Bach.

For these figures, music was an important aspect of society. It expressed important things about humanity and God and the nature of reality. All through the 19th century this was heightened by philosophers and thinkers like Arthur Schopenhauer. Music became the highest of the arts, most able to express the deepest inner feelings of humanity. As the century wore on, enormous, world-encompassing musical compositions like Wagner's operas and Mahler's symphonies were written to embody the profound significance of music.

In my last post I excerpted two pieces by Schoenberg in which he more or less extends this tradition. But he was fated to be one of those to break decisively with the past. Instead of more gigantic orchestral works, he was going to go on a different direction and this was signaled by choosing smaller instrumental forces and by writing music that no longer had a clear tonality.

Perhaps the most unusual piece Schoenberg wrote was his setting of 21 poems by Albert Giraud for singer and small instrumental group (piano, flute/piccolo, clarinet/bass clarinet, violin/viola and cello) called Pierrot Lunaire, completed in 1912. Pierrot is often described as a melodrama, a recitation with musical accompaniment, as the voice uses an odd sort of half-sung, half-spoken style called sprechstimme. The instrumental group is ironically and intentionally modeled on a cabaret orchestra. Some of the devices of modernism used to separate itself from the idealistic, naturalistic romantic tradition were irony, pastiche, detachment and incongruity--Pierrot has these in spades!

Here is the English translation of the text of the poem used for the first piece:

The wine that through the eyes is drunk,
at night the moon pours down in torrents,
until a spring-flood overflows
the silent far horizon.

Desires, shuddering and sweet,
are swimming through the flood unnumbered!
The wine that through the eyes is drunk,
at night the moon pours down in torrents.

The poet, whom devotion drives,
grows tipsy on the sacred liquor,
to heaven turning his enraptured gaze
and reeling, sucks and slurps
the wine that through the eyes is drunk.

Each song uses a different instrumentation. For the first one, apart from the voice, there is flute, violin, cello and piano. Now let's listen:

That little piano ostinato figure that we hear at the beginning is the material that ties the whole piece together. This figure outlines a whole-tone scale which is completed by the violin. This is not tonal music, but rather atonal music. But that certainly does not mean unstructured music! Indeed not. Part of Schoenberg's burden was to find a way of writing music that would live up to the high standards of coherence set by his predecessors, Bach and Beethoven. At this stage, still searching for a method, he would write music from pure intuition then struggle mightily to analyze how it was put together!

There is a kind of unique eeriness to the music of Schoenberg and his circle from this time that I savor. It slides around with ambiguous murkiness, giving one chills as each new strange facet is revealed. For this kind of music, the best approach is to listen several times until you start to feel familiar with the music. It has a density that takes time to absorb. Here is all of the first group of seven songs of Pierrot with the score. Have a listen.

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Arnold Schoenberg and Modernism

Arnold Schoenberg is a very, very complex figure. He is of enormous importance in the history of music in the 20th century, the founder of the "Second Viennese School" that I talked about here. Let me illustrate Schoenberg's complexity with three images. First, the stern, serious composer of modern music:

Second, a self-portrait (Schoenberg was also a painter), showing a more tortured, expressionist side:

Third, an image of Pierrot, the sad clown from the 17th century Italian commedia dell'arte, from the eponymous character of the poems by Albert Giraud that Schoenberg chose to set in one of his most famous pieces: Pierrot Lunaire:

In addition to these three facets we could add others: the German nationalist who said that his discovery of the 12-tone method would assure the dominance of German music for the next hundred years; the charismatic teacher who numbered as students not only Alban Berg and Anton Webern, but also the philosopher Theodor Adorno and even the American composer John Cage; the brilliant theorist who wrote Harmonielehre and the collection of essays Style and Idea; the painter of considerable ability; the Jewish emigrant from Nazi Germany who settled in Los Angeles and even considered writing music for films.

Here is a quote from Schoenberg: When asked by students in class to define "good" music, Schoenberg said: "If you arrange a piece of music for zither and it still sounds good, that's good music."

Schoenberg is often accused of being the only composer who is guaranteed to empty any concert hall, but I think that is unfair. I know quite a few composers that could empty a concert hall or two!

I have a feeling that this post about Schoenberg is going to become two or three, so let me start with his early music. Born in 1874, he grew up surrounded by the last stage of German Romanticism and his early music, such as the Gurre-Lieder was influenced by Wagner and Mahler. Here is just the orchestral prelude to part one:

That was rather lovelier than you expected, wasn't it? He began composing the Gurre-Lieder in 1900, but the orchestration was not completed until 1913. A mere six years later than beginning them, he wrote a piece for chamber orchestra that showed a considerable change in style. Here is the first part of the Kammersymphonie, op 9:

Schoenberg himself regarded this piece as the first step towards a new style and I think we can certainly hear a change in atmosphere, a disturbance coming from the depths. There was a great deal more change to come and I will turn to that in my next post on Schoenberg.

