From Beyond the Stave

Coda

2011-10-21T17:42:00.000+01:00

When we started this blog just over four years ago, it was intended to be a way to bring our music books to the attention of a wider audience. We quickly dropped the idea of mentioning events in music generally - other bloggers are doing that better than we could - and instead concentrated on stories from our authors and excerpts from our broad range of books on classical music. Many of you seemed to enjoy it and a flattering number of other music bloggers linked to it or referenced it, including Alex Ross and the mighty Overgrown Path.

Well, all good things come to an end, and we feel it’s time to bring down the curtain on our beloved Stave. We’ll soon be replacing it with an online newsletter - the Posthorn - which will feature articles on our books, interviews with our authors, excerpts from new titles, competitions, special offers, free books, and balloon-twisting - well, not balloon-twisting. To sign up for the Posthorn, simply send an e-mail to posthorn@boydellusa.net and a link to the first issue will be sent to you in November 2011.

In the meantime, anything posted on the web is there for eternity, and we invite you to look over our past posts and sample some of the best writing on classical music in cyberspace and, indeed, in the real world too.

Many thanks to all our readers. See you again soon in the Posthorn.

Michael Richards and Ralph Locke

Gunther Schuller at the Met

2011-09-19T16:16:00.000+01:00

Next month the University of Rochester Press will publish a book that is already attracting critical acclaim from proofs that were sent out to potential reviewers, the first volume of Gunther Schuller’s autobiography. Whether you know Schuller as a jazz composer and performer, or a jazz historian, or a composer of contemporary concert music, or a conductor or writer on classical music, or even - for those with long memories - a horn player, you will be charmed by Schuller’s attempt to ‘document the incredibly fortunate, exciting life in music (and its sister arts) that I have been privileged to live thus far,’ as he puts it in his Preface to the book.

Here, after our summer break, is the first of a number of extracts from this compelling memoir. In this week’s edited extract, we join Schuller as a horn player in the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera in 1949:

One of that season’s happiest encounters for me—and I think for most of the orchestra—was the arrival of Jonel Perlea, one of the best conductors to grace the Met’s podium during my years there. Romanian-born, but trained in Munich and Leipzig, where he studied with Max Reger at the Hochschule (he must have been in the same classes with my father, both being the same age), Perlea had already enjoyed a distinguished conducting career in Europe, including leading the first performances in Romania of Rosenkavalier, Meistersinger, and Falstaff.

At the Met Perlea was given four operas to conduct: Rigoletto, Carmen, Traviata, and for his American debut, Tristan und Isolde. In his very first rehearsal we could tell that we were in the hands of a superior musician. (I found out later that he was also a fine composer, more than just a conductor-composer.) He managed to bring to that ecstasy- and hysteria-laden score a wonderful calming restraint. With Fritz Stiedry the more frantic episodes in Tristan, especially in the third act, could easily spin out of control. It is incredibly intense music, sometimes more intense than it can readily tolerate. Perlea treated the music with an almost chamber music transparency—lyric, eloquent, even elegant—without diluting the drama and emotional excitement of Tristan, or for that matter of Carmen or any of the operas Perlea was given.

All this was all the more amazing since Perlea had had a heart attack and a stroke, and as a result was paralyzed on most of his right side; he conducted only with his left hand. This is highly unusual and takes some getting used to—which we did very quickly. We really loved this man. Alas, Perlea was at the Met for only one year. All year long we kept hearing backstage rumors that certain conductors, especially Alberto Erede, also new at the Met in 1949, were agitating with the management to have Perlea retired. If true, it was but another typical example of what is known far and wide in the music world as “opera intrigue.” I saw Perlea several times in the 1950s in the hallways at the Manhattan School of Music, where both of us were on the faculty, and I could never resist telling him how much we missed him after he was let go.

Near the end of the 1949 Met tour we began to hear rumors that our orchestra might be hired to play a two-week season—at the Metropolitan Opera House—of the visiting Sadler’s Wells Ballet. The rumor turned out to be true, and the two weeks with Sadler’s Wells were a wonderful musical and educational experience. It brought back many happy memories of my days with the Ballet Theatre, six years earlier; and now I was fortunate enough to witness with my own eyes the brilliant work of England’s premier ballet company, with its outstanding, oh so graceful prima ballerina, Margot Fonteyn. (This was a special bonus for Margie [Schuller’s wife], who was so keenly interested in great ballet. She came to almost every performance, accompanied by Jeannie Clark, my dancer friend from Ballet Theatre.) But for me the two major highlights of the Sadler’s Wells visit were the discovery of Prokofiev’s extraordinary Cinderella music (in its first performance in the United States), and the amazing experience of working with Constant Lambert.

I really looked forward to playing with Lambert, for I admired him greatly as a composer, and for years had heard that he was a marvelous conductor. In England he was generally considered a lightweight composer, I assume owing to his very jazzy 1929 Rio Grande Suite and his catchy, devilishly clever ballet Horoscope. I thought of him more as a kind of British George Gershwin, a high compliment.

I was thrilled with his conducting; it was so intelligent and sensitive, although I noticed that sometimes in certain performances his beat, his direction, would be kind of wavering, wobbly. I began to realize that the man was at times not entirely sober. It got worse when, in the middle of the second week, disaster struck. Halfway through Tchaikovsky’s Hamlet music (which Lambert had turned into a ballet), completely befuddled, he simply broke down in tears and slumped over the podium. We tried to keep playing; Felix Eyle, our concertmaster, beat time with his bow. But it was no use; we barely knew the music (none of us had ever played Hamlet before), and we certainly didn’t know the dancers’ tempos. We never finished the performance. It was a truly tragic occasion; I felt so bad for Lambert. We now all knew that he was a raging alcoholic, and wondered how he had held up so long.

Discovering Prokofiev’s Cinderella music was a much happier experience. It was completely new to me—the first recording (of only excerpts of that ballet) didn’t come out in England until a year after the New York performances. I was so taken with the sheer melodic, harmonic beauty of the music, with Prokofiev’s seemingly boundless creative imagination, that I knew I had to somehow get a look at the score. When I found that none was available for purchase, I did the next best thing: over a period of fours days, in every intermission during the six rehearsals we had of Cinderella, I copied out, either fully or in a shorthand of mine, a dozen of my favorite excerpts from Lambert’s conducting score—which, bless him, he always left on his podium in the pit.

I was now approaching my fifth year at the Met. Two major events loomed ahead, which made my life there much more agreeable, much more rewarding musically, professionally, and artistically. One such event was my full promotion to co-principal horn. David Rattner was relieved of his position near the end of the 1949–50 season, and I was told sometime on the spring tour that Max Rudolf, Fritz Reiner, and Fritz Stiedry had all recommended that, without need for an audition, I be moved up to first horn—with an appropriate and, I thought, rather generous raise in salary. “Would I please accept the offer?” Would I? Well, of course I would. I was thrilled and gratified that my work as third horn (and first horn in Mozart and Rossini operas) had truly been appreciated. It was nice to know that the conducting staff and the management valued my particular way of playing, which contrasted considerably with Richard Moore’s generally more boisterous, extroverted style. I think they recognized that I brought a composer’s insights to my playing, an intimate awareness of the music’s inner workings, structurally, orchestrationally, conceptually, particularly in regard to ensemble considerations.

For me it wasn’t just a horn part, which one could use to display one’s soloistic and technical prowess. My horn part was just one of some thirty other voices that in toto yielded the complex and constantly variable ensemble relationships in an orchestra. I can truly say that there was no ego involved in my playing—pride yes (when justified), but ego, no. I knew that I and my horn part were just one small cog in a great wheel that required constant flexibility and pliancy in adjusting to the myriad and diverse collective demands of the composition. Fitting in—rather than standing out—gave me the greatest pleasure—and still does to this day, a commitment I ardently pursue as a conductor as well.

The other event that not only affected my life as a musician but also significantly enlivened New York’s musical scene, and probably, by extension, the entire opera field in the United States, was the ascendancy of Rudolf Bing to the general manager throne of the Metropolitan Opera Company. I use such language because, in my view and that of most others in the opera world, Bing was an authoritarian aristocrat, virtually a dictator, certainly not a pleasant man to work for and with. He had a rather severe don’t-mess-with-me look about him all the time. Indeed, with his balding head, piercing eyes, and hawklike nose, he always reminded me of Max Schreck in Nosferatu, Murnau’s famous vampire film of 1922. His twenty-two years at the helm of the Met were marked by continual strife, altercations, feuds, and controversy—although they weren’t always his fault or his creation.

All that said, one has to acknowledge that he was in the end an extraordinarily talented, genial impresario–general manager. He really knew his stuff. Bing was what we call in German a real Opernhase (opera hare), richly experienced as managing director (Intendant in German) of the Stadttheater in Darmstadt, Germany, the Charlottenburg Opera in Berlin (that city’s second opera house), and as artistic director of Glyndebourne in England, literally bringing that institution to international prominence in the 1950s. In 1957 he helped organize and then managed the Edinburgh Festival.

Bing was remarkably knowledgeable in musical matters, especially in his primary function and responsibility of bringing to the house the best and most appropriate singers. He set the highest standards in selecting and hiring the casts himself, a skill that had eluded Edward Johnson in his later years. It is not enough to know that a certain role is for a soprano or baritone, and then hire the most famous soprano or baritone in the business. Every part, every role, has its own characteristic requisites: questions of range, timbre, size, and quality of voice. In the category of soprano alone there are officially three kinds: dramatic, lyric, and coloratura. But the Italians make further distinctions, such as soprano acuto (high soprano) and soprano leggiero (light soprano), and—I like this one—soprano sfogato. Furthermore, the Italian vocal tradition is significantly different from the German, and even from the French and English. In addition, not all composers always conformed in their vocal works to these basic categorizations. The same distinct differentiations exist in the other four vocal types: alto, tenor, baritone, and bass. So the opera manager must know particular singers’ voices really well in order to choose someone with the right quality, timbre, and expressive character—not to mention acting ability and stage presence, another aspect of casting decisions that Bing addressed very seriously and successfully. In these matters he engaged a whole roster of singers in his first year as manager who, by their presence and artistry, raised the overall artistic level of the Met. To name a few: the galvanic mezzo-soprano, Fedora Barbieri; the outstanding (but woefully underappreciated) Lucine Amara, who sang important roles at the Met for another incredible twenty-seven years, still in beautiful voice to the very end; Hans Hotter, in the twilight of his career, but one of the greatest Inquisitors ever in Verdi’s Don Carlos; Roberta Peters; Mario del Monaco; Victoria de los Angeles; and, above all, Cesare Siepi, one of the very greatest vocal artists I had the privilege to work with in my fifteen years at the Met.

Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty by Gunther Schuller is scheduled for publication in October by the University of Rochester Press, and can be ordered from your favourite bookseller now.

Springtime on Funen

2011-08-12T10:53:00.003+01:00

“Finally, everyone’s talking about Nielsen” is the witty title of an article by Andrew Mellor in the September issue of the Gramophone. It includes contributions from Daniel Grimley whose recent book, Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism, will certainly help nudge along any Nielsen revival. The BBC Proms included a Nielsen symphony alongside one from Sibelius and the Grieg Piano Concerto on August 8th, so perhaps the revival is already underway. Here, in a second extract from Daniel Grimley’s superb study, is an evocative look at Nielsen’s pastoral cantata, Springtime on Funen.

One of the recurring tropes in Nielsen reception, both at home and abroad, is his association with the Danish landscape. Repeatedly presented as a true and faithful son of the soil, Nielsen is held to have captured some elemental quality of the Danish landscape in sound, just as the landscape seems somehow to have determined the texture and grain of much of his musical work.

The pastoral cantata, Fynsk Foraar (‘Springtime on Funen’), is emblematic in this respect. It is here that Nielsen’s evocation of the Danish countryside, and the island of Funen where he was born, appears most powerful and explicit. But Nielsen’s response to the idea of landscape, and to the construction of Funen as specific place and sensibility in music, is more ambiguous than it first seems. In a brief, illuminating moment towards its closing bars, the whirling round dance with which Springtime on Funen concludes unexpectedly gives way to a hushed cadenza for tremolo violins, solo voices, horns, and bassoons. Marked molto adagio, the seven-bar passage is canonic: the soprano’s ornamental melodic arabesque is imitated first by the tenor and then by the baritone (doubled by the woodwind), beneath a shimmering inverted pedal in the upper strings.

Texturally, dynamically, and harmonically, the cadenza is an exceptional and striking event: its Ab minor orientation is a sharp diversion from the round dance’s final tonal goal, a radiant E major (the transition pivots on the enharmonic transformation Eb/D#), and the sudden drop in dynamic level and textural weight is in sharp contrast to the finale’s prevailing fortissimo tutti. The cadenza marks an abrupt change of direction that seemingly brings the whole work momentarily to a stop at the line: ‘Se, Æbleblomster drysser over vejen’ (‘Look, apple blossom scatters down upon the road’). The three soloists repeat the words hypnotically, as though held in rapt attention as they watch the white petals slowly falling to the ground, until the chorus re-enter in the final bar, whispering ‘Natten er vor egen, Æbleblomster drysser’ (‘The night is ours, apple blossom scatters down’). As the words slip silently away, the round dance returns, swiftly cranking up speed and volume once again so that the poignant memory of the spring night, and its associations of vernal love, are breezily blown away as the cantata spirals towards its celebratory final cadence.

On closer inspection, the cadenza might be heard simply as a moment of modest reflection, the brief calm before the uplifting storm of the cantata’s energetic final pages. It can also be understood generically as a closing curtain call for the three soloists who appear, partly in character, earlier in the work, alongside a children’s choir and an adult chorus. Springtime on Funen opens with a gentle sunrise heralding the turning of the season. The soft contours of the landscape are feminised, the spring blossom flowering upon ‘the gnarled apple tree/behind hills as rounded as young girl’s knees’ [det knortede Æbletræ/bag Bakker, der rundes som Pigeknæ]. The soprano solo enters as a spring goddess – Demeter or Persephone, or perhaps a local Nordic deity (Freya) – followed by the tenor, a young sap-filled hero, who greets ‘the gentle day, so mild and long/and full of sun and birdsong’ (‘den milde Dag [så] lys og lang/og fuld af Sol og Fuglesang’). The baritone appears twice: first as the earthy voice of experience, an ‘old bachelor’ whose dark lower register grounds the passage in the rich tilth of the Funen fields, and then later as the melancholy blind musician, ‘Blind Anders’ in Nielsen’s autobiographical account of his childhood, whose mournful clarinet solo provides the cantata’s greatest moment of pathos: ‘small hands seek my old hand/it is as if I touched the spirit of spring (små Hæder søger min gamle Hånd/ det er, som rørte jeg Vårens Ånd’).

In contrast, the cadenza has the feeling of withdrawal and abstraction, a liquefaction or draining away of meaning, as though the characters who enter elsewhere in the work suddenly lose their individual identity and drift from view. The cadenza’s haziness thus assumes the quality of a dream sequence, a hallucinatory episode that seems in some ways emblematic of the act of remembrance itself: the sudden unexpected lighting upon a forgotten image that is simultaneously familiar and strange. The shimmering string tremolo suggests the acute tingling of nerve endings, of a state of heightened awareness, the soprano arabesque appearing almost imperceptibly and then reproducing itself canonically as each stage in the process of recollection generates a further image in turn. The falling apple blossom hence becomes a Proustian key that momentarily unlocks a privileged domain of sensory experience and temporal projection backwards, or rather inwards, towards a hitherto inaccessible level of imagination. And, as swiftly as it emerged, the vision vanishes once more, swept aside by the inevitable return of the closing Dansevise.

Memory, the cadenza reveals, is as much about letting go as about recollection; landscape here is more concerned with erasure than with recording the permanent mark of dwelling and occupation. Nielsen’s springtime is a festival of celebration and rebirth, but it is also merely a seasonal stage in a larger cycle of growth and decay, of flowering and dissolution – it is the trace of landscape’s mutability and constant capacity for change and renewal.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism by Daniel Grimley is published by the Boydell Press and is available from all good booksellers, as is Grimley’s earlier book on Grieg. Dan Grimley will be appearing at the Bard Music Festival which starts this weekend. Andrew Mellor's Gramophone blog post on Nielsen can be found here.

John Ireland’s Companion

2011-07-29T16:43:00.004+01:00

2012 will mark the 50th anniversary of the death of John Ireland. His reputation lies somewhat in the shadow of Vaughan Williams, Elgar and others, and his music, with its European influences, sits uneasily in the pastoral tradition of twentieth century British music. The anniversary year will see a welcome rush of new and reissued recordings of his endlessly fascinating and attractive work. To open proceedings, the Boydell Press is pleased to publish, later this year, the John Ireland Companion edited by that great champion of British music, Lewis Foreman.

We open a short series of extracts from the book with something rather special. Here Bruce Phillips, Boydell’s music editor-at-large and director of the Ireland Trust, remembers his introduction to the music and to Norah Kirby:

I first became aware of John Ireland’s music in 1961, when I was 16. My piano teacher at school, John Alston, placed in front of me a piano piece called Month’s Mind and said that if I learned to play the piece properly he would take me to meet the composer, then living not far from the school in a converted windmill just outside the village of Washington in West Sussex. I struggled with the piece but became completely captivated by its atmosphere of nostalgic yearning conveyed through harmonies that reminded me of Ravel’s Sonatine, a piece I had attempted to add to my rather restricted repertoire. Here though was music that seemed as quintessentially English as Ravel’s was French, and moreover evoking a rather different Englishness from that of my then musical god, Ralph Vaughan Williams.

In June 1962 I read the obituaries of John Ireland, who had died at the age of 82. Much mention was made of the Sussex windmill in which he had passed the last nine years of his life. My relief at not being compelled to visit him and perform his piece to him in person — he would by that time have been unable to see me — was mixed with intense sadness at the news of his death and curiosity to know more about him. Acting on impulse a few days later I went to the one phone booth in the school and looked him up in the local directory. There he was: Ireland, Dr John, Rock Mill, Washington. I rang the number without of course knowing whether anyone would answer or what I would say if anyone did. I heard a woman’s voice at the other end, pressed Button A, and found myself speaking to a lady who introduced herself as Mrs Norah Kirby. I introduced myself as a schoolboy speaking from nearby Lancing College and said that I had been greatly moved and saddened by the news of John Ireland’s passing and that I had come to love his piece Month’s Mind above all other music that I knew.

I discovered in the course of our conversation that Norah Kirby had been John Ireland’s (or as she always referred to him, Dr. Ireland’s) companion, secretary and housekeeper for more or less twenty years. I learned later that she divided the world into those who loved his music and those who did not. By revealing that I had fallen completely in love with Month’s Mind I had fortunately placed myself in the former category. On hearing that I had not heard anything else he had written and that I knew no more about him than had been included in the obituaries, she invited me to lunch, promising to drive me to the beautiful converted windmill in which he had spent nearly the last decade of his life.

I obtained leave from my housemaster and met Norah in Steyning High Street. She was driving Ireland’s last car, a green Ford Popular which she later told me he had bought in the 1950s through contacts in Guernsey, which was then an export market for cars. We drove past Chanctonbury and turned right along a small slip road that led to a drive flanked by pine trees. There at the end of the drive was the windmill, minus its sails but with an adjoining two-storey building erected when it had been converted from a working mill into a residential house.

At that first meeting Norah was in good health. She told me about Ireland’s funeral that had taken place at Shipley, a village between Washington and Horsham. She showed me round the main part of the Mill, especially the octagonal room at the base of the tower, and we walked out of one of the doors into a beautiful garden from which one could see straight up towards Chanctonbury Ring, a large circle of pine trees cresting a promontory jutting out from the line of the South Downs. I was shown Ireland’s study and bedroom and then taken up to the very top of the Mill, from which one could see the results of the extensive sand and gravel extraction that had caused Ireland and Norah so much annoyance almost from the moment they had moved in. I also made the acquaintance of Smokey and Laddin, two Siamese cats that had played an important part in Ireland’s last years and remained for Norah a living link with him.