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The Second Viennese School

The very use of the name "Second Viennese School" is an act of hubris, marketing and ideology. The reference is to an imagined "First Viennese School" consisting of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven who were not really a 'school', though they were loosely connected and shared a number of stylistic traits. The Second Viennese School was Arnold Schoenberg and two of his students, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. The ideological strategy is to claim that these three are as central to music in the first half of the 20th century as Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven were to music in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Alas, that is probably not the case.

Arnold Schoenberg

For the Viennese classicists the only real rivals were Italian opera composers, especially Rossini. Otherwise, they were very much the highest standard in music of the time. But Schoenberg and his students faced considerable competition from other aesthetic and technical approaches. They were not the only game in town. The most important other schools of thought were the modern French composers such as Ravel, Debussy and Messaien, the Germans who were still writing tonal music such as Richard Strauss, the Hungarians such as Bela Bartok and a few isolated figures like Jean Sibelius, the great Finnish symphonist. But the biggest rival was the Russian Igor Stravinsky who had achieved great fame and popularity while still retaining his modernist 'street cred'.

Igor Stravinsky

The problem for  Schoenberg and his students was that while they had developed a new method of writing music that Schoenberg fondly hoped would assure the ascendency of German music for the next hundred years, none of the pieces written in this new style had or were going to achieve much in the way of popular acceptance. To this day probably the most performed piece by Schoenberg is his very early Verklärte Nacht and none of Webern's music has achieved wide recognition. Alban Berg is the exception: his operas Wozzeck and Lulu and some other pieces such as his Lyric Suite for string quartet have won quite a bit of praise and renown.

Anton Webern

Alban Berg

I am going to discuss each composer separately in future posts. For now, let's end with that early piece by Schoenberg that is in late Romantic style, Verklärte Nacht:

There are a few strange things about that piece that I will take up in my post on Schoenberg...

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John Cage at 100

I have posted on John Cage before, but I just read an interesting essay on him by Daniel Asia. I also read a rebuttal to the essay in NewMusicBox and a whole series of comments on it. The first thing I notice is that while Daniel Asia gives a fairly detailed, though not technical, series of reasons why he thinks Cage is not an important composer, Dan Joseph in NewMusicBox, does not give what I consider musical reasons why Cage is important, restricting himself to remarks about the diversity of modernism and if you disagree you are "mean-spirited". And I really don't care too much about Cage's contribution to an American musical identity. I'm not an American. As a Canadian who lives in Mexico, I'm not a nationalist of any kind for that matter. So let me weigh in on John Cage.

Let's start with the first part of the Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano, a piece a lot of commentors have said is their favorite Cage:

It's not Mozart! Sorry, couldn't resist. The thing is that I am not unsympathetic to Cage's aesthetic. There was a time, perhaps twenty years ago, when I was very much a Cage admirer. Though even then I found his writings ON music to be more interesting than his writing OF music. I contemplated giving a performance of some of his talks on music. I even wrote at least one piece very strongly influenced by his aesthetic. But as time went on, I'm afraid I have become an apostate of Cage's aesthetic as I don't believe it is a musical aesthetic at all. I can't quite agree with Daniel Asia when he says that "Sonatas and Interludes offers many movements that add up to no perceivable aural structure." The different movements each have a character that is largely rhythmic. Sonata IV, for example, is full of "fiveness" if I can call it that: a lot of quintuplets and time signatures involving 5.

Imagine you want a career as a modernist composer, but you have no real sense of harmony or melody. Your gifts, such as they are, lie in the area of rhythm. Writing for prepared piano, where screws and bolts alter the pitch to the point that it is really not possible to analyze the harmonic structure, is your way to avoid being evaluated in areas you are weak. It's brilliant, really! But it is a kind of aesthetic fraud. Is this what Cage did? I have no idea, I just present the possibility. Here is the second part of the Sonatas and Interludes:

When I was in my Cage phase, I can't say that I was thinking musical thoughts as such. Perhaps 'sound' thoughts or 'sonic' thoughts, but not musical thoughts as such. Cage presents, and intends to present, a huge challenge to aesthetics. But I think that the answer to the challenge is found by listening to his music. It is a simulacrum of music, to steal an idea from Baudrillard, a shadowy copy of music. One of the sonatas sounds like a horribly crippled prelude by Debussy, for example. You can listen to this music and enjoy it and have some kind of experience, but I have to agree with Daniel Asia, it is ultimately frustrating for the reasons he gives: "The emotional landscape is limited and proscribed, ultimately wan and shadowy."