Over lunch she asked me what pieces of Ireland’s music I knew (at that time only Month’s Mind and ‘Ragamuffin’, the music of which I had found I had at home). She played me the 10-inch LP of Boyd Neel’s recording of the Minuet from A Downland Suite, and presented me with a copy. She showed me the leather-bound autograph book presented to Ireland on his 75th birthday in which a wide range of musicians and other friends and admirers had written messages of congratulations and memories. Prominent among these was one from Ralph Vaughan Williams. This book is now in the British Library along with the majority of Ireland’s autograph manuscripts and correspondence.

Later that summer Norah suffered a series of strokes, doubtless brought on by the stress of Ireland’s death. She made a pretty good recovery except for her left arm, which was paralysed in such a way that it was very difficult for her to use her left hand despite constant physiotherapy. I for my part had left school at the end of December, leaving myself about ten months ‘gap year’ (as it was not then called) until I went up to Christ Church, Oxford. I had no plans for how to spend this time until I received an invitation from Norah to go and stay at the Mill and assist her in matters such as general domestic duties, as well as to provide a sympathetic companion and fellow listener to the many private recordings which had been made of performances and broadcasts of Ireland’s music. I would also be able to meet many of the musicians and friends who regularly visited the Mill. I accepted without hesitation, and was driven down to Sussex through the snow and ice of that legendary winter of 1962-3.

For the next three months, under Norah’s supervision, I acquired rudimentary skills in cooking and cleaning, and learned to drive well enough to accompany her to the places she associated with Ireland: Shipley churchyard, Storrington (where Ireland had been wont in earlier times to meet Arnold Bax in the bar of the Black Horse), Steyning and Pulborough (where lived Mary and Percy Turnbull, the third composer besides Ireland and John Longmire to be on board the SS Antwerp when it left Guernsey for Weymouth a few days before Germany invaded in 1940). I also met the pianists Eric Parkin and Alan Rowlands, the critic Scott Goddard, the broadcaster Alec Robertson, the writer Jocelyn Brooke, the artist Juliet Pannett, and Charlie Markes, whose friendship with Ireland had begun when they were choirboys at St Luke’s before the first world war and had survived a long interruption based on a misunderstanding between them. Another frequent visitor was Laurence Norcross, who in 1959 with John Steele had formed the John Ireland Society that had done so much to rescue Ireland’s music from a period of neglect in the 1950s. Other visitors included Peter and Margaret Taylor, friends of Norah’s from the days even before she had met Ireland and later the principal members of the Trust which she set up in the 1970s.

From this period dates my admiration for John Ireland the composer and interest in John Ireland the man. The picture I gained of him at that time was inevitably influenced by Norah Kirby, whose regard for him bordered on idolatry. There were times when, even then, I realised that he could not have been quite the perfect human being portrayed by Norah. A forceful and articulate person herself, she brooked not a single word of criticism or questioning of any aspect of his life or music, and viewed any failure to further his cause as evidence of malicious conspiracy, as for example his exclusion from the Proms after the BBC music department was taken over by William Glock and Hans Keller (though she much appreciated the hoax perpetrated by Keller and Susan Bradshaw when they recorded and broadcast on the BBC Third Programme music alleged to have been by the Polish composer Piotr Zac). She could take against perfectly good performances or recordings if she thought Ireland would not have approved of them, as for example the singer John Shirley-Quirk, whose Saga LP of songs elicited her constant disparagement. Yet it was Norah who from the mid 1940s, when Ireland had returned to London after the war, had brought order and comfort into the last two decades of his life.

In the month after I left the Mill I was a Hesse student at the 1963 Aldeburgh Festival, one of a group of young people who helped with things like ferrying musicians to rehearsals and concerts, setting out chairs, and the like. A high point while I was there was a party for all the Hesse students given by Imogen Holst at her house. Britten and Pears both came. Bursting with adolescent pride and curiosity I told Britten what I had been doing at Rock Mill, then knowing only that he had studied composition with Ireland and not knowing of the difficult relationship that seems to have existed between them. I asked Britten for his opinion on Ireland’s music. All I can remember of what he said was, first that Ireland’s piano music was difficult to play because it had fistfuls of notes, and that in his answer to my question as to what Ireland was like to meet, Britten replied that he had a strong personality but a weak character.

Ireland was once asked, so the story goes, whether he thought he was a great composer. He is said to have replied after some thought: ‘No, but I think I’m a significant one’. This perhaps tells us something about Ireland’s character. Born the fifth and by some years the last child of Victorian parents—his father was 70 when he was born—his childhood seems not to have been happy. Details of his early schooling are sparse but what is clear is that somehow at the age of 13 Ireland was sufficiently certain of his interest and ability in music to take himself unaided to the Royal College of Music, sit whatever entrance examination or audition was required, and return to Manchester to tell his mother what he had done.

Ireland was never exactly prolific. He once described himself as ‘England’s most laborious composer’. His peak years were between 1910 and 1930, with the apex coming in 1913-23, the years in which The Forgotten Rite, the second piano trio and second violin sonata, the piano sonata, the cello sonata, the Housman cycle The Land of Lost Content and Mai-Dun were written. The 1930s saw the production of Ireland’s two great works for piano and orchestra, the Piano Concerto and Legend, plus A Downland Suite, A London Overture, the Concertino Pastorale for strings, and his one extended work for chorus and orchestra, his setting of John Addington Symonds’s poem ‘A Vista’ entitled These Things Shall Be, in which Ireland, with more than a little help from his friend and pupil Alan Bush, expressed an optimistic hope for an Utopian future seemingly at odds with his innately pessimistic outlook. During the Second World War came two masterpieces, Sarnia, begun in his beloved Guernsey, and the Fantasy Sonata for clarinet and piano. His Epic March was written in response to a BBC commission for a patriotic march. After the war came the overture Satyricon, a piece that deserves to be played more often if for nothing else for its glorious clarinet tune in the middle section. The immediate postwar period also brought Ireland’s only film score, The Overlanders.

In England we tend not to celebrate our native composers enough unless they have produced a string of symphonies, concertos, large scale choral works and operas— and perhaps not even then. Ireland’s music is never going to achieve the same degree of popularity, admiration and wide exposure as, say, Elgar, Vaughan Williams, Britten, or Walton. He is often described as a miniaturist, sometimes in rather patronising terms. We can regret that he did not write more orchestral music given his mastery of orchestral colouring. His legacy is that of an intensely self-critical perfectionist who has given us some exquisite pieces for piano, many beautiful and deeply moving songs, some splendid sonatas and piano trios, and a handful of arguably great pieces for orchestra. It is to be hoped that the John Ireland Companion will contribute towards explaining some of the background to the life and music of this very significant composer.

The John Ireland Companion, edited by Lewis Foreman (whose classic biography of Bax is also available from the Boydell Press), will be published in October. A further extract will follow shortly.

Michael Talbot's Vivaldi

2011-07-28T12:47:00.004+01:00

The Boydell Press is privileged to publish a remarkable new book by the internationally renowned Vivaldi scholar, Michael Talbot. The Vivaldi Compendium includes a short biography of the composer, bibliography, a list of works, and takes us alphabetically from “Abate” to “Ziani, Marc’Antonio”. Here Professor Talbot gives us some background to what is certain to be considered an essential resource for anyone with an interest in the composer.

Every great composer needs at least one compact book of handy reference that enables anyone interested in him, from the ordinary music lover to the expert, to access basic data instantly and if possible to learn where to find more on the same topic. This is all the more true of a composer such as Vivaldi, about whom knowledge is growing so fast, so that constant updating is needed. For instance, literally dozens of new works by him have been discovered in the last fifty years. Vivaldi is not alone in being a composer on whom there is much ‘misinformation’ in circulation, and it is vital to set the record straight where one can.

Some thirty years ago an eminent Austrian Vivaldian, Walter Kolneder, wrote what he called a ‘Vivaldi Lexicon’ in response to this need. This book had many drawbacks – for a start, it was printed in such small type that one almost needed a magnifying glass to read the bibliography – but it did enough to reveal the potential of a Vivaldi dictionary of this kind and suggested what other, complementary sections could appear together with it. The book that I have entitled The Vivaldi Compendium is a more ambitious, and naturally more up-to-date, realization of the same concept.

The core of the book is its Dictionary section. This has entries for persons, institutions, places, genres, associated musical terminology, individual works and collections and many other items relevant to Vivaldi. To give a flavour, the entries for the letter E are: Echo-Repeats; Eller, Rudolf; Enharmonic change; Ensemble concerto; Ephrikian, Angelo; Ercole su ’l Termodonte, RV 723; Erdmann, Ludwig; Estate, L’, RV 315; Estragiudiziale; Estro armonico, L’, op. 3; Everett, Paul. (I should reassure the reader that most letters have many times that number of entries!) There is ample cross-referencing between the entries, so that the reader, starting at a randomly chosen point, can hop back and forth between entries following the drift of his interest. More important, nearly all the entries are cross-referenced to items in the bibliography that I have suggested for further reading.

This Bibliography section, running to 26 pages, is the probably the longest on Vivaldi in existence. Since the book itself is in English, priority has been given to English-language publications, although full account has also been taken of the many vital contributions in Italian, German, French and other languages. The other two sections are, first, a list of Vivaldi’s compositions that, with its well over 800 items, absorbs the latest discoveries and the latest opinions over the authenticity of certain controversial works and, second, a concise biography of the composer that likewise aims to bring to light the latest information.

Although The Vivaldi Compendium is as reliable and authoritative as I can make it, it is deliberately not an ‘impersonal’ product. On Vivaldi I have some strong opinions that I am eager to share, although I hope I have also shown fairness towards contrary opinions. While writing it, I have always been aware that its potential readership extends far beyond the academic fold. It is the sort of book, for instance, that a radio station might keep in the office in order to check a detail for the announcer of a broadcast piece by Vivaldi, or a collector of Vivaldi’s music on CDs might like to have handy. I will be interested to see how successful I have been in making the book serious but at the same time reader-friendly.

I enjoyed the experience of writing the book. Since I have been researching into Vivaldi for over forty years, during which period I have been writing constantly on him, I had little extra work to do, apart from keeping up with whatever literature or discoveries made themselves known during the period of the writing (and right up to the proofs stage, actually). But it is too easy to forget things, especially as one gets older, and my work on the book certainly reminded me of many important details that had slipped out of my mind over the years.

On the other hand, it was extraordinary how many absolutely new and unexpected things dropped into my lap while I was writing it simply by utilizing the resources of the Internet almost in a spirit of play. When I started out as a researcher in the early 1960s there were no photocopiers, let alone scanners and computers (with their music notation programs, search engines and e-mail). It seems almost indecent how easy it has become to acquire and store information, even though the problem of deciding how reliable that information is never goes away.

The experience of writing the book certainly helped me – as I hope it will many readers – to co-ordinate things better: to see more clearly the multifarious interconnections between the composer, his world and his music. In a sense, the book is a ‘taking of stock’, showing exactly how and where Vivaldi stands in 2011. But it is also meant as an act of thanksgiving towards the worldwide community of Vivaldians and Vivaldi-lovers, who have sustained my interest in the composer for so long.

The Vivaldi Compendium by Michael Talbot is published by the Boydell Press and available from your favourite bookseller. Talbot's Chamber Cantatas of Antonio Vivaldi is also available.

The ‘Lights’ vs 'the Rival Party’

2011-07-20T17:10:00.003+01:00

Last month we ran a post by Nancy Newman in which she explained her fascination with the history of the Germania Musical Society and its travels around North America, bringing a variety of music to audiences far and wide. In this extract from her book, Good Music for a Free People, Newman discusses controversies encountered by the Germanians in Boston over their programming. Some wanted more concentrated, homogenous programs of substantial works, while others favoured more dances and lighter fare.

Although it might be overstatement to say that “all eyes were upon the Germania” as they prepared for the 1853–54 season, it is not unimaginable that the members hoped to reach heights comparable to those of the previous year. The season began splendidly, with numerous “special attractions” and extra musicians supplementing the ensemble. As in the previous season, the subscription series of ten concerts had very reasonable terms: a package of thirty tickets was ten dollars, or fifteen for five dollars, all “to be used at pleasure.” The orchestra held some admissions in reserve for those who could not commit to the series: “In order to prevent the confusion and disappointment experienced upon the unusual demand for tickets last season, Only a Limited Number of subscription tickets will be issued.” Single tickets were available at the usual fifty cents apiece.

The first half-dozen concerts were very much like those of the previous two seasons. With the exception of the “Wagner Night,” each program opened with a complete symphony. No dances or potpourris were offered, and one or more guest soloists appeared at each event. In early December, Dwight’s Journal published a letter to the editor suggesting that the Germania offer weekly, rather than fortnightly, concerts. The author claimed to speak for many like-minded people. “I have also heard the wish expressed that we might have from [the orchestra] concerts more entirely of classical music, which should present, too, not only the best works of the best masters, but should produce them consecutively, and in some kind of system; a series of ‘Mozart nights’ and ‘Beethoven nights,’ for instance, or something of the kind.”

It was surely not a coincidence that the Germanians announced an additional subscription series devoted entirely to “classical” music the very next week. On December 10, Dwight called attention to the “new plan” in a long editorial. Each of the five concerts would include four major works—two symphonies and two overtures—with selections by Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart constituting nearly half the repertory (nine of twenty pieces). Schumann and Mendelssohn each appear twice, for another 20 percent of the total. With their concentration on works by the first Viennese School and other German composers, these programs are startlingly close to those of the modern symphony orchestra.

The Germanians kept the new subscription lists open for about a month, with the first concert scheduled for mid-January. Despite Dwight’s efforts and the reduction of ticket prices, the series failed to attract enough subscribers to cover its projected costs. The Germania abandoned the plan just before the first concert would have taken place. Dwight attributed its failure simply to having been “brought forward too late in the season,” and urged the orchestra to try again next year. In the meantime, the members were still faced with the demand that they offer more concerts of some sort. Just two weeks later, they made a swing in the opposite direction. Instead of adding concerts devoted to an exclusively “classical” repertory, they proposed four programs emphasizing “modern,” that is, “lighter” genres.

Manager Bandt gave two reasons for this decision. The first was that the Germania had already sold more tickets than there were seats available for the remaining concerts, and there were even more music lovers who wanted tickets. A season total of fifteen subscription concerts was needed to accommodate everyone. Second, “the undersigned has had application from many of the subscribers to compose the programme of mostly classical compositions; and again from many to have the Germanians perform more music of lighter character. To satisfy all, the Society has adopted the following plan: To perform alternately a programme of classical and one of modern music—which brings the next Concert in the category of the latter style, a Concert in which none but light music, with few exceptions, will be performed.”

The first concert was to take place that evening, January 28. “To-night the ‘lights’ have it,” commented Dwight. “A programme light indeed! (and if we may be pardoned the suggestion) a little too closely modelled upon Jullien’s programmes, not to endanger the Germania prestige. But we are glad to see that good overtures and parts of symphonies are not excluded.” He anticipated that the “lights” would outnumber “the rival party” at upcoming concerts, and that the Germanians’ revised plan would “test effectually the relative strength of parties in this matter.”

For the first time, Dwight described their audience in the language of partisanship. Previously, he had maintained that music lovers existed on a continuum of appreciation, based on education and prior experience, but always with the capacity for growth and further refinement. At this crucial moment, however, he recognized that alliances, whether voluntary or character-based, were being drawn. He hoped the next few months would “show that the ‘appreciating few’ fond of good music for music’s sake are not by any means so very few as it has been tauntingly and often said.” Dwight’s pessimism is epitomized by the fact that he dubbed those who appreciated “music for music’s sake” members of “the rival party.”

The program that night consisted of twelve pieces presented in two equal parts. As Dwight indicated, a symphony movement and three overtures were included. There were three dances, and a potpourri was revived, representing the return of these two genres to the Germania’s subscription concerts in Boston. A song by local composer Thomas Comer was premiered, and the assisting pianist played Mendelssohn’s relatively flamboyant “Rondo Brillante.” In its general format, this program is typical of the “light” concerts added that season: twelve selections, with overtures opening each half, three dances, and opera excerpts for instrumentalists or guest vocalist. Virtuosic showpieces filled out the rest, with the occasional inclusion of a movement from a lengthy, serious work.

The first program for “the rival party” differed greatly. It consisted of only five pieces: a symphony, two concerti, and two overtures. The overture to Medea may have been a Boston premiere; Beethoven’s Concerto No. 4 certainly was. “A purer and a richer programme never was presented to an American audience,” commented Dwight. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto, performed by Wilhelm Schultze, were particularly well done. The next two “classical” concerts followed a similar format: each one featured an entire symphony, a piano concerto, and one or two overtures. Of the sixteen selections total, only one, an aria from Der Freischütz, required a vocalist. With the exception of Cherubini’s Overture, the programs consisted entirely of German and Austrian composers. Beethoven and Mendelssohn account for five selections each, or nearly two-thirds of the repertory. Two works each by Mozart and Weber, and one by Schumann, made up the remainder.

While the Germanians carried out their innovations, Dwight began to articulate his own ideas on concert programming. It was a topic that had interested others in his circle for several years. Margaret Fuller, for instance, had “called on concert directors to arrange carefully the genres of music to be performed, with attention to the balance to be achieved as well as the effect on the listeners.” In his review of the Germania’s “Extra Concert” on January 14, Dwight made several observations about the relationship of individual works to the event as a whole. Le Désert was featured in the concert’s second half, but the first part seemed haphazardly planned. A chorus from Elijah was well done, but should not have followed Aptommas’s harp solo. Spohr’s song, “The Huntsman, Soldier & Sailor,” on the other hand, “was over before we could begin to make out what was the amount of it.” In conclusion, Dwight proposed that “miscellaneous programme-making should be more a work of art.”

Good Music for a Free People by Nancy Newman is available now from your favourite bookseller.

Modernism in the Modern World

2011-07-11T14:38:00.006+01:00

Arved Ashby’s edited volume of essays, The Pleasure of Modernist Music, was first published in 2004 and reissued in paperback towards the end of 2010. Here, Ashby discusses notions of a ‘cultural war’ in the light of some reactions to the book.

Although ideas for this book date back to the mid-1990s, it really only started coming together after 9/11. U.S. politics were starting to take on the bitter partisanship that now threatens the very cohesion and stability of the country, especially with the 2010 midterm elections. The "culture wars" first surfaced back in the 1990s: speaking at the 1992 Republican convention, Pat Buchanan informed the citizenry that a morally depraved Clinton presidency would be a tragic setback in the "religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war… critical to the kind of nation we will one day be."

Putting together the words "culture" and "war" had a certain self-conscious bombast back then, a certain pre-9/11 innocence: Buchanan was using the phrase to market his own political ambitions, for the most part. Twenty years later, however, these oppositions between progressiveness and conservatism have become so acrid and divisive that the "war" has come to involve guns as well as words. Tragically, national events seem to have less and less to do with culture and more and more to do with war. I often fear for the future of my country these days, but then it must be said that an angry, even sick conservatism — a militant resistance, at any price in blood or humanity, to the future and to the communalities that define culture —has reared its ugly head in so many places around the world.

The Pleasure of Modernist Music arrived early in this divisive history, when it was becoming clear that musical taste and reception — as part of these "culture wars" in North America and beyond — had more to do with politics than with aesthetics and needs of expression. Some would say, no doubt, that musical reception has always been a political matter. And to read Eduard Hanslick criticizing Liszt's symphonic poems in the 1860s is to see someone hearing a particular musical novelty through a thick cloud of pure ideology or, rather, someone refusing outright to hear that music because of ideology. Some would go further and say that aesthetics and listening are necessarily forms of ideology, are ideologies by definition. But if that's true, how can people of different backgrounds, tastes, and agendas agree on the value of certain musicians, composers, and works? How could Hanslick seem not to have even listened to Liszt — at least not to the Liszt we know and accept today? In other words, how could a person as smart as Hanslick have been so wrong? (That is presuming Hanslick's view of Liszt was obscured by ideology while our view today is less obscured — a fairly safe presumption, I would say.)

And let us remember that Hanslick talked about culture without mentioning war. He heartily berated Liszt, but didn't resort to a 21st-century style of critical privilege or strategic purging of those things that happened to offend him. He didn't say Liszt's music was in the ashbin of history, or that it should be burned, or even that it should be ignored. Nor did he couch his arguments in moral terms. By contrast, people of the past decade or two talk about "killing" or "burying" certain kinds of music, or of "letting nature takes its course" and pulling the plug on styles that are said to be "on artificial life support." Whence the homicidal, or at least vulgar Darwinist, rhetoric? I wouldn't say all kinds of music are equally worthwhile, and I can understand how the historical and aesthetic contexts surrounding some musics might inspire resistance or active animosity. But styles themselves are rather like human beings, tangled skeins of weakness and delight, strength and foible. They are breathing bodies — entities that might not insist on being heard, but want at least to abide, to be allowed to exist.

Heine famously said, "Where people burn books, they end up burning human beings." So, if it is hard to see what value or moral utility — or raw usefulness, even — there might be in burying or unplugging artworks, it is easy to see how "always remembering" might be in our best interests. Just as we shouldn't be any more eager to rid ourselves of artworks than of human beings, it also behooves us to keep the historical record as rich and complete as we can. We should avoid consigning those segments of culture we don't approve of to The Dustbin of History — lest we sound like the lobotomizing bureaucrats who operate the strategic "memory holes" in Orwell's 1984. While denying certain segments of history is a criminal offense in some countries, which is as it should be, in most North Atlantic venues it has become strangely fashionable to single out modernist cultures and dismiss and ignore them on history's behalf. This is a very odd thing — perhaps self-contradictory, and certainly hypocritical.

* * *

One lives and one learns. While The Pleasure of Modernist Music garnered rave reviews from modernists and non-modernists alike, others were quick to see naivety in its attempt to "rescue" modernist art from modernist discourse. If I held on to the idea that non-ideological hearings of music were possible, reviews of The Pleasure of Modernist Music showed just how implausible the idea of reading "around" or "past" ideology might be. One reviewer pointed to the hopeless futility of de-ideologizing art, and said the book "has dug [its] own grave" by "piling still more words on the problem" — in short, by propagandizing onanistically for de-propagandization. The book's contributors, instead of offering coffin nails, should have been smart enough to just shut up and let nature takes its course.

Fred Maus's essay "Sexual and Musical Categories" proved a particular hotpoint: I've always thought Fred's chapter one of the book's most shrewd and powerful, and indeed I now give the essay to all my undergraduates to read, but I have yet to see a welcoming response in print. Instead, Fred's piece set off diatribes from people who had clearly decided what it said before they read it. One eminent reader said the author was crying victimization, an accusation that betrays not only misreading, but complete ignorance of the queer theory that Fred clearly describes — a philosophy that has nothing to do with oppression, let alone redressing oppression, and everything to do with identity, making do, and finding any available way to carve out "a place of one's own" in the world. Other readers resolved that Fred was telling us how gay 20th-century composers were attracted to tonality rather than an atonal compositional language.

Regarding his chapter "'One Man's Signal Is Another Man's Noise,'" Andrew Mead was accused of hitching his wagon to recent trends in experiential discussion of post-tonal music, when what he did was describe his personal history with post-tonal music all the way back to boyhood. Several chapters were dismissed as apologia. The book was said to claim that serial music had never differed in its aims from any other kind of music, certainly not a claim advanced by my introduction, where I stated that "modernist music is the most conflicted that we have. More than any other kind of music, except maybe for rock 'n' roll, it offers each listener a unique, volatile, high-stakes dialectic of inseparable pleasure and pain, reward and risk." Amy Bauer and Jeremy Tambling invoked schizophrenia in their essays as a non-pathological parallel to this kind of conflicted aesthetic and artistic sensibility, and thereby pointed out the arationality of "rationalist" modernism, but they were interpreted as saying that modernist music and its practitioners are mentally ill. The list of astonishing misreadings goes on, some readers jerking their knees to the point of dislocation.

I would like to lay out some of the book's more important conclusions here, less out of didacticism or indignation with reviews than the conviction that a book is less a thing than a process, that it has a necessary pre-history and post-history. So if the post-history of The Pleasure of Modernist Music started with its readers and reviewers, it will continue here. I take the following statements to be indisputable, even self-evident enough that they hardly seem worth propounding in a book — so maybe there is a shred of truth to that review after all. As opposed to most accounts of modernist music, which begin — and often end — with the composer, why not begin here with the listener? Many claims of complexity in understanding modernist music are ill-conceived or simply beside the point, since people do not process musical "information" as if they were computers — how does one even go about defining musical "difficulty" or pointing out a musical-aesthetic disconnect?

Getting to know a new musical style is more like acquiring a literacy, and it's hard to see why a culture that prizes literacy and varieties of language should resist such acquaintance. As one corollary to this, the very notions of modernist music being edifying or otherwise good for you are obsolete, to put it mildly. The premises behind art appreciation are offshoots of modernist thinking, in fact — they propound the idea that hearing music is the necessary obverse of composing music, and that it needs to be heard the way it was composed. Such premises are more oriented to the notion of connecting with the composer's intention, of formatting our brains and sensibilities in order to process music on its creator's terms, as opposed to assimilating new styles and allowing our listening experiences to be self-transforming.

Modernist music is really more about immediate experience, less about knowledge and learning, than mainstream music of common practice. That often means, however, that the styles in question are awkward and disordered — as opposed to the more frequently touted, supposedly modernist qualities of complexity, organization, difficulty. And that awkwardness, that manner of resistance, represents the modernist critical gap between art and society that is not to be bridged or done away with, as "education" has tried to do, but allowed instead to condition the listener's experience. Such modernist gapped-ness has proved deeply evocative and provocative in film music, in fact. The theater is one place where the public, free from the onus of modernist discourse and "educated listening," has connected with modernist sounds, gestures, and even structures. Movies show the possibility, the inevitability even, of modernism's relevance once it has been separated from modernist ideology. The newness to what Schoenberg student and film composer Hanns Eisler called "the new musical resources" is in fact not an ideology, but an anti-ideology. As if to prove the point, modernist sounds and gestures proved very popular and influential in 1960s and 70s rock music, where said sounds and gestures were commonly called called "out there," "trippy," and "far out," descriptions that associated them with freedom, with out-ness rather than in-ness.

As for the much-discussed and -reviled notion of compositional techniques, two major composers among the book's contributors, the "postmodern" William Bolcom and the "modern" Pierre Boulez, both say that techniques like canon and 12-tone serialism are not so much instruments of conscious control as they are necessary tactics for liberating the possibilities of the unconscious. They serve to open up the creation to a higher number of possibilities, they take the creator into uncharted waters. As such, compositional techniques are described by Boulez as a simple extension of the act of writing music down: techniques that in and of themselves beneficially remove that which is written from its writer, that in a sense kill the author for the sake of enlivening the possibilities of authorship. The act of encoding an experience into script is the point where "disconnection occurs," according to Roland Barthes, the point where "the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, [and] writing begins."

* * *

Happily, in addition to the uncomprehending reviews and the predictably positive reception from modernism enthusiasts, some students, composers, music-lovers — younger people, mostly — have told me directly that The Pleasure of Modernist Music was an exciting, transformative experience for them. This shows some success in realizing the original intent of the book, which was to encourage people to reconsider assumptions, certain aesthetic-historic-musical clichés. It's an awful, tautological idea that those who disagree with you don't understand what you're trying to say, while those who do, do. But one always likes to imagine that if one's work stirs things up, said stir-up will not involve arguing over a book that one didn't write, but will lead to a productive debate over one's presumptions and bases.

And so I will end by joining a debate that no one has yet started: yes, The Pleasure of Modernist Music cultivates naivety, and the particular kind of idealistic naivety that it proposes can sometimes be a misleading, frustrating, and unproductive thing. (Martin Scherzinger felt liberated by the naivety that cover artist Yoshiaki Yoshinari showed in trying to reconcile the bleak abstract expressionist shapes of Motherwell with the pop-art colors of a Hockney or a Howard Hodgkin. Martin said he was thrilled by Yoshi's "smears of modern paint in post-truthful times!") But I don't think naivety can ever be dangerous in a homicidal sense — indeed, it seems the single mindset that could benefit the current climate of cynicism, myopia, and murderous greed. The "culture warriors" of current affairs could certainly use a healthy dose of it. And just as certainly, if The Pleasure of Modernist Music suffers from naivety, it is a naivety worth defending.

Conversations with Elliott Carter

2011-06-28T15:48:00.004+01:00

If the Aldeburgh Festival began (almost) with a bang (see ‘Beside the Seaside’ below) it ended (almost) with the sound of a tiny cymbal - the final note of Elliott Carter’s Conversations which received its world premiere in Snape Maltings last Sunday. Performed by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group with Festival director Pierre-Laurent Aimard on piano, Colin Currie on percussion and conductor Oliver Knussen on a rather precarious-looking chair, the seven-minute piece packs in a great deal within its short span. Luckily Knussen and his musicians played it twice on the night.

With two other recent pieces on the bill, Helen Grimes’ exuberant Everyone Sang (2010) and Charlotte Bray’s haunting violin concerto, Caught in Treetops (2010), it was an evening (indeed a weekend) for new music at the Festival. One hopes that Carter would have felt in good company. In 1994, in a piece reprinted in his Substance of Things Heard, Paul Griffiths wrote:

You do not have to be eighty-five years old to feel marooned in the past while time races on, but you probably have to be that age - and specifically to be Elliott Carter - to have the reverse feeling of desertion by time’s skidding hurriedly backwards from a point you thought was not only yours but everyone’s. At a public interview before the world premiere in Chicago of his newest orchestral work, Partita, Carter reacted passionately to a question about the future. How could he have any certain hope for his music, he said, when the last decade had seen a rush of young composers - by whom he probably meant anyone under seventy or so - ‘writing like Brahms, and doing it badly’? His tone was regretful, bewildered, but not bitter: he has too much gaiety of mind ever to turn sour - or indeed, ever to write like Brahms. We therefore have the paradox of an aged composer producing some of the most exhilarating music around, and doing so with majestic accomplishment (if that does not seem too settled a term for this athlete of the mind) in his new piece.

But perhaps the youthfulness is not so paradoxical; maybe only the old, in these jaded times, have their innocence intact, and stay able to be surprised by immediate sensory impressions, as Carter is evidently surprised and delighted by sounds. Simplicity and directness have always been as much his blessings as the vaunted ‘complexity’. (Why should this always be introduced as a problem? Who complains of the complexity of a forest?) Indeed, the abundance, to give it an apter name, comes out of a simple certainty about the nature of a composer’s task… [p.22]

Listening to Conversation on Sunday evening - how the piano often seemed primarily percussive and the percussion instruments, especially the vibraphone, took on the more melodic role expected of the piano - we were reminded of a paragraph in Felix Meyer and Anne Shreffler’s ‘centennial portrait’ of Carter:

Carter has drawn on existing traditions for key points of his creative process and his artistic philosophy, preferring to prolong and rejuvenate them rather than call them into question. This applies to his preservation of the idea of a self-contained work of art, set down in writing with maximum precision, and to his focus on working with conventional tonal material (for example, precluding electronic sounds and largely avoiding experimental performance techniques on conventional instruments). It applies equally to his understanding of the role of the performer, whom he employs primarily as an interpreter of his ideas and not, as in aleatoric music, as a ‘co-author.’ And finally it is no less applicable, at least in intention, to his understanding of listeners: although Carter has often said that he never thinks of the audience while composing, but only of the performers, his efforts to make the musical events audible, and his penchant for casting his musical discourse in quasi dramatic roles, doubtless spring from a desire to make statements of maximum concision and urgency and to communicate them to his listeners. [Elliott Carter: A Centennial Portrait in Letters and Documents, pp.16-17]

Let’s hear finally from Elliott Carter himself, as quoted in Bálint Varga’s essential new book, Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers:

Each of my works is an adventure into a new conceptual, expressive, and musical domain which I have not yet explored. Their style is not something consciously thought about, but is a reflection of the expressive and musical intention. To work out a series of stylistic devices and then use them as formulae bores me as a prospect and it bores me in others who do it. Self-repetition is to me a sign of fatigue. [p.43]

In a 1985 postscript to Varga, Carter wrote: ‘The plan of your proposed book seems interesting and I hope you have the best of luck with it. It is courageous of you to include something about an American composer—for all of us have had a very hard time penetrating European indifference to our work.’ There was certainly no indifference on Sunday evening, as rapturous applause followed that delicate cymbal note in the closing minutes of the 64th Aldeburgh Festival.

Beside the Seaside

2011-06-16T17:01:00.008+01:00

The 64th Aldeburgh Festival opened last Friday with a bang. Several, actually - many from the gongs and tam tams in Messiaen’s Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum, performed by the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra under Simon Rattle. The second half of this thrilling concert was given over to Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, with an ailing Magdalena Kozena nevertheless giving a superb performance right down to the closings Ewigs. Such is the variety of the Festival programme, even after this big opening number there will be much more to enjoy over the coming weeks.

The New Aldeburgh Anthology is as essential an accompaniment as the highly-collectable Festival programme book. This remarkable collection of prose, poetry and images of Aldeburgh and the Suffolk coast has, at its heart, the Aldeburgh Festival in Benjamin Britten’s time and beyond. We celebrate both the Festival and the Anthology with excerpts from Steven Isserlis’ contribution to the latter, appropriately titled ‘Aldeburgh: A Magical Festival’:

My first performance at Aldeburgh was as part of a short masterclass seminar given by the distinguished Danish cellist Erling Blondal Bengtsson. I remember playing the Prelude of Bach’s fifth suite at the end-of-course student concert; about ten minutes after I’d finished, Britten arrived. So alas, I just missed my only chance to play to him. I did, however, get to play Bach to Imogen Holst, who was a friend of my teacher, Jane Cowan. As a result of that, I became friends with ‘Imo’ (well, if a rather bumptious teenager and a distinguished eccentric in her late sixties can be called friends), and she invited me to play her lovely piece for solo cello, The Fall of the Leaf, at a concert that marked her seventieth birthday in 1977. (I received my first-ever national review for that, the Telegraph graciously describing me as ‘the talented Roger Isserlis’.) Later, she invited me back to the festival to give the first performance for many years of her father’s only work for cello, Invocation. So my early memories of Aldeburgh are very much bound up with her. I really don’t think that a character like Imo’s could exist now. I remember her speeches to audiences: bending from the waist down, she would inform them, in the sort of voice now heard only in nursery schools, that they were about to have a ‘lovely, lovely time’. They would sit there meekly, putty in her hands.

At the concert in which I played The Fall of the Leaf, Peter Pears sang songs by Quilter and his contemporaries, with Roger Vignoles at the piano. I listened backstage and was bowled over by the performance; when they came offstage, I was ready for them. ‘That’s the best performance I’ve ever heard of British music!’ I gushed. Peter Pears looked at me a little strangely, as well he might; to him, having introduced so many of the greatest works ever written by a British composer, it must have sounded very foolish. Well, it was a silly thing to say; but I was young…

Another striking memory is from 1974, when Rostropovich was finally allowed out of the Soviet Union and was able to give the premiere of Britten’s Third Suite for solo cello, which had been written for him some years earlier. Again, Britten was sitting in the box; I remember thinking how frail he looked – but he was still a strong presence. We knew that we were listening to history in the making. Since then, I have performed that same Suite (the only one of the three that I play) several times at the Maltings; on each occasion, I have glanced towards the darkened box and imagined that Britten’s ghost was sitting there. It is quite an eerie feeling!

As I think of Aldeburgh and Snape, other memories come tumbling into my brain: the sight of Joyce Grenfell striding into a concert, seemingly oblivious to the excitement she was stirring up among her fellow audience members; Peter Pears and Murray Perahia getting to the very heart of Schumann’s Dichterliebe; Olly Knussen’s torso heaving with enjoyment of a somewhat risqué joke, with his co-director Steuart Bedford sitting with cocked head and knitted eyebrows, doing his good-natured best to understand it; my friend the pianist Paul Coker watching with amused concern a temper tantrum of mine backstage including (I’m ashamed to admit) some kicking of a dressing-room wall, when I felt my cello hadn’t been speaking properly during the first half of a recital; my mother attending a Bach recital I gave in the beautiful Blythburgh church, shortly before she died; Stephen Hough being thrilled by the sound of Britten’s piano, kept at the Red House; and so on. Variety has always been a hallmark of the festival and its associated activities, every visit offering a new and different experience.

The New Aldeburgh Anthology, edited by Ariane Bankes and Jonathan Reekie, is available in paperback, hardback and a limited edition. More books on Benjamin Britten, music associated with Aldeburgh and the history of Suffolk may be found here.

Pronunciation note: Aldeburgh almost rhymes with Marlboro rather than Nuremberg.

Selling Serialism

2011-06-09T16:44:00.005+01:00

Luigi Dallapiccola was the first Italian composer to work within the twelve-tone system, and is considered one of Italy's most important composers of the twentieth century. As Brian Alegant writes below and in his recent book, The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola, the emotion in Dallapiccola’s music makes his version of twelve tone an exciting place to start for anyone who thinks they won’t enjoy it.

Anyone who has had to teach twelve-tone music knows that it is a “hard sell.” Having taught music majors for nearly a generation, I can say without hesitation that no other genre of classical music inspires such a hostile reaction as serialism. I have seen and heard students, performers, and even critics denigrate it as abstract, tortured, inhuman, and more about numbers than music.

And yet, most scholars would agree that twelve-tone composition is among the most important musical developments of the twentieth century. Even a partial list of composers who experimented with—or fully embraced—serialism is staggering: Babbitt, Barber, Bartok, Berg, Boulez, Britten, Carter, Crawford, Ligeti, Lutoslawski, Mamlock, Martino, Mead, Morris, Nono, Perle, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Sessions, Schnittke, Skalkattos, Stockhausen, Stravinsky, Webern, and Wuorinen, among many others. And most scholars would also agree that Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–75) is among the most accomplished and admired serial composers. His output includes ballets, choral music, concertos, film scores, piano pieces, song cycles, orchestral pieces, and operas. Dallapiccola enjoyed international fame as a lecturer, teacher, and author, and he was a member of the national academies of arts in the U.S., France, and England.

I have been entranced by Dallapiccola’s music ever since I heard David Burge play the Quaderno musicale di Annalibera. I have been listening to his music ever since with increasing appreciation and admiration, and I use his works to introduce twelve-tone to my students (with overwhelmingly positive results).

The scholarly literature on Dallapiccola is vast, and comprises a host of books and monographs, countless articles, and an ever-growing number of dissertations and theses. As a result, we know quite a bit about his oeuvre: namely, his predilection for self-quotation and symbolism, his fondness for intricate counterpoint and systematic designs; his penchant for languages and text setting; his stylistic eclecticism; and his appropriation of Anton Webern’s techniques. And yet many facets of Dallapiccola’s music await further explanation, chief among them a gradual but inexorable absorption of Arnold Schoenberg’s techniques.

In simplest terms, this book does not ask why Dallapiccola composed twelve-tone music, but, rather, how. It examines his repertory through a technical lens and traces the evolution of his praxis over a thirty-year period. In so doing, it highlights facets of his music that have not been previously disclosed, and sheds light on compositions that have been virtually ignored. Ultimately, it aims to complement the existing research in order to understand more fully his technique and his language.

This book attempts in several ways to fill in some of the lacunae in the state of Dallapiccola research: it sheds light on several twelve-tone works of high quality that have been virtually ignored; it discusses these works in depth, so as to help readers understand them analytically and engage with them aurally; it builds upon recent developments in the post-tonal theory by Allen Forte, David Lewin, Andrew Mead, Robert Morris, Joseph Straus, and myself; it documents the composer’s seemingly limitless invention and his extraordinary skill and delight in text setting; and, most of all, it endeavors to continue the conversation on this important composer and his serial compositions, whose enchantments and challenges are so richly rewarding.

The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola by Brian Alegant is published by the University of Rochester Press. Anyone interested in the life and work of Dallapiccola should also seek out another Rochester publication, The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola by Raymond Fearn, which is available in paperback from your favourite bookseller.

Good Music for a Free People

2011-06-02T15:59:00.002+01:00

During the revolutions of 1848 two dozen members of an orchestra left Berlin for America to bring their music to new audiences. With their repertory of symphonies, opera selections and social dances they helped shape an audience for orchestral music at a seminal time in the history of the public concert. In her new book, Good Music for a Free People, Nancy Newman looks at the history of the Germania Musical Society, as they called themselves, and their effect on their adopted land. In this piece, written specially for the Stave, the author describes how she came across the orchestra and their fascinating story.