The reasons for this are obvious: Cage was not writing music as such, he was creating a facsimile of music without harmony or melody, without anything but chance sounds within a rhythmic framework. Of course there is no narrative! For one of his talks, he wrote a talk, then cut it up and mixed the pieces randomly. There is not supposed to be a narrative in Cage. But writing music the way he did is to create, at best--at best--a private language, one that we are not privy to. For that reason, it fails as music. Here is part 3 of the Sonatas and Interludes:

But listen and make up your own mind, by all means. Just don't assume it is a musical success simply because everyone and his dog is putting on a John Cage concert for the centenary.

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"Radical New Musical Languages"

Reading Alex Ross' blog this morning I notice that he is giving several talks inspired by his book The Rest is Noise.

On January 19th, The Rest Is Noise, a year-long festival inspired by the book of the same title, opens at Southbank Centre in London. I'll give four allied lectures over the course of the year; the first of these, "The Big Bang," is at noon on the 19th, in Queen Elizabeth Hall. It will survey the emergence of radical new musical languages in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Expect audio snippets of Debussy, Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Bartók, and many others, though Salome, featured that night at the London Philharmonic, will be the center of attention.

I think it may be time to have a closer look at the book, which seems to be having quite an influence on the way people look at music. But can you pick out the words in the above quote that caused my hackles to rise? Sure you can; I picked them for my title: "radical new musical languages." What's wrong with that?

Underneath the cool exterior and mellifluous writing style, Alex Ross is, I suspect, deeply conventional. He is not really a musicologist, but rather a journalist. But since musicologists these days are chasing one another down various rabbit holes, Alex Ross tends to fulfill the function of a public intellectual in music. Richard Taruskin is another, but as he sometimes expresses unusual, contrary opinions, he is less popular with the mass media. Alex Ross, however, seems more and more popular, so I think I will take a run through The Rest is Noise to see what assumptions he is operating under. In the meantime, though, let's just deconstruct that phrase "radical new musical languages."

That was most certainly not what was happening in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. You may recall that on several occasions I have made the seemingly trivial point that music is NOT a language? Have a look here and here and here for some examples. Most of the time when people refer to music as a language they are simply making a metaphor and there is no real problem with it. But if someone is not aware that it is nothing but a metaphor, then some strange conclusions appear. You might start thinking that a composer can simply invent a new musical language. If music were a language, then that would simply not be possible for the very same reason that I cannot invent a new language. (Let me qualify that: of course, I can invent a new language. People have done so and Esperanto is an example. But these invented 'languages' are not languages in the sense that they are used by any community of humans. The most you could say is that someone invented the framework for a language--which was then ignored. Languages evolve naturally, they are not 'invented'.)

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein came up with a very famous argument about why you can't invent your own private language, known as the private language argument. The concept of a language understood by only one person is incoherent: it violates the very notion of a language, a central concept of which is shared meaning. A language is a language if it has words and a dictionary you can look them up in. Now of course there are languages that are not even written, but they have the equivalent of dictionaries in tribal elders: "Grandma, what does "spadoinkle" mean?" If the idea of a private language is incoherent, then it would follow that all language is essentially public: that language is at its core a social phenomenon.

Music is also, at its core, a social phenomenon. Think about what that means for a moment. One consequence is that you cannot simply invent a new musical 'language'. While music is not a 'language', it has some language-like qualities. One of these is that it is a social phenomenon, perhaps a bit more so than the other arts. Take for example two fundamental kinds of music-making: singing and dancing. I talked about this here. Both song and dance are social. We sing words to other people to communicate with them. We prefer to dance with other people rather than alone for the same reason. Just what you communicate when you sing or dance with another might be hard to put into words, but the communication itself is undeniable.

So I think the consequence of all this is that a composer cannot simply invent a radical new musical language, though he can do something perhaps a bit less radical in re-shaping the way music is structured in some fundamental way. This is what those composers Alex Ross mentioned were doing. If you take a close look at Debussy you will see the music absolutely permeated on every level with the fundamental elements of tonal music. But you will also see how he has re-thought and re-shaped these elements.

Well, enough for today on this. Let's end with some Debussy so you can see what I mean.