My first encounter with the Germania Musical Society was through Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Lawrence Levine’s provocative book had ignited a debate across disciplines about the historical relationship between so-called classical and popular music, a subject that interested me deeply. The Germania Musical Society makes a brief appearance for having played a pivotal role in the emergence of the symphony orchestra as a regular feature of American musical life. Its members were a group of young Berlin musicians who immigrated to the United States in 1848 and presented nearly nine hundred concerts to approximately one million listeners over the next six years.

Although it’s widely acknowledged that German immigrants had a profound effect on American musical practices, what intrigued me was Levine’s characterization of this particular group’s motivations. The orchestra members wanted “to further in the hearts of this politically free people the love of the fine art of music through performance of masterpieces of the greatest German composers”? Why would their listeners’ freedom have mattered? What did political liberty have to do with appreciation of the foremost classical compositions during “the century of artistic autonomy,” as Carl Dahlhaus described it? The relationship between absolute music and political thought was also of on-going interest, and the Germania Musical Society offered a new perspective on this complicated topic.

Following Levine’s trail led me to Skizzen aus dem Leben der Musik-Gesellschaft Germania, a brief memoir by Henry Albrecht, viola and clarinet player for the orchestra. This little-known account raised more questions than it answered. For example, Albrecht describes the members’ departure during the 1848 Revolutions in terms of their adversarial relationship to patronage. The prevailing system in Europe did not produce ideal musical results because it encouraged currying favor. Although noble courts were musically sophisticated and employed “virtuosi of the first rank,” nearly all the musicians sought to exhibit themselves through “exceptional mannerisms.” Albrecht claims that as a result, “a performance rarely appears totally flawless.”

The Germanians, in contrast, were willing to sacrifice their egos for the sake of the ensemble. “In the performance of orchestral works, every member realized that it was his holiest duty never to exhibit an exceptional, individual artistic mannerism.” To me, this articulated a fascinating paradox: by coming to the cultural wilderness of the United States, the Germanians sought the freedom not to show off. Even more surprising, they gave their desire for an alternative to patronage a form that was explicitly political. Not only did they seek an environment that was democratic, but they organized themselves accordingly. They drafted a constitution and agreed to share equitably in rewards and obligations. Aware that in leaving Berlin the orchestra became their sole means of support, the members pledged to place the welfare of the group above self-interest. A social-utopian motto, “One for all and all for one,” was adopted.

Good Music for a Free People makes Albrecht’s fascinating memoir available in English in its entirety for the first time. It also chronicles the orchestra’s travels to the major cities and small towns of the Eastern seaboard, west to the Mississippi, and to southeastern Canada. The ensemble offered Americans first and repeat hearings of works by major composers—especially Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Wagner. They familiarized listeners with current opera repertory by playing overtures and excerpts by Mozart, Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Auber, and Verdi. The Germanians performed with many of the era’s traveling virtuosi, including singers Jenny Lind, Henriette Sontag, and Teresa Parodi; violinists Ole Bull, Camilla Urso, and Miska Hauser; and pianists Alfred Jaëll and Otto Dresel.

At the same time that they helped forge a “classical” canon, the Germanians varied their programs with lighter genres such as polkas, waltzes, and potpourris. A good number of these works were original compositions by members, especially conductors Carl Bergmann (who later conducted the New York Philharmonic) and Carl Lenschow. The diversity and eclecticism of the Germania’s repertory had not been explored previously, however. I analyze how their programs changed over time in response to audiences in Baltimore, Boston, and other cities. During the orchestra’s final year, debates over whether they should segregate their repertory into lighter and more demanding concerts were aired in Dwight’s Journal. The controversy affords unique insights into contemporary attitudes toward the social significance of the public concert as a place where heterogeneous audiences gathered. Ultimately, the Germanians’ manipulation of their repertory reflects a struggle to define the semiotic arena of the arts and leisure by those who served it.

Much of Good Music for a Free People is concerned with events of the 1840s, a remarkable decade in transatlantic history. The Germanians were part of a great movement of Europeans, dislodged by economic and political upheaval, to the New World. German-speaking immigrants became known as “Forty-Eighters,” so named for the Revolutions of that year. The merging of their diverse and often innovative practices with the dominant culture would have a deep impact on many areas of American life.

The 1840s also saw experimental forms of music-making by “private orchestras,” modeled after the touring ensemble of Johann Strauss, and in “promenade concerts” in Paris and London. In these forums, audiences for orchestral music grew from a few hundred to several thousand enjoying “mixed repertory” concerts indoors and out. Such democratization of musical experience helped solidify the middle class’s consciousness of itself. These first truly “popular” musical events led to the realization that the same processes of commodification and mass mediation—sheet music production, instrument sales, and journalism—worked equally well for both serious and lighter genres. And the image of the United States as a place where musicians operated exclusively within a market economy increasingly tempted individuals and ensembles to make the dangerous Atlantic crossing. The Germanians’ origin as a private orchestra situates it within a formative stage of the “culture industry,” the Frankfurt School’s term for the institutions and practices that shape the commodification of art.

In The Dialectical Imagination, Martin Jay posits that the intellectual ferment of the 1840s make it “the most extraordinary decade” of the nineteenth century. For the first time, abstract German philosophical thought began to be applied to social and political matters. Social utopians Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Étienne Cabet had embarked on a similar path, and their adherents pursued the implications of their systems in France and abroad. Music critic John Sullivan Dwight, for example, lived in the Fourierist community Brook Farm on the outskirts of Boston. Before he left Berlin, Albrecht read Cabet’s utopian novel, Voyage en Icarie. Shortly after the orchestra disbanded, he went to live in Cabet’s model community in Nauvoo, Illinois. The ideology of “Icarian communism” played an important role in shaping Albrecht’s idealized view—his utopian vision—of the Germanians’ attempt at self-determination.

In many ways, we are still living with the ramifications of musical, cultural, social, and political developments that occurred during the 1840s. It is my hope that the Germania Musical Society’s extraordinary story will shine new light on the possibilities unleashed during that eventful decade.

Good Music for a Free People by Nancy Newman is available now from your favourite bookseller. Excerpts will follow over the coming weeks in this blog.

Words and Music

2011-05-23T17:23:00.007+01:00

Advance copies of Bálint Varga’s Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers have just arrived, and what a remarkable publication it is. Birtwistle, Boulez, Cage, Carter, Henze, Kurtág, Ligeti, Nono, Reich, Tippett and Xenakis are just a few of the artists who agreed to discuss their music and their influences. In this post we extract a few choice morsels but urge you to seek out a copy in your favourite bookshop, as we are unable to reproduce the compelling flow of conversation and ideas within the confines of a blog post.

Gunther Schuller

To get back to Darmstadt: in the early fifties there came about an alliance between the German radio stations, composers, publishers, modern music journals, and festivals. Radios, as you know, are subsidized by the state and can broadcast new music without any great risk. A political/business linkup developed: a festival premiered a new work, it was recorded or taped by a radio station, and then the tape was broadcast throughout Europe. And everybody became richer and more famous. As a result of a terrific publicity machinery, everything was made to sound bigger and better than it really was. That is how lesser composers, like Pousseur or Kagel, became touted as “great” composers. We were told in Darmstadt that they and Boulez and Stockhausen were the masters of our time, and we should all compose like them.

There were three composers in Darmstadt in those early years who thought this was all pretty silly: Alexander Goehr, Harrison Birtwistle, and me. We were young and fairly cocky, and didn’t necessarily swallow Stockhausen’s line. I am proud of that. In the end—around 1957—I left Darmstadt, never to return.

Pierre Schaeffer

I am going to tell you why, at a particular moment in my life, I embarked on an adventure which I called concrete music.

I am not a composer. I have a degree in engineering but I have always regarded writing as my calling. As for my profession: I was one of the pioneers of broadcasting. I set up an experimental studio during the German occupation (today, they would call it an atelier) with the aim of developing the bases of radio art. Is it possible to create art devoid of the visual aspect? Is blind art viable?

Those were great years even though we had to work clandestinely during the occupation. We also participated in preparing the liberation of Paris. The first broadcasts went on the air a few days before the withdrawal of the Germans: it was rather a perilous undertaking.

It was after the war that the development of radio art really got under way. We wanted to find out all the possibilities inherent in this genre based only on text, background noise, and music—a genre that freed the imagination. Logically enough, I attempted on one occasion to create an experimental work in which I set out to explore at what point background sound, the condensing of noise turns into music. (In other words, musique concrete was the outcome of an accident, just as most other innovations. One stumbles on something one was not looking for.)

Toru Takemitsu

The pieces I wrote during the past several years have had a great deal to do with water. I love the sea. It has many faces. Numerous currents are whirling in it, each with a tempo, a color, and a temperature of its own. This phenomenon reminds me of the structure of music.

Twenty-five years ago when I started composing, I carried out concrete musical experiments with water. During a visit to France I was surprised to find that Pierre Schaeffer was working in the same direction. In my Water Music (1960) I use the sound of dripping water. I collected material from rivers, wells, and the sea and in the process of concentrating my attention on these sonorities, I grew fond of water.

Nature is important for my music in other ways as well. All four seasons are beautiful in Japan. I live on the shore of a lake and forty thousand cherry trees blossom in the neighborhood. Still, I prefer the autumn when trees, the grass—nature as a whole—change from day to day. One cannot catch the actual moment of change, only its result is tangible. It is a phenomenon that is of interest for me also as a composer.

Iannis Xenakis

Metastasis, that starting point of my life as a composer, was inspired not by music but rather by the impression gained during the Nazi occupation of Greece. The Germans tried to take Greek workers to the Third Reich — and we staged huge demonstrations against this and managed to prevent it. I listened to the sound of the masses marching toward the center of Athens, the shouting of slogans and then, when they came upon Nazi tanks, the intermittent shooting of the machine guns, the chaos. I shall never forget the transformation of the regular, rhythmic noise of a hundred thousand people into some fantastic disorder . . . I would never have thought that one day all that would surface again and become music: Metastasis.

I composed it in 1953–54 and called it a starting point because that was when I introduced into music the notion of mass . . . Almost everybody in the orchestra is a soloist, I used complete divisi in the strings which play large masses of pizzicati and glissandi. In other words, I do not use the term “mass” in a sociological sense.

Another experience of my youth dates from the time immediately preceding the war. I used to make outings to the countryside near Athens. I would take my bicycle, select a spot to erect my tent and listen to the sounds of nature. Crickets, for instance: their chirping was coming from every direction and was changing all the time. Those are also mass sounds, you see? But I also liked listening to the wind and the sea or the rain as it was lashing at the side of the tent.

Three Questions for Sixty-Five Composers by Bálint András Varga is published by the University of Rochester Press and will be available soon from all good booksellers.

The image at the head of this post is taken from the book. The drawing, by Johannes Maria Staud, was made 'at the time of preparing the score of my opera Berenice in 2003/4.'

Who was that masked man?

2011-05-12T17:30:00.005+01:00

Unmasking Ravel is the intriguing title of a new collection of essays on the French master, edited by Peter Kaminsky. It joins an already impressive list of books on French music in the Eastman Studies in Music series published by the University of Rochester Press, including Stephen Zank’s acclaimed Irony and Sound. Here Professor Kaminsky describes his “Eureka!” moment with Ravel’s music and gives us some idea of what to expect from this new publication.

Ravel’s music has had an irresistible hold on me since my first encounter with it in Professor Joel Sheveloff’s music history class at Boston University. It was there that I heard the combination of hilarious story and impossibly clever music that is Ravel’s first opera The Spanish Hour (L’Heure espagnole); and the shimmering and utterly original dance “Forlane” from Le tombeau de Couperin. Cut to 15 years later as I began my professional career as music theorist: imagine my surprise when my colleagues sneered at the mere mention of Ravel’s name — too lightweight, too effete, too popular. (The ubiquity of Bolero did not help.) Needless to say, this situation presented precisely the thing that all writers need: A PROBLEM TO SOLVE. That is, how could I square my conviction that Ravel’s music was Hall of Fame material (I am a hardcore baseball fan), while all but a handful of scholars regarded him as strictly bush league*?

After writing a number of journal articles and book chapters, I finally had a breakthrough, a “Eureka!” moment. I understood that the metaphor that everybody writing about Ravel seemed to employ — MASKS — was in reality a bunch of tropes that, beginning with his earliest reviews onward, gradually hardened into the public and critical reception history of his music. These tropes include what I term “Ravel as classicist,” as “artisan,” as “artificial,” as deliberately attempting the impossible (the so-called “aesthetic of imposture” made famous by his student and first biographer Roland-Manuel), as “cold,” as “virtuoso,” and as “ornamentalist.” Three realizations followed: his music presents all of these facets at once; I decided to assemble and edit a Ravel book rather than write a monograph to better reveal the panoply of musical, aesthetic and historical contexts; and I found a title for the book that captured all this: Unmasking Ravel.

The book divides into three parts: Orientations and Influences; Analytical Case Studies; and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. In Part I, authors Steven Huebner, Barbara Kelly and Michael Puri—three of the most incisive current writers on Ravel’s music—engage aspects of cultural and literary history, biography, influence, reception, branding (in the modern advertising sense), memory, and interpretive strategies. Ravel provocatively stated that his most important composition teacher was the American author Edgar Allen Poe, especially the essay The Philosophy of Composition in which Poe describes the step-by-step creation of his poem “The Raven.” Huebner, equally provocatively, places this statement in the broader context of Ravel’s literary circle and unravels (pun intended) its crucial role in his aesthetics and concept of classicism (e.g., why Ravel loved Mozart and equivocated over Debussy). Kelly reveals how Ravel’s student and first biographer Roland-Manuel deliberately and continually manipulated the composer’s image in relation to ongoing music-critical currents to enhance his standing with audiences and critics alike, and how this effort subsequently shaped our current views on Ravel. Puri manages to interpret Adorno’s writings on Ravel with a positive spin by addressing the composer’s melancholic nostalgia in the context of the demise of the Western music tradition. (Do I hear La valse?)

The five chapters comprising Part II provide close analyses of compositions representing the chronological boundaries of Ravel’s mature work (from the 1899 Pavane pour une Infante défunte to the 1931 Piano Concerto in G Major). My essay provides an introduction to the other analyses by comparing formal process in three pairs of like works (including Aloysius Bertrand’s poem “Le Gibet” and Ravel’s musical setting as the middle movement of Gaspard de la Nuit). As theorist/pianist and concert pianist, respectively, co-authors Daphne Leong and David Korevaar address Ravel’s virtuosity in “Scarbo” from Gaspard and other works in terms of “mechanical motion” and “dance-like motion” (and their merging), showing how musical structure, physical gesture, and expressivity come together in ingenious ways. Sigrun Heinzelmann addresses Ravel’s approach to sonata form in the pre-War String Quartet and Piano Trio, further demonstrating Ravel’s axiomatic and classicist economy of means. Volker Helbing deconstructs the waltzes of Johann Strauss into their sub-atomic particles to show their culmination in the “spiral form” and self-destruction of Ravel’s La valse. Elliott Antoloketz, better known for his work on Bartók and Debussy, shows the relevance of Bartók’s polymodal chromaticism in modeling Ravel’s modernist post-War music, in particular the elusive Sonate pour violon et violoncelle.

In Part III, Interdisciplinary Studies, authors Lauri Suurpää, Gurminder Kaur Bhogal, and the present writer offer novel perspectives through the combination of philosophical, art-critical, or psychoanalytic theories with music analysis. Suurpää draws on semiotician A. J. Greimas and Schenkerian theory in dealing with text-music relations in songs from the cycle Histoires naturelles. Bhogal synthesizes aspects of the nineteenth-century Art Nouveau movement, pianistic pyrotechnics, current metrical theory, representation, and Ravel biography in her analysis of selected virtuosic piano works including “Ondine” from Gaspard. In the concluding chapter, I begin with psychoanalyst Melanie Klein’s well-known interpretation of Colette’s libretto, and go on to explore contrasting psychoanalytic theories (Freud’s and Piaget’s) of moral development in children as a backdrop for analyzing the 1925 opera L’Enfant et les sortilèges. Readers will discover what is meant by “his [the Child’s] chord is his sword.”

In conclusion, let us reconsider the notion of “Ravel as lightweight.” In a sense, the composer’s own irony and self-deprecation helps foster this impression. After all, any artist who heads a score with “the delicious and ever-novel pleasure of a useless occupation” (quoting de Régnier in Valses nobles et sentimentales) is not exactly asking to be taken seriously. But that is part of the seductive charm of Ravel’s irony. Indeed, Roland-Manuel cites Valses nobles as marking a seismic shift in his harmonic and compositional conception. (A glance at the voice leading of the opening two bars confirms this in spades.) Such a gap between the “face value” of a Ravel work and the depth of its technique, craft, and especially its expression manifests itself in virtually all of his major compositions. Perhaps more than any other factor, this argues for a re-examination of context, interpretation, perspective, style, and structure across his output. À mes lecteurs: amusez-vous!

Unmasking Ravel will be available soon. Why not order a copy from your local bookseller and help keep bookshops on the high street as well as in cyberspace?

* For those of us not steeped in the terminology of North American sports here is a definition of 'bush league'.

Talking to Morton Feldman (and 64 others)

2011-05-06T17:32:00.007+01:00

Imagine being able to ask composers like John Cage, György Ligeti, Steve Reich or Karlheinz Stockhausen detailed questions about their influences and their methods of composition. This is exactly what Bálint András Varga did for his new book, Three Questions for Sixty Five Composers. Here, as a taster for this fascinating book, are excerpts from three of his conversations. First György Ligeti:

Noises do not influence me directly, but neither do I cut myself off from them altogether. The outside world makes an indirect impact. Music works with acoustic material, no doubt, but I do not think that the sounds of live or dead nature would influence me in a decisive manner. Various types of movement do. In my view, you see, music mirrors the processes of motion through sound. Machines play an important role… I have, after all, also written a piece for one hundred metronomes.

Although Atmosphères and Apparitions are not programmatic in character—I did not set out to render the sensation of flying in either piece—flying did have an indirect influence on their floating, on the continuous transformation of their musical patterns.

Without asking for my permission, Stanley Kubrick used extracts from Atmosphères, Lux aeterna, and the Requiem in the music of his science fiction film 2001. I was angry with him but I did like his work (apart from the mystical beginning and ending). While composing, I did not think of anything “cosmic” (Atmosphères is meant to convey “atmosphere” rather than “air”), but the film made me aware of the possibility of associating infinity with my music.

As far as Lux aeterna is concerned, the words only served as a chance for me to compose music which is in fact musica aeterna: as if it has been sounding from time immemorial and would be going on forever—we only hear a part of it. It emerges from nowhere, it is here and slowly disappears.

Interviewing Morton Feldman, Varga writes: I must plead guilty to having known precious little at the time about Feldman and his music. All I knew was that he was considered an important composer and that was enough for me to reach for my microphone. It will not be difficult to imagine my acute embarrassment in meeting this unique man face to face. I felt hopelessly European, hopelessly bourgeois, hopelessly underinformed. However, I made a brave effort to conceal my uneasiness and to conduct a conversation with Feldman as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

[On whether Robert Rauschenberg’s white pictures influenced John Cage]
What influenced John Cage in Rauschenberg was an answer to a philosophical question about life and art. Robert Rauschenberg is exactly my age. And brilliant. He said something that was very influential to a lot of young artists at that time. I think this is the influence of Rauschenberg, with his white paintings, to Cage. He said that he does not want either life or art. He wants something in between. A very influential statement: neither life nor art but something in between. And Cage would see this beautiful white thing in the shadows of the environment. He lived in a very beautiful apartment, Cage, and he saw where art and the outside environment could collage.

John Cage is only involved with music forms….That there is nothing there behind the material. So in that sense, John Cage is not a mystic.

Don’t you think that his music exudes an atmosphere and in doing so, it communicates something beyond the music, it communicates a way of thinking?
I think it asks a lot of questions. I think it’s the atmosphere of asking questions.

Whereas yours?

The atmosphere of answering them (laughs).

In that case, one must envy you: you seem to have the answers. Few people can claim that.

Only for my music. Only. You see, that’s another problem: I don’t feel that it’s a community. I could never listen to a piece of Boulez and get some insight from the piece. I could listen to a piece of Boulez and could say to him what I said once to Ligeti, who I like very much, we are very good friends, and I said to him: “György, you are too gifted to write European music”.