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Music, the Mundane and the Progressive

One of my commentors, Nathan Shirley, remarked on this post (how music is not the soundtrack to your life) that "Music, like any art is the polar opposite of the mundane." This got me thinking. Mundane has two meanings:

Lacking interest or excitement; dull. Of this earthly world rather than a heavenly or spiritual one.

I wonder which he intended? Could have been both, of course. Music as an art, as opposed to a commercial commodity, should not lack interest, should not be dull. But music also seems to have a quality that takes you out of the ordinary world, the mundane in the second sense. The thing is that the history of music in the 20th century shows composers striving to be not mundane by being 'progressive' in a special sense.

Usually this is talked about in a technical sense: the composers of the "music of the future" rejected the methods of the music of the past. This wasn't just a trend in music, of course, as the Italian futurists demonstrate. Their ideological position was that all music of the past, that is music up until their moment in history, was mundane. They hated any and all musical traditions, calling them mediocre and conservative. Though none of the music of these early Futurists has become part of the repertoire, they were a big influence on later composers. The tools that they emphasized were percussion instruments, especially unusual ones, and the use of machines. This led directly to the music of Edgar Varése, Igor Stravinsky and John Cage among many, many others. As the Futurist movement began in 1909 and continued through the First World War, it set the tone for a great deal of musical progressivism in the 20th century. Ironically, viewed from this angle the music of the Second Viennese School was actually an extension of the musical conservatism of the past! When Arnold Schoenberg developed his serial method of composing atonal music in the 1920s, it was actually an attempt to preserve some musical traditions (the use of pitched notes in a contrapuntal context) against the excessive radicalism of the Italians.

After several decades of experimental, percussive, atonal progressivism in music, exhaustion set in and composers started going in the opposite direction. By the 1960s, one of the most radical things you could do was write a piece in C major, so Terry Riley did just that with his "In C" the very first minimal composition. Even Shostakovich could write something with a minimal flavour. His last string quartet, dating from 1974, begins with an adagio that seems almost frozen in time. He told the quartet players to play it so that flies would drop out of the air and people in the audience die of boredom. This is, of course, a sample of Shostakovich's sense of humor, but the movement is minimal indeed.

Let's listen to one of the few pieces that are part of the Futurist tradition and has a place in the repertoire: George Anteil's Ballet Mécanique:

And now that movement from the 15th String Quartet of Shostakovich:

If you have listened to both pieces all the way through, ask yourself the following questions:

• Which is more 'mundane'?
• Which is more 'progressive'?
• Which takes you out of the ordinary world?
• Which is the better composition?

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The Case of Stravinsky

I think that the first serious piece of music I ever heard was the Rite of Spring by Stravinsky. I can't be positive, but way back in grade 7 or 8 a substitute teacher played a recording of something wild for us and I have the dim feeling it was the Rite. Junior High is pretty late to be hearing serious music for the first time, but I grew up in a very isolated part of Canada where 'music education', if present at all, consisted of singing "The Caissons Keep Rolling Along" with piano accompaniment if the teacher could play, without if she or he could not. No, really! Radio, well there was CBC AM, but all I can remember is the farm report "hog bellies up 2/10ths this morning..." No, really! But back to Stravinsky. Here is the Wikipedia article.

It is odd, but the two 20th century composers that loom largest in my mind are both Russian: Stravinsky and Shostakovich. Very different, of course. Stravinsky was the big success story of 20th century composers. Often compared to Picasso, he experienced early and continuous success throughout his career. He was the only 20th century composer that the ordinary person was sure to have heard of. Much of this was Stravinsky's masterful self-promotion, but not all. He is a very fine composer, no doubt. But it may be time for a re-evaluation. His career started with a bang following a formula particularly useful to a 'progressive' artist: take a very established, but somewhat precious genre, like the ballet, and, uh, get all raunchy with it (my first choice of phrase was more extreme). Here is the beginning of Firebird, his first success in 1910.

This is great stuff: rhythmically energetic, crisp orchestration and nicely tied together. He followed this with another ballet, Petrushka in 1911.

Also great stuff. You have to recall that in 1910/11 audiences were used to Tchaikovsky and other romantic ballets. This sparkling, incisive and rhythmically insistent music was quite a shock. But the big shock came in 1913 with the Rite of Spring--pagan Russia!

Surprisingly quiet beginning, but Stravinsky at this point had to show his range as a composer and had to advance the language away from the past. He is using winds at the extremes of their range. The rhythms are just as insistent, but more complex, less obvious. All this is an introduction to the terrifically motoric section starting at 3:30. This is how it all ends:

Another great masterpiece of the 20th century. At the premiere of the Rite in Paris, the audience rioted with some booing, others cheering, fistfights and even seats being torn up. They really take their ballet seriously in Paris. I'll bet lots of composers now would pay to have a riot at one of their premieres.