II.
Sounds do not surround you.

There are sounds right now.

I don’t hear them.

You don’t hear them?

No.

What sounds do you hear?

Nothing. I hear them but they are indigenous. In a place that builds modern buildings—do you hear the drilling that’s going on? It is absolutely like having a lion in a jungle. I mean it is indigenous to the landscape. It would be interesting if you would hear an Islamic chant. What’s happening here? OPEC, OPEC! (Vienna - where the interview took place - is the headquarters of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries). In other words: I hear it like everyone else but it is not a source of . . .

. . . inspiration.

It’s not a source of anything. Most of the time I think of it as pollution. Noise pollution.

How about the sounds of nature, such as the wind, birds, and so on?

I have no contact with them. They don’t interest me at all. I can live very well without them.

So in composing, the sounds always come from within.

Yes, only when I am composing. Otherwise, you are crazy. I don’t go around hearing sounds. Some people do! Stockhausen, I am sure, is one of them.

Let’s turn to Karlheinz Stockhausen for our final snippet. Here the Master describes what one might find in one of his best known pieces:

In Hymnen there appear national anthems, that is, completely banal material as well as numerous other situations (recordings made in a Chinese shop, at a student protest demonstration in Aachen, at a ship’s christening in Hamburg, at a soccer match with crowds of people shouting, the squawking of birds, and boys shouting in a school yard). Linked to the American national anthem, you hear odd short-wave sounds (Morse signals, whistling, shrill screeching), as if someone has turned on a radio station at night, with distorted broadcasts. In the context of the “International” the words of a croupier: “rien ne va plus Messieurs Dames,” “faites vos jeux Messieurs Dames,” etc., are heard. Out of the “Rouge” called by a croupier in a roulette hall emerges a four-part fugue in four different languages on the word rouge, with all the different variations of the color red as listed in the color catalogue of a London paint company.

Longer excerpts will follow over the coming weeks. Three Questions for Sixty Five Composers by Bálint András Varga will be published towards the end of this month by the University of Rochester Press.

Leon Kirchner and 'a Boo for the Boos of Boulez'

2011-04-18T14:06:00.018+01:00

Known throughout his career for his controversial stances and outspoken polemics, in 1952 Pierre Boulez aroused considerable ire with his essay “Schoenberg is Dead”, which denigrated the aging composer for being too conservative in comparison to Webern.

In 1963 Leon Kirchner was in his second year of teaching at Harvard. Despite his discomfort with Boulez’ attack on Schoenberg, he was prepared to offer camaraderie to the Frenchman during his own sojourn in Cambridge. During the following years Boulez became increasingly active and successful as an orchestral conductor and remained in contact with Kicrhner. Robert Riggs takes up the story in his recently published biography, Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher:

In January 1969 Boulez’ appointment as music director of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in London was announced, and in the spring of that year he came to the United States again, this time as a guest conductor with the orchestras in Cleveland, Boston, Chicago, and New York. Boulez agreed to be interviewed in Boston by Joan Peyser for a feature article to be published in the New York Times. During the interview over a long lunch at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, Boulez became quite expansive, providing Peyser with numerous quotable but also controversial remarks for her article, which appeared in the Arts and Leisure Section on Sunday, March 9, 1969. The headline, “A Fighter From Way Back” (supplied by the Times editors), already gives a premonition of the article’s thrust: an attack by Boulez on various aspects of American musical life.

According to Boulez, composers who publish in Perspectives of New Music “think they are great scientists. They are not. I know great scientists and they possess invention and imagination. Composers who publish in this journal never discuss important questions of choice and decision. They write only about putting different things together. This is not an esthetic point of view. It’s what I call a ‘cashier’s point of view.’’’ Addressing the perceived rivalry between European and American composers, Boulez asserted: “The Americans do operate under a severe handicap, of course; they have no strong personalities in the field. If they were strong enough to establish their personality on the world, they would see that no national favoritism exists. . . . They have no one in America as good as Hans Werner Henze, and that is not setting your sights very high. A composer the stature of Stockhausen they have not.” Boulez also offered a diagnosis of what caused this alleged impoverished state of music in America:

European music in not connected with the university. There is no ivory castle for us. But here, the university people and practical musicians ignore each other. It’s a very unhealthy state of affairs. I do not like this pedantic approach. I do not like scholars who bring only Death to music. The university situation is incestuous. It is one big marriage in which the progeny deteriorates, like the progeny of old and noble families. The university musician is in a self-made ghetto, and what is worse, he likes it there.

The night before “A Fighter From Way Back” appeared in the New York Times, Boulez was a guest at the home of Leon and Gertrude Kirchner in Cambridge. Although Boulez obviously knew that the interview/article would be coming out soon, if not the very next day, he was, according to Kirchner, urbane, charming, and completely relaxed that evening. After the very pleasant dinner party on Saturday, the Sunday paper brought Kirchner a rude and totally unexpected shock. Boulez’s inflammatory and judgmental remarks, the sting of which was augmented by his deceptively collegial demeanor the previous evening, disturbed Kirchner. In response, three weeks later he sent a lengthy letter to the editor of the Times.

Peyser had begun her article by recounting how Boulez, as a twenty-year-old, had booed a performance of Stravinsky’s music in Paris. Boulez explained that his action had been directed not at Stravinsky, but rather at those in the music establishment who considered him a God and an idol. Thus, Boulez had booed Stravinsky in order to draw attention to Schoenberg, and eventually he was successful in doing so. Then, a few years later, after Schoenberg’s serial techniques had attracted a wide following, Boulez attacked him in order to promote Webern.

Kirchner prefaced his letter with an extract from Peyser’s article that recounted this story of Boulez’s boos. Then, in the manner of Robert Schumann—who divided his persona between two fictitious interlocutors in order to debate musical issues in his journal, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik—Kirchner launched a satiric dialogue between “Leon” and “Kirchner” who discussed their reactions to the Boulez interview:

LEON: What did you think of “A Fighter from Way Back?”
KIRCHNER: Boulez lost his “cool.” He led with his right. Perhaps he should confine himself to leading Booing Groups.
L: Have you ever led a Booing Group?
K: Well, to be perfectly frank, I’ve booed Boulez’s Boos, not that I was attacking him. I have the greatest respect for him. I was only attacking the establishment which considers Boos “the God, the Idol, the Only Truth.” I’ll be honest with you. I did it to draw attention to Babbitt’s Boos. However, I soon realized I would have to defl ower Babbitt’s Boos with a dwindling supply of my own. Not that I didn’t respect him but I thought it was time to draw some attention to Carter. But really, I don’t want to be drawn into this, it can only lead to Boo dropping. I’d have to mention so many.

The Times decided to use “A Boo for the Boos of Boulez” as the headline for Kirchner’s letter.

After addressing several points in this manner, Kirchner discontinued his humorous repartee in favor of a traditional and serious examination of one the most troubling issues raised by Boulez: the role of universities in American musical life. Having been uncomfortable for many years with the increasing emphasis on positivistic approaches in the cultivation of music within academia, Kirchner proposed that the root of the problem was to be found not with the universities but with the individuals who reside there.

As an example of a rare scholar who recognized this condition, he cited German musicologist Friedrich Blume, who, in a recent guest lecture at Harvard, had given “a vigorous polemic ‘against the encroachment of philological methods’ which ‘pushed aside concern with interpretation, meaning and technique’ to the point where ‘scholars forget that they have to do with music at all.’” In agreement with Boulez’s low assessment of much academic writing about music, Kirchner maintained that “composers can, apparently, demonstrate brilliantly that they are subject to the same restrictive and essentially trivial involvements as some of their colleagues in musicology.”

Broadening the discussion beyond music, Kirchner touched on aspects of the relationship between the arts and the sciences that had concerned him in “Notes on Understanding.” He maintained,

What affects the sciences affects the arts: the inability to distinguish between the operation of a calculus and the operation of human language forms. The enormous success of technology in the solution of a variety of soluble problems has made this inability to distinguish operations more difficult, and the result is that profoundly important areas of activity are suppressed and vanish in favour of a monolithic approach to what appears to be all there is. We are caught in a struggle of methodologies; control and prediction of human behavior vs. the demonstration of human competence and creativity.

Buttressing his position from an unlikely source, and at the same time tying it in to current political issues, Kirchner noted with irony that

we must turn to Vice-Admiral Hyman G. Rickover (the New York Times, June 9, 1967) to be told that “war is not quantifiable,” that human life is not a factor in mathematical cost-effectiveness equations that are fed into computers because there is no way to assign intrinsic value and fi nite proportions to it . . . that “our society is threatened by any man who knows method but not meaning, technique but not principle . . . any man who depreciates wisdom, experience and intuition.”

In response to Boulez’s charge that many American composers, in their fixation on systems and analysis, devalue or even ignore the parameters of imagination, choice, and aesthetics, Kirchner admitted,

In our recent craze and almost exclusive involvement with the “substantive,” we tend to fossilize our art and repudiate its function. One of the wonderful things about Schoenberg—whom Boulez not long ago likened to an unfortunate Moses who never got to the promised 12-tone land—is the contest between abstract rule (from time immemorial a catalyst) and sheer musical urge. The resultant modifications, or “mutants” if you like, are exciting, a result which would be statistically unlikely without the two. At all points, there is a choice to be made and it is the memory bank operating in the continuing present and all that the memory stores of experience and of contemplation that guides the choice.

We talk a great deal about systems analysis, determination of rules and so forth, but in the process we forget the act of total involvement, of physical and spiritual play. Rules are valuable and with a proper understanding we can construct models from which invaluable information may be inferred. But the adequacy of a rule is entirely dependent upon highly refined and sensitive observation and, given an adequate rule, we must also understand that the variables (a most productive area) are difficult to “cover.” When we grasp a fact by describing it, there is no reason to assume that we have understood the total phenomenon.

Leon Kirchner is available from all good booksellers, both virtual and real, or in case of difficulty, direct from our website.

Hans, Milein and Igor

2011-04-07T11:04:00.004+01:00

In March Toccata Press launched their new edition of Hans Keller’s writings on - and Milein Cosman’s drawings of - Stravinsky with a reception at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London. Stravinsky the Music Maker is the third incarnation of this book and the most complete yet, with all of Keller’s known writings on the composer, greatly enhanced by Cosman’s lively line drawings. Christopher Wintle, one of the trustees of the Cosman Keller Art & Music Trust and a publisher in his own right, gave the following address on the night, which we are pleased to post here in full:

The Time: Spring 1967. The Place: Oxford. The Occasion: I am cycling into College for dinner. As I come down the Woodstock Road, I see my tutor waiting at a bus stop. He is Dr. Egon Wellesz, one-time student of Arnold Schoenberg and classmate of Berg and Webern. I stop. “Good evening,” he says sweetly, “And what did you do today?” “I listened to Stravinsky!” I beam in reply. His smile becomes rictal: he is clearly agitated. “Stravinsky,” he cries, “was a FRAUD!” Whereupon he raises his arms as if dancing The Rite of Spring and emits a few primeval grunts. I bid him a pleasant evening and continue to College. Naturally, I spread the bad tidings among friends. No-one is delighted – but then, no-one is surprised: even in the 1960s, Igor is still ‘hot potato’.

In the preface to this combatively-titled book – for Hans believed that Stravinsky, unlike others, genuinely made music – Martin Anderson claims I supplied the articles that got the project started. Well, as far as it goes that’s true– but I can go further still. What happened was this. First, I breathed heavily down his neck to ensure he included all Hans’s writings on Stravinsky; and then I was forced to draw in my breath as he and Mark Doran added in extra pieces I’d either forgotten or knew nothing about. The result of their expert sleuthing is not just a gratifyingly tidy piece of archival house-keeping, but also a generically richer collection than I’d expected.

The writings are arranged chronologically over a period of 35 years from 1948 to ‘83; they are drawn from music magazines, learned journals, book reviews, newspapers, concert previews and programme notes; and they come to an imposing head in ‘Stravinsky Heard’, a reprint of Hans’s contribution to Stravinsky Seen and Heard from 1982. Yet taken together, they evince the refracted unity of a modernist collage. After a few introductory scraps, the main theme emerges in 1954 as Hans sets out to defend Stravinsky, not so much against Schoenberg, but rather against ‘the Schoenbergians’ – in other words, against the Welleszes and all those who couldn’t recognize genius when they heard it. Pre-eminently he targeted Theodor Adorno. It was, of course, an extraordinary mission: for if he didn’t count himself among the Schoenbergians, Hans was still deeply imbued with the thought of Schoenberg and the traditions behind him. Not for him was the Russian Stravinsky, the ‘neo-classical’ French Stravinsky or the time-travelling American Stravinsky; his Stravinsky could only be a co-opted Viennese. And it is no surprise that, during those 35 years, Hans had to wrestle with some demons of his own.

Let me sift the evidence. At first sight, Hans’s attitude to Stravinsky seems ambivalent. True in 1956, he berates Adorno for not being ‘inspired by that great respect for a great genius without which the truest observation on him lacks perspective’ [:45]; true too he deplores how Adorno tears ‘Stravinsky to shreds with the intellectual power of … a philosopher and the subterranean passion of a fanatic’ [:53]: after all, Adorno likens Stravinsky’s repetitions – the celebrated ostinati – to ‘the mask-like ceremonial politeness of certain schizophrenics’ [:54]. And even when he and Adorno both recognize ‘a sado-masochistic trait’ pervading the music, Keller again springs to the defence: ‘I should never have dreamt of evaluating a creative character trait as such, negatively or positively’ [:59], he writes: for Stravinsky’s ‘anti-expressiveness does not, as Adorno thinks, result in emptiness, but in fullness fully opposed’, yielding a ‘statically intense tension [by] opposing the flow of rhythm [with] rhythm itself’ [:60]. And so on.

But what happens when Hans himself takes the stage? His earliest views are so disrespectful that they’re not worth the debate. In 1951 he refers to The Rake’s Progress as a ‘sham creation’, ‘a pale and defective copy’ of Così fan tutte [:59]; and in 1954, in an essay that compares Schoenberg’s ‘Dance round the Golden Calf’ (which he sees as a rite) with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring (which he sees as a dance) he derides the Rite as ‘a musical failure’:

I cannot see that it has any chance of survival, except as a museum piece [:40].

He listens uneasily to Stravinsky rehearsing Agon and failing to correct the ‘distonations’ in the string unisons: ‘his zest nevertheless carried off the passages in question,’ he remarks diplomatically, ‘but any lesser musician will have to be more pedantic at these points …’ [:71]. In a review of Robert Craft’s Conversations with Igor Stravinsky he reveals severe logical contradictions in Stravinsky’s pronouncements on music theory, resolves them in his own terms and saves up a stinging riposte to the end:

’Critics’, says Stravinsky, ‘misinform the public and delay comprehension. Because of critics many valuable things come too late.’ All the more so when artists themselves turn into critics and proceed to misinform themselves.’ [:81]

Hans berates Stravinsky (not unfairly) for ‘deceiving himself in his usual manner’ over the working of contrast in a later piece, Movements [:83]; and he notes how

the master was not beyond descending to the level of uncomprehending gutter journalism when pronouncing upon the music of such dangerous rivals as Beethoven, Brahms, Schoenberg or, most savagely, Britten [:110]

– especially when there was doubt as to how much of Schoenberg’s music Stravinsky actually knew [:142]. Finally in 1983, Hans considers it a positive ‘duty’ to reassure the reader that Stravinsky the man was not worth knowing about

unless one is childish enough to enjoy the coincidence, within one and the same mind, of supernormal art and moral sub-normality. I only met Stravinsky once – and had never met such a small-minded great mind before. [:167]

Of course, none of this is to suggest that Hans would happily have taken tea in Oxford with Wellesz: the positives far outweigh the negatives. But when we take these strictures, along with those on Colin Mason, Peter Stadlen, Robert Craft, Joseph Kerman, Paul Griffiths and others, we understand that his appetite for publicly criticizing the critics, already whetted in the Music Survey by 1950, never diminished one iota.

More importantly, though, Hans set out to enrich ‘history of music’ and ‘textual criticism’ with ‘the application of psychoanalysis’ [:39]. It was a vital, lifelong initiative, though still not one much heeded by our relentlessly positivistic culture. As the book Music and Psychology shows, Hans was a classical Freudian enriched by the British psychoanalysis and sociology of the 1940s; and, as a hilarious chapter in his book 1975 shows, he could also play the unpious ‘psychological observer’. So it comes as no surprise to find him talking, in Stravinsky the Music Maker, of sadomasochistic masterpieces (such as the Mass or the Symphony of Psalms), or of self-castigating aggression, identification, object-love, creative mourning and melancholia, the return of the repressed, the capacity in art for pathology to yield health, and so forth. What is fascinating, though, is to see how the psychoanalysis, once allied to aesthetics, interacts with and reshapes Adorno’s critical stance. This happens in three ways.

First, Hans revalues the opposition between the respective followers of Schoenberg and Stravinsky into a positive dialectical field, and even considers a mutual influence between the two masters (though there is more to be said on how the mature Schoenberg not only reclaimed classical forms but also did a bit of neo-classicizing of his own). That is to say, Hans celebrates the tension between release and restraint, development and anti-development. Stravinsky, he concludes, is more a ‘counterpoint’ to Schoenberg than a ‘counterpole’ [:41]. Second, he relates this revalued dialectical field to Freud’s dual-instinct theory of 1920, with the Austro-Germans promoting Eros (love) and Stravinsky Thanatos (death). But that being so, he argues that the dialectic should not be between Schoenberg and Stravinsky, but rather between Wagner and Stravinsky – Wagner being the counterpole that Schoenberg wasn’t. He writes:

Clinically, it is of the greatest significance … that the most passionate Stravinsky-lovers … are, at the same time, the most conscientious – invariably moralizing – objectors to Wagner’s music. [:164]

And third, he comes to recognize that it was not just Schoenberg’s death in 1951 that released the creative mourning behind Stravinsky’s late move into atonality and serialism, but rather Anton Webern’s in 1945. For Webern, ‘the ultimate expressionist’ [:112], was also, in Hans’s words, a fellow ‘sado-masochist’ whose ‘sparse, ultra-transparent textures [were] cleaner … than anything our entire musical history had had to offer until then.’ Indeed, they were textures whose brevity Stravinsky would emulate repeatedly, notably in the poignant setting of Dylan Thomas’s ‘Do not go gentle …’ analysed with some attention in the book.

All this is immensely stimulating. Today, for instance, we could extend the argument by aligning Hans’s work on small groups in the 1940s with modern sibling-theory. Juliet Mitchell argues that our deepest influences are not necessarily the father-figures of the past, but rather our professional brothers and sisters of the present. So not only did Stravinsky honour the ghosts of Schoenberg and Webern, but he also set out to prove himself with the post-war avant-garde – a Boulezian peer-group that, as we know, took for its pace-setter the pupil and not the master, Webern not Schoenberg. Add to that Keller’s observation that Stravinsky displayed ‘hostile identification’ towards Benjamin Britten by plundering the younger man’s texts and music [:100] and we conjure up yet another Stravinsky: the castrating father, the annihilating older sibling and – since Britten almost alone knew how to plunder Stravinsky to effect – a jealous cannibal gorging on his own, reclaimed flesh.

This is not the occasion to assess the book’s technical aspect. On the one hand the analyses restrict themselves (now unfashionably) to theme and motif, but on the other integrate their findings with psychology and aesthetics. Suffice it to note that the terms in which Hans analyses Stravinsky are those in which he also analyses Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven – as is clear from the Essays on Music. In general he postulates a tension between a composer’s ‘background’ – his sources – and his ‘foreground’ – his invention. In Stravinsky’s case, though, he inverts the duality, with the sources now to the fore; out of this he reveals a new creative type, the anaclitic artist, one who can only operate by revealing his emotional dependence on others. And Hans also shows how style can arise from the exaggeration of some features at the expense of others. Although his contrast between Wagner’s surging ‘upbeats’ and Stravinsky’s restraining ‘downbeats’ may be a rhetorical exaggeration, he nevertheless illuminates counter-poles that were once united. Bach’s St. John Passion, for instance, begins with down-beating cries of ‘Herr, Herr, Herr’ and ends with up-beating injunctions of ‘Ruht wohl … Ruht wohl’.

In these and other respects, Hans’s contribution to Stravinsky the Music Maker may open up territory for others to invade, develop or dispute as they see fit. But it is still a momentous pioneering effort, and one that repays our closest attention.

Round Stones

2011-03-31T12:48:00.006+01:00

When the Japanese pianist, Noriko Ogawa, read Out of Silence by Susan Tomes, she was so impressed she decided to translate it into her own language. Earlier this week, the two pianists came together to discuss the challenges of translating a book like this into Japanese (the various nuances of ‘practice’ in Japanese, did Susan Tomes write in a woman’s voice or a man’s voice, and so on). Their meeting was recorded and broadcast by BBC Radio 4 on their Women’s Hour programme. Here, by way of a reminder, is one of Noriko Ogawa’s favourite pieces from the book. Perhaps it is a cliché to suggest that the Zen calm of this extract appealed to her.

Back in the days when I used to play for the string masterclasses at Prussia Cove, I developed the habit of going for a walk along the beach by myself after the classes to dispel the tensions of the day. My job was to play the piano for the violinists, viola players or cellists who were having a lesson. The lessons took place in front of a roomful of other gifted students and visiting teachers from all over the world, so the atmosphere was always intense and the stakes high. I wasn’t having a lesson myself, but this didn’t stop certain teachers from including me in their personal criticisms and tantrums, and I sometimes needed to remind myself afterwards that there were things in life other than music.

I walked slowly along the beach, looking for interesting stones. My method was not to look for anything consciously, but just sweep the beach with my gaze and let the stones call to me. I took them back to my room and kept them on the windowsill as talismans, though I usually liberated them back to the beach before I went home. As I walked on the beach, waiting for ‘interesting’ ones to present themselves, I realised that I was always drawn to stones which were smooth and round. This may not be most people’s idea of interesting stones, but it’s mine. I am fascinated by the thought of the multiple forces of wind and water which have to work on a rough piece of rock for years and years to convert it into something smooth and round. Such tremendous forces from so many different directions: what are the chances of them making something round? Far easier to imagine how the clash of asymmetrical forces could produce jagged, dramatic shapes with attention-seeking personalities. There were plenty of those theatrical stones on the beach, but I passed by on another track. I see the round stones as survivors of a long process of buffeting. They hold more secrets.

Out of Silence by Susan Tomes is available from all good booksellers. Her earlier book, Beyond the Notes, largely concerning her time with Domus, remains in print. Both are published by the Boydell Press.

“. . . a vision of eternity”

2011-03-14T16:32:00.005Z

As an organist, writes John R Near, I cannot remember a time when I did not know the name Charles-Marie Widor (1844–1937), but little did I know what lay beyond that name and the ubiquitous organ Toccata—a work so famous that it virtually is the music of the organ to many who may not even know the composer’s name. I have always loved playing Widor’s organ music; I think of it not so much as music for the organ as music of the organ. It rises organically from the instrument as if born of a loving parent. For Widor, the soaring tone of the organ was a “sound singing eternity to the stars.” He once told his pupil Albert Schweitzer, “Organ playing is the manifestation of a will filled with a vision of eternity.”

Why wouldn’t I want to explore more fully the organ music of a composer with such a lofty notion of our chosen instrument? When I began my doctoral dissertation at Boston University in 1982, that was precisely my goal—nothing more. Then I began the research. I was soon overwhelmed to discover that Widor was not at all just an organist and organ composer, but rather a mainstream musician who composed in nearly every genre, and who had been a sort of cultural ambassador for France. It became clear to me that it would do Widor a grave injustice if I considered him only from the single aspect of his career as an organist, albeit legendary. I had to write a biography—a “life and works.” What began as an academic project soon became a labor of love. In hindsight, I clearly arrived at precisely the right moment, as no one was yet much interested in Widor.

Completed in July 1984, my dissertation became the first full-scale posthumous biography of Widor in any language. Although it encompassed his entire work, it naturally highlighted his career as an organist and organ composer, and I felt certain that if there were to be a resurgence of interest in Widor’s music, it would be through the organ works. I decided I had to continue my research, and the study of Widor became a kind of mission. I had become quite aware that the composition and publication history of Widor’s organ works was knotty at best, and that a critical edition of the ten organ symphonies was sorely needed. I put that as a priority, but I had no idea how complex the puzzle would be. It required ten years, 1987–97, to research and to publish my edition with A-R Editions.

Just when I thought I might start this biography in earnest, it was proposed that the Philadelphia Orchestra would perform Widor’s Symphony in G Minor for Organ and Orchestra in 2002, but with the stipulation that it had to be published. They had last performed the work from manuscript copies in 1919! The biography had to be put off as I undertook the research to publish a critical edition of the Symphony, again with A-R Editions. In retrospect, I can see how the twenty intervening years between my dissertation and the beginning of the present book only prepared me better to reach the summit of this biographical Everest.

I have always thought it surprising that there were only a couple of fairly extended biographical studies of Widor during his lifetime. Although I had my doctoral research to build on, I was forced to mine original source materials, almost entirely in French. Over two decades, I collected a great deal of new material that I had not yet fully digested—countless letters, reviews, articles, news clippings, and a cache of material in the possession of Widor’s grandniece, whom I found in 1988. Perhaps the most extraordinary of the treasures that tumbled out of her huge armoire, was the 103-page manuscript of Widor’s “Souvenirs autobiographiques” that he was dictating in his ninety-first year. It required several visits to her home over a period of years to plumb the depths of those holdings as well as the memories of family members who as youngsters had known “Uncle Charles.”

Born during the reign of Louis-Philippe, Widor endured more transitions in French government, wars, crises, and changes in the social fabric than perhaps any other musician. In this biography I have wanted as much as possible to let him tell his own story, either through his prolific writings or the recollections of friends, students, and admirers. His descriptions of backdoor intrigues in Conservatory politics, bureaucratic infightings, professional jealousies, and survival during the Franco-Prussian and First World Wars propel his life’s story with historical relevance, passion, insight, and wit. In addition, critical reviews have been drawn upon liberally, as they were an invaluable resource for piecing together the composite picture of Widor’s lengthy professional career and the critical reception of his works. Most of this material appears in English translation for the first time.

In Widor: A Life beyond the Toccata, the reader may be astounded to discover a musician of amazingly diverse accomplishments: organist, composer, Paris Conservatory professor, member of the Institute of France, leader in the French Bach revival, co-founder and first director of the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, journalist, conductor, music editor, scholar, correspondent, inspired visionary, and man of deep culture. Widor was well connected in social and professional circles; he seems to have known nearly everyone who counted. Living to become an icon in French music and his country’s cultural emissary, Widor also reigned for sixty-four years over the largest instrument in France at the Paris church of Saint-Sulpice where the elite of society, musicians, artists, litterateurs, scientists, politicians, and nobility flocked to his organ gallery. Far from being cloistered in that organ gallery, however, Widor is seen in this biography as a man of mainstream intellectual and artistic achievement.

Adolphe Boschot, Widor’s successor as perpetual secretary of the Academy of Fine Arts wrote: “By his ever-generous narratives, he taught us to direct our attention not to the shadows, but rather toward the bright side of things—not to the inevitable pettinesses of men or the disillusions that events sometimes carry, but rather toward the beautiful works and the good deeds that enrich our intellectual and moral heritage.” Through his talent, indefatigable industry, and humanity, Widor left a wealth of beautiful works and the example of a life lived with grace and rich in good deeds. In his final days he reminisced, “I have had a beautiful life.” For what he left us, we are the lucky ones.

Widor: A Life beyond the Toccata by John R Near is available now from the University of Rochester Press or your favourite bookseller. It includes the most complete listing ever compiled of Widor's oeuvre.

Beecham's Salome

2011-02-28T11:01:00.003Z

Thomas Beecham had intended that his first Covent Garden season should open in February 1910 with what was bound to be a sure-fire sensation, the British premiere of Richard Strauss's Salome. There was a problem, however. The Lord Chamberlain's office, responsible for stage censorship in Britain since 1737, refused to grant it a performing license. Oscar Wilde's play of the same name, on which Strauss's libretto was based, had been similarly banned twenty-eight years earlier, on the grounds that it portrayed on stage the New Testament figure of St John the Baptist, and the current Lord Chamberlain (Earl Spencer, great-grandfather of Princess Diana) was not prepared to change his mind on the matter. Beecham opened his season with Elektra instead, but continued to do battle over Salome with the Lord Chamberlain who, nine months later, at last gave in, but at a price.

The Baptist was to be allowed back into the opera, though he was to be called, not Jokanaan or John, but ‘a Prophet’, while in the final scene the executioner was to hand Salome a blood-stained sword, rather than the saint’s head on a silver charger. Salome’s hymn to the head was to be bowdlerised and all Biblical allusions in the text eliminated. The action was to be moved from Judea to Greece and the Five Jews were to become Five Learned Men. For the sake of getting Salome produced in London at last, Strauss accepted the changes.

The opera was licensed on 1 December, one week before the opening. Tickets for its opening night sold out within eighty-five minutes of the box-office opening, and before long touts were offering seats at more than double their face value. During the final dress rehearsal Salome, the lissom Finnish soprano Aïno Ackté, found that the ‘blood’ dripping from the sword was staining her fingers and, using ‘some very drastic words in French’, wiped it off on the cloak of the nearest supernumerary. It was not a problem she had encountered in Germany, where she had held the charger bearing the head.

Beecham stopped the rehearsal and in the hope of finding a solution ordered one of his staff to make an urgent telephone call to the Lord Chamberlain's office. After a long wait the shirt-sleeved stage manager rushed to the front of the stage and knelt before Beecham, who was waiting in the orchestra pit. ‘We can use a tray instead of a sword’, he shouted, ‘so long as there is no head on it.’ The news was greeted with cheers. Comedy had finally turned into farce.

Beecham was tireless. The dress rehearsal took place in the afternoon. In the morning he had taken a three-hour rehearsal for his first concert for the Philharmonic Society, which he conducted that same evening at Queen’s Hall. The concert came at an awkward moment, but he had postponed it once already, and for the sake of future relations with the society he could hardly delay it again. It was not the only concert he conducted during the final week of Salome rehearsals.

Three nights earlier he had conducted a programme of Wagner excerpts with his orchestra at the Opera House; and on the evening before that had given a concert of eighteenth-century operatic music at the Aeolian Hall in Bond Street, at which Maggie Teyte sang arias by Méhul, Grétry, Paisiello, Isouard, Monsigny and Dalayrac. Teyte claimed to friends that she had an affair with Beecham, but, if true, it seems it was a brief one.

Not surprisingly, given the enormous amount of pre-publicity it had received, the first night of Salome on 8 December was a succès fou, though several reviewers found the opera less musically satisfying than Elektra (Ernest Newman took the opposite view.) The Lord Chamberlain’s office came in for a good deal of criticism. ‘Truly the ways of the Censorship are past finding out’, wrote the Times critic, who wondered how anybody in the audience could possibly have been expected to miss ‘the very striking coincidences’ between the fate of the Prophet and that of John the Baptist. ‘Of what avail was it’, asked the Sunday Times, ‘that Salome had to say “Ich will dir folgen” [“I want to follow you”] instead of “Ich will deinen Mund küssen” [“I want to kiss your mouth”], when she expressed by every fibre of her being the very abandon of amorous desire?’

In the heat of the performance some of the textual alterations were forgotten by the singers, though if these were noticed by the members of the Lord Chamberlain’s staff who were present, none of them mentioned it. Either they did not speak German or they chose to adopt a diplomatic silence.

By all accounts Ackté’s performance in the title-role was remarkable. She expressed emotion ‘not only by glance and gesture, but by sensuous curve of bodily movement’, said one critic, who added that although the music was ‘rather exacting’ for her (recordings suggest that the top of her voice was not her strongest point), she sang ‘skilfully’ and with ‘rare expressiveness’. It was noted with approval that, contrary to the practice in Germany, she performed the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ herself, rather than handing over the task to a double. Less appreciated was the silver tray, which, though it lacked a head, was filled with ‘gore’. Ackté found it ‘inartistic and rather revolting’ and, after the sixth of the ten performances, asked if it could not be covered with a cloth, so that ‘people may imagine what they want’. Company manager Archibald Archdeacon passed on Ackté’s request to the Lord Chamberlain's Comptroller, who replied that ‘Lord Spencer says “yes”, the tray can be covered with a cloth, only care must be taken not to build up a great heap in it which would look suggestive.’

So great was the ridicule poured on the Lord Chamberlain’s office for its part in the Salome affair that many imagined it could not be long before it was relieved of its licensing duties, but another fifty-eight years and two world wars were to pass before stage censorship in Britain, along with the Lord Chamberlain’s role in it, was finally abolished in 1968.

This post is adapted from Thomas Beecham: An Obsession with Music, the acclaimed biography of Britain’s greatest conductor by John Lucas. It has been reissued in paperback to coincide with the 50th anniversary in March 2011 of Beecham’s death. ‘This is the best biography of a musician I have read for a very long time,’ said the International Record Review of the hardcover, while Classical Music claimed that this ‘thorough, exhaustive and often highly amusing biography will...re-establish Beecham as one of the foremost musical personalities of the last hundred years.’ The book is available now in paperback from all good booksellers.

On Music and Beauty by Markand Thakar

2011-02-17T15:48:00.006Z

Part 1: A Visitor from Outer Space, Confused

Art is a vehicle for self-knowledge. Whoa, that’s heavy. With apologies, yes.

I sometimes imagine a discussion with a visitor from outer space.

Space Alien: What did you do last night?
Human Person: I went to a big box.
There were about 1500 people there. They turned off the lights, and in a corner
of the box some people made noise.
SA: EEW! How long did you have to do
this?
HP: It took about two hours, and I wanted to do it.
SA: So they
must have paid you well?
HP: Actually, I paid a handsome sum.
SA:
(scratching its left nose) Hmmm. I have just one question.
HP: Yes...
SA: Why?

Why indeed!

I have never seen myself. Don’t get too smug — you’ve never seen yourself either. I’ve seen my face in a mirror, I’ve seen photographs of my face, I’ve seen my lower extremities, the backs of my lower legs, parts of my arms. I’ve never seen my back, my rear end, or parts of my arms. I’ve never seen the essence of my physical presence to the world: my eyes, my mouth, my nose, my ears.

My understanding of who I am is limited to the absence of what I am not. I know that I am not the table, the computer, the window, those trees. I am not the glass or the flowers. I am not the air or the smells. I am not the omelet, nor am I the taste of the omelet. I am not the death of my friend, nor am I the sadness. I am not the joke nor am I the humor. That thing that is missing from all the things I am not — that’s who I am. So the more defined, more present, more vivid to me are the things I am not, the better I understand my own being.

Ordinary understanding — or consciousness — is a three-part process: subject—mode of consciousness—object. If I see the Tower of London, I am the subject, the tower is the object, and seeing is the mode of consciousness. If I remember the tower, I am the subject, the tower is the object, and remembering is the mode of consciousness. If I imagine the tower, I am the subject, the tower is the object, and imagining is the mode of consciousness.

So here’s one answer to the “Why?”: we consume art because it helps to define us to ourselves. I read a novel; it has meaning for me to the extent that I relate the events in it to my own experiences of the world, it makes them more vivid, it heightens my awareness of the world external to me, and it brings my own essence into better relief. I see an opera or a play, or a Warhol Campbell’s Soup Can, I connect deeply with the loves, the losses, the joy, the sadness, the soup, and I have a more pronounced understanding of my loves, my losses, my joy and sadness, my soup. The external world is more vividly limned, what that world is not is in greater relief, and the “what-it-is-not” — me — is better defined.

Ah but visual art — and music — can do something else, something different, something — yes — BETTER!

Part 2: When is a Tree not a Tree?

When is a tree not a tree? Or, more precisely, in observing a tree, when am I not observing the tree?

Some 25 years ago I lived in an apartment in a rural area. Outside the apartment was a tree, a large one, with many branches. I saw the tree as I was coming and going, every day for two years. It was a tree. One day, though, leaving the apartment, I glanced up, and observed that tree. It was beautiful, and I was struck by it. And I was left with this nagging question: what was different about the tree when it provided an experience of beauty from when it was just there as part of my general observation of the world around me?

Kudos to you, honored reader, who has presumably made your way gamely through part 1 (and more kudos and sincere apologies if you remember it!), but we return to the structure of consciousness of our ordinary experience, which is: subject — mode of consciousness — object. I (subject) see (mode of consciousness) the tree (object). The experience of beauty is different from that of ordinary experience. In an experience of beauty, the object comes to me in such a way that I absorb it. It takes me over. I lose myself in the object. And in “losing myself” in the object, in a very real sense I become that object. There is no longer a subject or an object, what remains is just consciousness.

So what was different about the tree? Nothing. What was different was me: my openness to the possibility of losing myself in that visual image. Perhaps it was the incipient sunset in the background. Perhaps I approached it in a pensive moment of inner peace. Nonetheless, the visual image of that tree enabled me to absorb it, become it, and be moved. When the tree comes to me as beautiful, I am observing the tree but I am not observing it, because I am the tree.

Now this extraordinary experience couldn’t happen from just any old tree. That particular tree had numerous branches fanned out in a particularly gratifying shape. And the experience was fleeting, to be sure.

But there is an experience of beauty that is deep and profound: it is the one available from visual art, and from music. We open ourselves to the aesthetic object – the Rembrandt or the Picasso, the sublime performance of Mozart or Brahms. We focus on it, and it alone. We absorb it, it takes us over, we lose ourselves in it, we become it.

And in so doing it takes us to a magical place: ourselves. Our Selves. In this act of becoming the object, neither subject nor object participate in the conscious act. What remains is the very essence of our being, our consciousness.

Toward the end of his life Handel led a performance of Messiah. Afterward, legend has it, he was approached by a friend, who said, “Maestro, surely you have provided a great entertainment.” And he responded, “I should be sorry if I only entertained them, for I had hoped to make them better.”

Why music? We can know the very essence of our being, and we can be better.

This essay is adapted from the April and May Maestro’s Musings columns in Duluth Superior Magazine (reproduced by permission of the publisher). Markand Thakar’s book, Looking for the “Harp” Quartet: An Investigation into Musical Beauty is published by the University of Rochester Press and available from all good booksellers.

For the month of February 2011 readers of From Beyond the Stave can order Markand Thakar’s book at 25% discount from our website. Simply use the discount code HARPWEB25 during our secure checkout.

Or you can wait for the movie.

‘To know a world of beauty…’

2011-02-10T12:45:00.005Z

My first encounter with Grainger’s music - writes Penelope Thwaites, editor of The New Percy Grainger Companion - began not as a music student at Melbourne University, but in England in the 70’s, not long after my Wigmore Hall debut. The composer William L Reed said to me one day, “You’re an Australian – why don’t you play some Grainger?” I considered, and decided to include three folk-settings at the end of my next recital. I found them delightful, stimulating - and demanding. That, I learned, was a not unusual experience for those embarking on performing Grainger.

Fifty years after his death in New York on 20 February 1961, a fresh evaluation of Percy Grainger is due. This Australian-American composer and pianist who spent much of his youth in Germany and Britain and who revered the Scandinavian countries and their culture seems to have been born into a state of reaction against existing norms. The necessity to earn his living and support his invalid mother took him to the heart of the British establishment as a society pianist, when his own genes were drawing him inexorably towards the music of ordinary people – folk music. His quenchless curiosity led him to experiment with new instruments to introduce into the lush panoply of Edwardian orchestral writing – an orchestra for which he wrote superbly. He envisaged a kind of music that would dispense with regular time signatures and conventional pitch, music that would move as freely as the sounds of nature.

I have just come from rehearsing a trio of Grainger songs. Grainger’s pianist is a full partner to the singer and together, time and again, two artists are called upon to create a scene, a drama , more often than not with an undercurrent of sadness. The Sprig of Thyme tells the old story of the young woman betrayed by the disappearing lover, but this girl has spirit, and hopes for better things. The music reflects all that, with a kind of gaiety that is far more touching than a display of self-pity. Absolutely characteristic in the song is Grainger’s harmony, now poignant, now twisting the knife in the wound. It all happens in three minutes – a masterpiece.

Benjamin Britten recognised Grainger’s unique greatness in this field : “In the art of setting folk song, Grainger is my master”. Britten may have produced the greater volume of works, but neither he nor any other composer I know comes near Grainger’s strangely affecting mix of emotional earthiness enhanced by harmonic sophistication.