One of the reasons Stravinsky was compared to Picasso is that he also had his stylistic phases. Not a blue period or pink period, but a ballets russes period followed by a neo-classic period. Much neo-classic style music sounds just like more traditional music (they tended to emulate the Classical or Baroque forms) with wrong notes. At least that is what it sounded like with most composers. But Stravinsky did it better. Here are the first few sections of L'Histoire du Soldat from 1918:

In 1930 he wrote a wonderful piece for chorus and orchestra, the Symphony of Psalms:

Another masterpiece of 20th century music.

There are a few troubling things about Stravinsky: his unrelenting self-promotion which included several volumes of conversations and essays. That's not so troubling, but the strong suspicion is that his collaborators did most of the writing. The books are also full of misrepresentations and outright lies--all to the end of magnifying Stravinsky. For example, musicologist Richard Taruskin has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Stravinsky make extensive use of Russian folk melodies in the Rite, something he vociferously denied. Stravinsky was also rather nasty to other composers. Succeeding as a composer in the 20th century was not a picnic and rivalries were ubiquitous.

I think that, while I love many pieces by Stravinsky, at the end of the day I find his music expert, fashionable and ultimately cold--with a few exceptions such as the Symphony of Psalms.

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The One-Minute Test

Way back when I was an undergraduate student I used to go to the listening library when I had a spare hour, collect a stack of LPs (I said it was way back when) and give them a listen. I would put on a disc and, if it didn't grab me in the first minute, I would go on to the next. I know this is the musical equivalent of speed-dating, but I figure if a composer doesn't do something in the first minute that is beautiful, interesting, charming or in some way capture your interest, well... This is how I discovered Steve Reich. I had a bunch of contemporary music discs including Stockhausen, Ligeti, Nono and after a few of those very complex compositions I put on Drumming by Steve Reich. It begins with an unadorned single drumbeat. Wow. Sometimes simplicity is utterly radical. I ended up listening to a whole side. Let's try this experiment with some stuff randomly chosen from YouTube. Since the last few posts have featured pop music, I'll stick to classical. Let's start with the 20th century. I'll use the list of composers from this Wikipedia article.

Here's a sonatina for clarinet and piano by Malcom Arnold:

There's nothing wrong with that, it's boisterous and, uh, boisterous. By the one-minute mark we are just about to hear the second theme, it sounds like. It didn't really make me want to hear more, though.

Part of the introduction to Tintagel by Arnold Bax:

I listened to the whole excerpt. It sounds a bit like Sibelius and water, but that's ok. The melody, when it finally arrived, was a bit of an anticlimax--folky and sentimental.

Harrison Birtwistle, Movement for String Quartet

Nervous, fragmentary and annoying. Barely made it to one minute. Reminds me of not-very-good Bartok.

Let's jump to an American: Lou Harrison, String Trio:

It's not bad, but I did stop at the one-minute mark. This is the kind of meandering atonality that I have heard plenty of and don't need any more of. Reminds me of uninspired Alban Berg.

Carl Ruggles: Sun-Treader

I used to have this recording. No, I didn't listen past the one-minute mark. Why does so much 20th century orchestral music sound like the soundtrack to a horror film? Was it because the 20th century was so horrific? This was written in 1931, so there was certainly a lot to be horrified about. But I'm just not going to enjoy listening to the rest...

Elie Siegmeister: Three Studies for Piano

This is not bad. It doesn't try to bully the listener. But after a minute, I was getting the sense that there was quite a lot of jazz influence and I didn't get the sense that we were going anywhere, so...

Włodzimierz Kotoński - Antyfony 1989 (for tape)

 

I was glad to see this was for tape. Some of it sounds like choir, which would be cruel. No, not interested. I have sat through "performances" of electronic music played through high-quality sound systems in concert halls and I am aggressively uninterested!

Galina Ustvolskaya - Symphony No. 3

I had hopes for this one because she was a student of Shostakovich. It is probably going somewhere, but the unrelenting dissonance makes it a road I don't think I want to travel.

After all that, let's hear something by her teacher:

Why is it that most composers seem incapable of a) simplicity and b) beauty? I first heard this trio many years ago in a summer chamber music festival in Vancouver. I think it was the first piece by Shostakovich that I heard in concert. I was riveted from the first note. And still am. How does he do that?

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