He wrote with passionate appreciation of the folk-singers who gave him their (often jealously guarded) tunes. Perhaps they sensed he was one of them? Grainger himself never mentioned, perhaps never knew, that his great-grandfather, Jacob Grainger (1796-1880) farmed in the south of County Durham, as did almost all of his (Jacob’s) family. Just one son moved to London in the 1840s and became a master tailor, and one of his family of ten left England to take a job in distant Australia as a draughtsman, later architect. That was Percy Grainger’s father.

Some 350 performers in eight concerts will take part in the Celebrating Grainger 2011 festival at Kings Place, London, from 17-19 February. They will traverse his choral and solo vocal music, woodwind, brass and string chamber works, with the Royal Artillery Band and Orchestra his superb writing for military band, a concert including Grainger’s non-western settings, multi-hand duo piano works, percussion ensembles, Theremins, experimental music machines, and a chance for audiences to sing Grainger’s music too. On the actual 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, Sunday 20 February, speakers and scholars from Australia, Canada, USA, Denmark, Germany, and the UK will gather at the British Library for a seminar entitled Percy Grainger for the 21st Century.

Grainger’s universalism is one of the most important themes in the book I have been privileged to edit The New Percy Grainger Companion – important not because Grainger solved every problem, and certainly not because his life was some kind of pageant of triumph. He struggled. But he did think more widely than many classically trained musicians of his time – or of this time – and because he thought so freshly about music, his provocative thoughts are stimulating.

At Kings Place on Saturday 19 February, we include a British premiere of his Thanksgiving Song. Ours must be a chamber version of a work written originally for full symphony orchestra and off-stage choir with instrumental ensemble. The first half of the piece is purely instrumental – a dreamy beginning leading to a frenzied apotheosis – then silence. The second half could not be more different. When it was premiered in 2003 in the spacious Adelaide Town Hall, the off-stage musicians were able to realise Grainger’s highly original (seemingly almost comical) idea of the endlessly repeated chorale fading very slowly into the distance, as the singers and accompanying group were transported on a trolley outside the periphery of the hall. Yet as they finally stood in the outer corridor singing ever more quietly, the doors were slowly closed and a pin-drop silence followed. For this magical effect in our restricted space on 19 February, Trinity College of Music has recorded that final section with their singers and instrumentalists, and that will provide our conclusion. The live performers will listen, along with the audience.

My hope is that audiences will leave feeling altogether happier!

And now to continue my own practice...

The New Percy Grainger Companion edited by Penelope Thwaites is available now from all good booksellers and will be on sale at the events mentioned above. More on Percy Grainger can be found here and here. For tickets to the Kings Place concerts, please visit their website, and for the British Library symposium click here. Chandos Recordings Grainger Edition is self-recommending. The quotation that names this post is by Grainger and runs, in full, ‘To know a world of beauty and not to be able to spread the knowledge of it is agonising’.

Nielsen in the South

2011-02-03T10:44:00.007Z

Danish composer Carl Nielsen (1865-1931) is arguably the most underrated composer of his generation, despite an ever-growing number of recordings and performances of his music. In a new book, Daniel Grimley offers a critical re-evaluation of his music and its rich artistic and literary contexts, drawing extensively on the newly completed Carl Nielsen Edition. Topics include the composer’s relationship with symbolism and fin de siècle decadence and his response to the Danish landscape. Running through the book is an engagement with the idea of musical modernism - a term which, for Nielsen, was fraught with anxiety and yet provided significant creative stimulus. In this excerpt, Grimley looks at the overture Helios. For anyone who might sympathise with the old joke that writing about music is like dancing about architecture, this is how it’s done:

The opening page of Nielsen’s concert overture Helios (1903) is one of the most magical dawn sequences in music. Long pedal notes in the lower strings suggest a seemingly infinite sense of musical time and space, of floating weightlessly in the musical ether: the pause over each second bar momentarily suspends the perception of regular clock time before the work has properly begun, so that the piece literally begins in a state of timelessness. The hairpin dynamics, rising almost imperceptibly from pianississimo and falling back again, reflect the vibrating amplitude of the bowed open string: it is as much a description of the sound object or ‘Klang’ as a performance direction.

The horn calls that then gradually rise above the bass pedal sound almost impossibly distant, gently arching upwards first through the octave and then to the flat seventh, as though sounding the upper partials of a single glowing harmonic spectrum. As this sound slowly echoes and peals, the resonance gaining strength through its waxing reiteration, the upper strings begin to weave a gently flowing quaver figure, gradually filling in the gaps between the widely spaced intervals of the horn calls and bass, so that the orchestral texture emerges as if from a clearing morning mist. As this slowly shifting curtain of sound grows, the harmonic palette also widens and enriches itself, the rocking fifth steps in the bass (a horizontalisation of the earlier vertical chord structures) followed eventually by the first chromatic descent (b. 30), tilting the music momentarily towards the flat side and casting aside the drowsy somnolent sevenths of the opening page.

The return to the opening white-note C major gains a greater sense of clarification or focus, prefiguring the arrival of the first fully fledged melodic statement, the striding chorale entry of the horns with a transfigured version of their opening call at b. 54, supported by a blaze of string tremolandos and organ-like woodwind writing. The final shadows of the night in which the piece figuratively began have melted away and the music surges irresistibly forwards to the start of the main section, an energetic Allegro ma non troppo in the bright, super-charged key of E major.

Formerly broadcast every 1 January by Danish Radio, Helios has gained a deeply symbolic place in Danish musical culture. It has become a ‘Morgensang’ (‘morning song’ or aubade), sounded optimistically at the threshold of each New Year. Yet the richly associative gestures with which the music begins invite a range of critical and historical interpretations. For example, the horn’s striding chorale belongs to a local tradition of Danish dawn hymns, a musical subgenre headed by Niels W. Gade’s setting of B. S. Ingemann’s ‘I Østen stiger Solen op’ (‘The sun rises in the east’) in his cantata Elverskud (1851–4), a pivotal reference work in the creation of a distinctively Danish musical romanticism in the mid-nineteenth century. The confident new dawn which Helios evokes, with its rising horn octaves and sonorous diatonicism, is at least in part a warm afterglow of this national romantic awakening, and also an affectionate tribute to Nielsen’s former teacher at the Danish Conservatory.

Yet the music delves even deeper into imaginary ideas of Danishness in its opening bars. The horn calls at the start evoke the sound of Lurs, curved Bronze Age brass instruments excavated (usually in pairs) from barrow mounds across Denmark and southern Sweden throughout the nineteenth century. They have discshaped bells that represent stylised sun symbols whose ritual function, it was believed, was to herald the passage into the afterlife. Pairs of Lurs were displayed in the Danish national museum, and in 1910 Nielsen even composed a Lur prelude as part of his incidental music for the Viking play Hagbarth og Signe, performed outside at Friluft Teatret in Dyrehaven (the open-air theatre at the deer park north of Copenhagen), one of his most atmospheric and evocative dramatic scores. Yet, as Svend Ravnkilde has revealed, Helios simultaneously evoked an even more startling archaeological discovery, now displayed in the antiquities collection at the National Museum.

In 1902, the year before composition of the overture, a ploughed field at Trundholm bog in Zealand unearthed a precious miniature model of a solvogn (sun chariot), a golden disc pulled by a stylised divine horse (equipped with spoked wheels) that was believed to represent the journey of the sun across the heavens: a metaphor, in the Bronze Age Nordic mind, for the course of human life and its relationship with the cosmos and the seasonal cycles of the natural world. The structure of Nielsen’s overture, waxing and waning from near silence to full strength and back to silence, traces the same circular trajectory as the imaginary path of the solvogn. Nielsen thus responded to this complex mythic notion of Danishness on different levels, both through the highly localised evocation of an antique Nordic sun cult as embodied in the archaeological treasures at the National museum, and also in its reimagining through the prism of the nineteenth-century national romantic imagination in Gade’s Elverskud.

Yet Helios also breaks out from such local associations and embraces a wider musical patrilineage. The musical representation of apparently organic, self-determined growth from a kernel cell points to a whole range of nineteenth- century evocations of nature – the opening of Wagner’s Rheingold is the most obvious and paradigmatic example. Such evocations conventionally serve as thresholds to an imaginary Arcadian landscape or enchanted nature realm, and signal displacement (or removal) from the modern world. Helios is similarly concerned with a sense of the mythic past, the temporal suspension and circularity of its opening bars a way of manipulating time so as to create the impression of reaching back into an imagined antiquity.

Yet its re-creation of a lost golden age serves a double function, casting expectation optimistically forwards towards the reattainment of previous greatness and cultural renewal. The music’s growth, evolution and fulfilment thus begin to gain a more pointed ideological focus. The chorale-like treatment of the morning song at b. 54, with its shades of the finale from Brahms’s First Symphony and the Academic Festival Overture, becomes the apotheosis of a broader Northern European cultural vision, a stylised synthesis of Hellenic and Nordic streams with elements of the early eighteenth-century German Baroque. The manner in which the music sheds the mythic Wagnerian gloom of the opening page for a brighter, leaner and more athletic musical discourse at the work’s heart reveals a great deal about Nielsen’s stylistic orientation.

The overture’s Hellenism becomes a musical realisation of Nietzsche’s decisive anti-Romantic turn and famous call for the ‘Mediterraneanisation of music’ in The Case of Wagner, promoted energetically in Copenhagen in the 1890s by Georg Brandes. The ritualistic dawn evoked by Helios’s opening pages thus gives way to a consciously modern, neo-classical, and ultimately comedic vision – its closest musical counterpart, in that sense, might be Richard Strauss’s tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra, a work which likewise opens with a dramatic musical sunrise and unveils the birth of a new Nordic-Hellenic superman. Just as his First Symphony had sounded a dramatic modernist breakthrough in 1894, therefore, Nielsen’s Helios became a further threshold to a new expressive and musical domain, a gateway that is as much the symbolic adoption of a particular aesthetic tone or vision as the literal depiction of the sun rising above the wine-dark waters of the Aegean Sea.

Carl Nielsen and the Idea of Modernism by Daniel M Grimley is published by the Boydell Press and available from all good booksellers. Grimley's acclaimed book on Grieg is also available from the Boydell Press.

The Gamba's Return

2011-01-27T15:33:00.006Z

Peter Holman’s long-anticipated Life After Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch was published at the close of last year. In this fascinating post, he outlines how he came to his subject and some of the research that has grown out of it:

The origins of this book go back to a day in the late 1990s when my Ph.D. student Ian Davies mentioned that he had come across a manuscript in London University Library that contained some eighteenth-century English sonatas for bass viol – or ‘viol da gamba’ as it was more commonly known at the time. He had come across it as part of his research into English cathedral music around 1800, and he knew I was interested in stringed instruments and their history. The London University Library manuscript turned out to include six sonatas for bass viol and continuo or two bass viols evidently composed or compiled (it includes arrangements of violin sonatas by Angelo Michele Besseghi and recorder sonatas by Francesco Barsanti) around 1730. However, it was evidently copied much later: it also includes a gamba part from a hitherto unknown sonata by Carl Friedrich Abel as well as trio sonatas from Maximilian Humble’s op. 1 of 1768.

Researching the manuscript for an article made me realise that the viol did not entirely drop out of use in England at the end of the seventeenth century, as was conventionally thought, and that there was scope for a larger study. At the same time I had become aware that I was in danger of repeating myself in writing about seventeenth-century music, and that it was time for a change of direction. Working in a later period would give me access to a far richer range of primary sources than was available before 1700. I was aware that others were developing interests in late gamba music in other European countries, notably Vittorio Ghielmi, Christophe Coin, and Michael O’Loughlin, for example. I also benefited from the interest and encouragement of the viol player and cellist Mark Caudle, an old friend and colleague in The Parley of Instruments; he is the dedicatee of the book. From the material I had assembled at an early stage, in 1998 we recorded a CD, The Noble Bass Viol (Hyperion CDA67088). It covered the repertory of compositions and arrangements for one, two and three bass viols with continuo from Purcell to Handel, including pieces by them and Benjamin Hely, William Gorton, Giovanni Battista Draghi, Gottfried Finger, Francesco Conti, and Arcangelo Corelli.

In beginning to research and plan a book on the viol ‘after the golden age’ I started with two areas where I knew gamba players had been active and there was surviving music for the instrument. The first was a group of musicians associated with Handel and the orchestra of the Italian opera company at the Haymarket Theatre. It was known that Handel wrote a gamba solo in the famous Parnassus scene in Giulio Cesare (1724), and that about the same time he wrote out the first bar of his G minor violin sonata HWV364 in the alto clef, labelling it ‘Per la Viola da Gamba’, presumably as an instruction to someone else to copy out the whole work in that form. Handel’s involvement with the gamba had been explored before, though the problem had always been that these pieces appeared to exist in a vacuum: no gamba player was known to have been active in London around 1724, and no other contemporary English gamba works appeared to have survived.

That quickly changed: in addition to the Williamson Manuscript (as it became known), colleagues working on Handel and his contemporaries, including the late Anthony Hicks and Lowell Lindgren, pointed me to a cantata by Pietro Giuseppe Sandoni for soprano, two gambas and theorbo, and cantatas by Tommaso Bernardo Gaffi and Francesco Gasparini arranged in early eighteenth-century England with gamba obbligatos. It also became likely that the various trio sonatas by J.C. Pepusch with gamba obbligato had been written for Pietro Chaboud, an Italian bassoonist and flute player who arrived in England around 1700 and played in the Italian opera orchestra. Chaboud may also have been responsible for a set of gamba arrangements of Corelli’s op. 5 violin sonatas, two of which were published in London in 1712, and the publication Aires and Symphonys for ye Bass Viol (London, 1710), which contains a set of arrangements for solo bass viol of arias from Italian operas in the repertory of the Haymarket Theatre. Arrangements tended to loom larger in the repertory of early eighteenth-century gamba players than their predecessors partly because Italian opera and violin music was all the rage at the time, and partly because gamba players in England had begun to read music in the (octave-transposing) treble clef, which made all music written for soprano instruments and voices available to them.

The other task was to try to identify the person or people who had played this new repertory of gamba music. Chaboud was the obvious candidate for the second decade of the eighteenth century, but there is no trace of him in London (or anywhere else) after May 1719. To cut a long story short, a number cellists in the opera orchestra, including Nicola Haym, François Goodsens, Pippo Amadei and Giovanni Bononcini, may have played the gamba, though only the German David Boswillibald, principally a double bass player, seems to have been active in Handel’s circle around 1724. In the book I put him forward as the person most likely to have played the solo in Giulio Cesare.

The other topic I researched early on was Carl Friedrich (or Charles Frederick) Abel, the greatest gamba player in the late eighteenth century. Abel had been studied by Walter Knape in the 1950s and 60s, who produced a thematic catalogue of his works, a biography and a complete edition. However, Knape’s work is flawed in a number of respects and is now out of date; the time seemed ripe for a new study of his gamba music and his life as a gamba player. I started by reading through The Public Advertiser, the main newspaper for concert advertisements, for each London concert season between 1759 (when Abel made his London debut) and his death in 1787, omitting the period between 1782 and 1785 when he was in Germany. Getting a clear idea of his concert career (and the careers of other professional gamba players at the time) was subsequently made much easier by Simon McVeigh, who kindly made his database Calendar of London Concerts, 1750-1800 available to me, and by the appearance of the online database Seventeenth-Eighteenth-Century Burney Collections Newspapers.

Another topic that developed early on was the life and work of John Frederick Hintz (1711-72), who seems to have been the only maker of viols in England between Barak Norman and his contemporaries in the early eighteenth century and the first makers in the early music revival at the end of the nineteenth century. He is now by far the best documented London instrument maker of the eighteenth century, thanks to the work of furniture historians and those such as James Lomax and Lanie Graf who have researched the early history of the Moravian Brethren in England; Hintz was successively a furniture maker, a full-time Moravian evangelist, and an instrument maker. The realisation that he specialised in making and selling unusual and rare instruments led me to look more generally at the cultivation of them in the late eighteenth century, helping me to understand the role of the gamba in musical life. It led in turn to studying others in the same field, such as the inventors John Joseph Merlin and Charles Clagget, and the steam engine pioneer James Watt – who made at least one gamba before he moved from Glasgow to Birmingham in 1774 and went into partnership with Matthew Boulton.

One of the pleasures of researching a rare instrument, one that was not used in mainstream public and private music-making at the time, is that many interesting people were attracted to it. James Watt is one unexpected example, and others are the American statesman Benjamin Franklin; the writer Laurence Sterne; the aristocrats Sir Edward Walpole, John, Viscount Bateman, Elizabeth Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, and her cousins Margaret Georgiana, Countess Spencer and Lavinia, Viscountess Althorp; the musician and writer Ann Ford; and the artists Thomas Jones, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Cheesman, John Cawse, and perhaps John Constable. Many of these amateurs were inspired by Abel’s example and tuition to take up the gamba. Others doubtless thought that playing an unusual instrument would make them appear distinctive among their musical friends. For aristocratic women it was just about the only ensemble instrument open to them, since wind instruments involved distorting the face and playing the violin or violoncello involved adopting ungraceful postures. In addition, artists seem to have been attracted to the graceful shape of the gamba, which often featured in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century paintings they studied.

A parallel study of amateur gamba players in the early eighteenth century revealed much about musical life at the time. Having made a list of all those amateurs known to have played or owned gambas at the time, it became clear to me that they divided into roughly three groups according to social status. There was a small group of aristocrats who probably received musical tuition from household musicians or on the grand tour – which at the time often meant a period studying in Paris or Leiden as well as visiting Italy. At the other end of the social scale there was an interesting group of self-made and self-educated artisans and tradesmen, including the musical coal merchant Thomas Britton, the apothecary and botanist James Sherard, the writer Daniel Defoe, and the clock maker John ‘longitude’ Harrison. In between there was the great mass of members of the professions – clergymen, doctors and lawyers – who must have acquired their musical skills and knowledge of the gamba at university in Oxford or Cambridge or (in the case of lawyers) at the Inns of Court in London; dissenters, who were barred from the English universities, went abroad, often to Leiden, or to Scottish universities.

We know from letters, diaries, inventories of music and surviving manuscripts that these amateurs often used the gamba as a solo instrument, though it was also indispensible for providing the bass line in the music clubs that were springing up all over the country at the time; amateurs did not start to take up the violoncello in England until about 1730. In general, there was a transition at the time from using the gamba as a bass instrument, reading music in the bass and alto clefs, to a solo instrument in the tenor register reading from the treble clef. This was also associated with a change of name, from ‘bass viol’ to ‘viola da gamba’ or some Anglicised variant such as ‘viol di gambo’. After about 1720 most people outside elite musical circles normally used ‘bass viol’ to mean a four-string unfretted instrument. This was particular true in parish churches, where people would have been familiar with the Sternhold and Hopkins ‘old version’ of Psalm 150, which includes the phrase ‘Praise him upon the viol’. However, this usage was not confined to church: Benjamin Franklin wrote in 1789 that the six-stringed instrument ‘called Viol de Gambo’ is ‘about the Size of a Bass Viol, but is not the same’.

I originally planned to confine the book to the eighteenth century, but it soon became apparent that gamba playing continued sporadically throughout the nineteenth century. In 1889 the historian, lawyer and gamba player Edward Payne (1844-1904) stated in a lecture to the Musical Association (now the Royal Musical Association) in London: ‘I could prove, if it were necessary, that the art of playing it [the gamba] has never died out in this country, but that the traditions of the instrument have survived in a constant succession of amateur players’ – by which he seems to have meant Thomas Cheeseman (1760-?1842), John Cawse (1779-1862), and himself.

The last professional player in England in the continuous tradition, the Dutch cellist Johan Arnold Dahmen, died in 1813, though other professionals occasionally took up the gamba for particular concerts throughout the nineteenth century, mostly as part of the developing early music movement. They include an unnamed player in a concert directed by the harpist Nicholas Bochsa in 1836; the cellist Richard Hatton in a Concert of Ancient Music in 1845; the viola player Henry Webb in at least one of Ernst Pauer’s historical concerts in 1862; and the cellist Walter Pettit (1836-82), who became well known in the 1870s for playing the obbligato parts in J.S. Bach’s passions on the gamba. By the 1880s gamba playing by amateurs and professionals was fairly common, so that when Arnold Dolmetsch organized his first old music concert in 1890 his innovation was not to revive the viol per se, but to attempt to assemble a complete viol consort and to use it to play English seventeenth-century consort music. Even so there were compromises: his first viol consort included a viola and a viola d’amore. However, Dolmetsch was a turning point, and the model he developed of the scholar-performer came to dominate the British early music scene during the twentieth century.

As always with a major research project of this sort there are loose ends to tie up and further avenues to explore. One is the history of early music: I am hoping to write an article on the harpsichord in nineteenth-century England, and I have been asked to give a paper on the twentieth-century British early music scene at a conference in Salzburg in December. I have also been using material I have accumulated on other eighteenth-century ‘exotic’ instruments. I am editing Geminiani’s treatise on the English guitar for Christopher Hogwood’s Opera Omnia of the composer, and I have recently written a study of John Russell’s fine painting of the actress Dorothy Jordan playing a lute-family instrument. In addition, I am planning a study of Handel’s use of the archlute and theorbo, which will reveal the identity of the person I believe was his regular lutenist in the 1720s and 30s. I have also started work on another research project on the history of conducting and musical direction in Britain, in collaboration with Fiona Palmer. I hope it will result in another volume in the Boydell series ‘Music in Britain, 1600-1900’, provisionally entitled Before the Baton: Conducting and Musical Direction in Georgian Britain.

Life After Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch by Peter Holman is available from all good booksellers.

Introducing Balcarres

2011-01-18T16:53:00.005Z

With Burns Night fast approaching, we are pleased to post an article with a Scottish theme. Recently the University Presses of Glasgow and Aberdeen published the long-awaited Balcarres Lute Book as part of the Music of Scotland Series. Described as a ‘beautiful production’ by the Times Literary Supplement, it is intended both for the lute player with a facsimile of the tablature and extensive notes and concordances, and the scholar with a introduction on the background and context followed by a full transcription. Here, editor Matthew Spring provides some background to this important discovery:

The Balcarres manuscript is the largest and arguably most important post-1640 British source of lute music. The collection is also possibly the most extensive and interesting of all Scottish late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century instrumental manuscript sources, whether for lute, keyboard, violin or lyra viol. It contains 252 pieces of Scottish, English and French provenance, written or arranged for the 11-course lute. It may have been copied out by or for Margaret, the fourth wife of The Earl of Balcrarres. Along with native Scottish music, Balcarres contains arrangements of violin music, English popular tunes and French baroque lute music by mid- and later seventeenth-century masters.

Although its date of compilation cannot be pin-pointed, nor its early provenance traced, it clearly does not date from before the last few years of the seventeenth century and it more probably originates from the first years of the eighteenth. Hence it is contemporary with and comparable to the group of Scottish instrumental manuscripts that date from the period 1680-1725. These were the years before the trickle of printed collections of Scots songs, fiddle tunes and dance music produced for the English and Scottish market became a veritable flood. Seventeen twenty three/four saw the publication of Ramsey's The Tea-Table Miscellany and 1725 Stuart's Music for Allan Ramsey's Collection of Scots Tunes, both published in Edinburgh, and the first edition of William Thompson's Orpheus Caledonius in London. The popularity of such books, and those that followed, ensured that Scots songs were staple fare for music publishers aiming at the popular market in the eighteenth century.

The sheer number of publications that continued throughout the century and into the next which included, or purported to include, old Scots melodies, largely ensured that the living and changing body of popular Scots melodies was gradually replaced by tunes that were full of the ‘highland humours’ that the general British public expected, in 'tasteful' eighteenth-century arrangements calculated to sell. Balcarres is representative of the pivotal years when manuscript circulation, which was clearly responsive to oral tradition, was being increasingly undermined by the scale of popular publications.

Writers on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Scottish music who have mentioned Balcarres have all assumed that the book originated from the household of one of the Lindsays of Balcarres. Certainly it survives today as part of the Crawford-Lindsay family possessions. The manuscript has the shelf mark, English MS 970.201 on the front cover. This refers to its cataloguing as part of the library at Haigh Hall, near Wigan, Lancashire, the residence of the Lindsay family after the merger of the Balcarres and Crawford branches in 1808. There is nothing within the manuscript’s contents to substantiate this, one cannot entirely rule out the possibility that it was acquired by the Lindsay family after completion. However given that it survives as part of the family papers, and that it formed part of the Haigh Hall library in the nineteenth-century, it is likely that it did originate with a family member, and was kept after its period of use because of the family connection. It is called the Balcarres Lute Book presumably because it came from Balcarres House, and had belonged to the Earls of Balcarres.

Margaret Campbell, Colin, third Earl of Balcarres’ fourth wife, is the most likely candidate as author of the Balcarres lute book. There are a number of similarities between her known hand and that of the book’s compiler. While these similarities are insufficient to make a positive identification they certainly admit a possibility.

One of the most striking characteristics of the book is that almost every piece has a careful attribution that names one, or often two, individuals. These attributions set the manuscript apart from contemporary music books, and give the best clues as the musical world from which it comes, and the manner in which the book was put together. In 85 pieces a certain Mr Beck is given sole credit for pieces as ‘by mr Beck’, or ‘mr Beck’s way’. This man turns out to be a certain John Beck, a musician working in the Canongate area of Edinburgh in the 1690s.

A second important character mentioned frequently in the title is Mr McLauchland. Through the research of Sally Garden a geneology of McLauchland has emerged. He married Margaret McKenzie, on 19th April 1699 in Edinburgh, the marriage record listing him as ‘musickmaster’ in the city. His wife was the daughter of Daniell McKenzie and Eupham Miller. Birth records for Margaret McKenzie show that Daniell McKenzie was active as violer in Edinburgh in 1680, and that he lived in or around the Canongate. Witnesses to this birth suggest that the family was from the artisan class and well settled in the area.

John McLauchland’s testament and inventory dated 30 July 1702 shows that he had died earlier in 1702, and had drawn up a marriage contract on 24 March 1699 with Margaret McKenzie. The considerable number and variety of beds, furniture, blankets and bedding, plates, cutlery, and drinking utensils might suggest that John McLauchland, his wife, and father-in-law, were running an inn. The inventory lists 8 instruments; 5 violins, a bass violin, a viol and virginals. His compositions alone suggest he was an important figure in Edinburgh musical life at the end of the eighteenth-century and one that was developing a distinctive style of violin composition that brought together native folk melodies and art music variation techniques.

The manuscript was produced at the point in the development of Scottish instrumental music when the folk and art traditions were closely linked, when oral and manuscript circulation of music were predominant, and before printed music had begun to dominate the circulation of Scottish melodies both in the Lowlands and in England. The music contained in the manuscript reflects this background. Thus it includes French art music composed by celebrated lute masters, pieces drawn from Playford’s publications for the violin and much native folk music in various arrangements, many of which can only be found in this manuscript and were clearly locally produced by musicians known either to Mr Beck or the original owner.

It is a magnificent manuscript both in its execution and in the rich diversity of its contents. It deserves to be better known by both lutenists and by those interested in the national music of Scotland.

The Balcarres Lute Book, edited by Matthew Spring, is available from all good music booksellers.

Marlboro Man

2011-01-12T14:27:00.003Z

Leon Kirchner first visited the Marlboro Music Festival in 1959 but it was from 1963 that his participation started to grow. He enjoyed renewed contact with old friends—Schneider, Serkin, Fleisher, and Horszowski—and by conducting a performance of his Double Concerto, with Jaime Laredo and cellist Madeline Foley as soloists, Kirchner made many new friends. Kirchner and Marlboro proved to be an ideal match, and in the course of ensuing seasons his participation and role in the festival quickly grew. Rudolf Serkin, Marlboro’s artistic director, wanted to augment the festival’s involvement with twentieth-century music, and Kirchner was wonderfully suited to guide this effort. Here is another extract from Robert Riggs’ superb new biography of the composer, who died in 2009, which looks at a rather unwelcome political intervention in the Festival:

In the mid-1960s, at the height of the Vietnam War, world events were not just distant news—Marlboro occasionally had direct personal encounters with major players from the political stage. In 1967 an orchestra rehearsal conducted by Casals was disturbed by the noisy arrival of two helicopters from Washington, DC. They disgorged a team of sleek Secret Service agents sent in advance to run a security check on the premises prior to the arrival the next day of Vice President Hubert Humphrey and his entourage: Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Supreme Court Justice Abe Fortas, and Katharine Graham, owner and publisher of the Washington Post.

Graham, whose wealthy parents had helped Serkin establish Marlboro, spent a weekend there every year, and Fortas, an amateur violinist and music lover, was also a regular visitor. Years earlier, government business had taken Fortas to Puerto Rico, where he served on the Board of Directors of the Casals Festival and became friends with Casals, even playing chamber music with him informally. When Franco became dictator in Spain in 1939 at the end of the Spanish Civil War, Casals’s public musical profile became politically charged by his refusal to play in Spain or in any country that recognized its regime. Thus, Fortas had instigated a coup—both political and artistic—by proposing and orchestrating an invitation to Casals to perform in the Kennedy White House in 1961. Casals had requested and received a private meeting with the president, during which, it was later reported, their conversation focused on world peace.

These visitors from Washington were not unequivocally welcome at Marlboro. Some musicians resented that Fortas, a mere amateur, would be playing with Casals, which they did not have the opportunity to do. A far more serious matter, however, was that without exception the younger participants, and most of the senior ones as well, were vehemently opposed to American policy in Vietnam.

Serkin—who had played in Minneapolis in 1947 and had met Humphrey, at that time the city’s mayor—viewed the visitors as musical pilgrims rather than as representatives of a corrupt government, but he was in a distinct minority. Strong sentiment to mount a political protest put Serkin in a very awkward situation. According to bassoonist Sol Schoenbach, Serkin threatened, “If you insult my friends, I’m leaving”; and Schoenbach noted: “We finally worked out a compromise: the angry students wrote letters of protest and Serkin promised to give all the letters to Humphrey. And he did just that: he handed him about seventy letters, which I’m sure Humphrey never read.”

Although the visitors took an interest in and enjoyed the music making, the real—but unannounced and secret—purpose of Humphrey’s visit was more political than musical. He had come to urge Casals to accept another invitation to perform at the White House. Casals, however, was terribly disturbed by Lyndon Johnson’s policies, which he considered immoral, in handling the Vietnam War. According to biographer H. L. Kirk, “This time his conscience would not let him accept, but the decision preoccupied Casals for days and made him physically so ill that he curtailed his stay in Vermont, canceled scheduled engagements abroad, and returned to Puerto Rico.”

Kirchner also had a dramatic personal encounter with one of the Washingtonians. On leaving his rehearsal studio, he ran directly into Serkin and McNamara, and was summarily introduced to the secretary of defense.

I was very uncomfortable. There he was, the man who was sending out over a million of our men to Vietnam—a place where we didn’t belong and had no understanding of what was going on. There were people dying by the hundreds of thousands. This was McNamara. He asked me what I was doing, and I said that I was working on a piece. He asked which one, and when I told him it was by Hindemith [Kammermusik No. 1, Op. 24, no. 1], he wanted to know what it was about. I told him that it was actually about fascism. This really rattled him, so I explained that at the end of the work there was a dance-like section—rapid and fast, with a trumpet that seems out of control—and that it appears to end in violence with the tremendous whine of a siren. He listened without saying much, so I continued and told him that it was like a pickup truck. Some artists have the means to feel what is going on in the world around them. Hindemith left Germany not only because his wife was Jewish but also because he was severely antagonistic to Hitler’s policies.

They parted, but the following day Katharine Graham (whom Kirchner knew from previous visits) came up after a rehearsal and asked Kirchner to join her and McNamara, who wanted to speak with him again: “I had to; there was nothing else to be done. McNamara began to reflect on this Hindemith; he asked me all sorts of questions. I always thought he was a smart brute, a person who had no feelings, no sensitivities, but he was really quite sensitive to what was going on. He wanted to know how these things came about with artists. He asked me crucial questions.”

When Graham came to Marlboro again the following year, Kirchner was reminded of these conversations, and he told her that he had found McNamara to be extraordinarily sensitive. She suggested that he might write to McNamara, who—due to intervening developments in Vietnam, and his subsequent “demotion” by Johnson in February 1968 to become head of the World Bank—had become one of the most unhappy creatures on the globe. McNamara was in agony, she explained, and now regretted his policies; he felt that he had made terrible mistakes. He knew it in his stomach—perhaps, Kirchner wondered, partially through the kind of intuitive, artistic process about which they had conversed—but not in his mind and did not yet have the courage to come out and admit everything publicly. Kirchner never wrote.

It should be noted that Robert S. McNamara finally revealed his personal views and analysis of the Vietnam War when he published In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (1995). In this book he discussed his mistakes in detail and acknowledged a strong sense of guilt and regret. The image at the top of this post shows Kirchner (on the right) and Jaime Laredo at Marlboro in 1965 (photographer unknown).

Robert Riggs’ new book, Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher, is published by the University of Rochester Press and is available from your favourite bookseller.

Christmas Post

2010-12-23T17:22:00.005Z

As snow falls on both our US office in Rochester NY and our UK home in Woodbridge, Suffolk, we draw our chairs a little closer to the fire, cup our gloved hands around a mug of mulled wine and look back on our publishing programme for 2010:

Alexander Zemlinsky ‘leaves us in no doubt of just how complex and how crucial Zemlinsky's personal and professional relations were’, declared the Gramophone.
CHOICE claimed that there is ‘nothing quite like [Reading Mahler]’ - an essential addition to the centenary literature.
Busoni as Pianist: Svetlana Belsky’s new translation of Grigory Kogan’s classic study.
The Twelve-Tone Music of Luigi Dallapiccola reveals the great twentieth-century Italian composer's innovative handling of harmony, form and text setting.
The Music of Luigi Dallapiccola: a paperback edition of a book described as ‘an overdue landmark in Dallapiccola studies’ by the UK’s Classical Music magazine.
Richard Wagner and the Centrality of Love: a controversial book that divided Wagnerite opinion, but it was one of the Financial Times’ top music books of 2010.
Wagner’s Ring in 1848 presents an English translation Wagner's original Siegfried libretto and his early essay on the Nibelung myth.
Art and Ideology in European Opera examines the interplay between opera, art and ideology across three centuries.
Ian Woodfield’s The Vienna Don Giovanni looks at the compositional history of Mozart’s opera.
Samuel Barber Remembered: Peter Dickinson’s collection of interviews and essays shed new light on this popular - and misunderstood - composer.
Robert Riggs’ Leon Kirchner is the first biography of the great American modernist who died in 2009.
The Whistling Blackbird is the charming title of composer Robert Morris’ essays and talks on music.
‘One of the best-written books about a musician to appear for many years’ said BBC Music of Diana McVeagh’s Gerald Finzi, newly available in paperback.
BBC Music of the Glock Era and After: Leo Black’s mixture of memoir and portraits enchanted reviewers.
The fifth volume of Benjamin Britten’s Letters from a Life covers the period of his pacifist masterpiece, War Requiem.
Completely revised and updated, Imogen Holst: A Life in Music, was issued in paperback in November.
The New Aldeburgh Anthology was also reissued in paperback, bringing Benjamin Britten’s Suffolk and the Aldeburgh Festival to life as never before.
Of Poetry and Song is a truly interdisciplinary study of text-music relations in the German Lied.
Essays on the History of English Music in Honour of John Caldwell looked at music from the medieval carol to the twentieth century.
Marianna Martines ‘sets new standards [for books on women composers]’ observed the Musical Times.
Juan Esquivel: A Master of Sacred Music during the Spanish Golden Age is the first study of this master of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
New in paperback from Toccata Press, The Harmonious Musick of John Jenkins (Volume I) concentrates on the composer’s music for viols.
The Consort Music of William Lawes 1602-1645 was described as ‘vivid’ (TLS) in its portrayal of Lawes’ music at the Court of Charles I.
Peter Phillips thought the Balcarres Lute Book a ‘beautiful publication’ in the TLS. A revelation for lute players worldwide.
Peter Holman’s Life After Death: The Viola da Gamba in Britain from Purcell to Dolmetsch is a fascinating new study of the history of the viol.
The Music of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach is a long-overdue study of the music of the eldest of Bach’s four composer sons.
Szymanowski on Music, newly paperbacked, includes selected essays and other pieces by the most important Polish composer since Chopin.
Martinu and the Symphony is not only the first book in English but by far the most comprehensive work on the subject in any language.
At the heart of Comrades in Art is the correspondence of the composer-pianists Percy Grainger (1882-1961) and Ronald Stevenson (b. 1928).
The older composer is celebrated in The New Percy Grainger Companion, a new collection with contributions from performing musicians and Grainger scholars.
Tully Potter’s monumental Adolf Busch, thirty years in the making, was described as ‘a magnificent achievement, one to challenge all future biographers of any musician,’ by Fanfare.
Beethoven's Chamber Music in Context shows how the larger scale works relate to the chamber music and how the composer evolved an increasing freedom of form.
Bernarr Rainbow on Music includes a memoir and selected writings by the leading historian of music education.
Good Music for a Free People examines the activities of the Germania Musical Society, a group of immigrant musicians who toured the United States from 1848-1854.
A Tanner's Worth of Tune is the first book on the post-war British musical, described as ‘an instant must-have for any lover…of musical theatre’ by the Stage.

A very happy Christmas and a harmonious New Year from all at Boydell & Brewer, the University of Rochester Press, Toccata Press and Plumbago Books.

Herzliche Glückwünsche zum Geburtstag, Wilhelm Friedemann!

2010-12-14T15:31:00.005Z

As 2010 comes to an end, lovers of keyboard music will remember the bicentenaries observed during the year for Chopin and Schumann. Some will look forward to that of Liszt in 2011, while others will recall Mendelssohn's in 2009. Before 2011 is over, all these composers will have been the subjects of numerous symposia, festivals, and publications. Yet it would be a shame, in the midst of these celebrations, to overlook the fact that the present year has marked the three-hundredth birthday of another composer arguably of comparable merit: Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, born at Weimar on Nov. 22, 1710.

Friedemann, the oldest son of the great Johann Sebastian Bach, has often been described as the most brilliant of his father's children. No fewer than five of the latter became professional musicians; four are known to have been composers. Of these, Sebastian's second son Carl Philipp Emanuel, born in 1714, is now probably the best known, his music the most frequently performed. But Emanuel has long been rivaled by Johann Christian, the youngest of all (born 1735), thanks in part to his influence on the young Mozart. Friedemann has never been so well known or appreciated, and although a new critical edition of his works began to come out in 2009, before the appearance of my recent book he and his music had been the subject of only a single monograph, published in German in 1913.

Unlike some Bach specialists, I've always been interested in the music of the sons as well as the father, not to mention other members of the family. Virtually all of them were, of course, keyboard players, writing substantial quantities of music for harpsichord, organ, clavichord, and (in some cases) early pianos. Most, including Friedemann, also made important contributions to chamber, orchestral, and vocal repertories. A keyboard player myself, since my college days I have been fortunate enough to have had access to their music, and to good instruments on which to play it.

But even on a good clavichord or fortepiano, Friedemann's music, although often very expressive, is challenging for both player and listener. His friend J. N. Forkel (Sebastian's first biographer) even said of one piece that the difficulties of learning to play it were incommensurate with the rewards of hearing it. Nevertheless, as Friedemann's tercentenary approached, I felt that the time was ripe to test this and other perceptions of his music by subjecting it to a careful critical review. Even if some of the music is indeed not worth the challenges of learning it—a position far from certain—the question of how Friedemann's distinctive style might have emerged within the Bach household was certainly an intriguing one. Therefore, about three years ago I set out to examine and write about all of his surviving works.

Having previously done something similar for all of Sebastian's keyboard works, I knew what I was getting into. In the case of Friedemann, the task did not appear to be as difficult. True, only about half his music was available in modern editions, and some of these are quite old and not terribly reliable. But the German scholar Peter Wollny, in his Harvard dissertation of 1993 and subsequent publications, had laid the groundwork for a critical re-examination of Friedemann's music. And virtually all of the music was available at least in microfiche facsimiles of eighteenth-century manuscripts, many of these the composer's autographs. Best of all, Friedemann left only about one hundred works, making it possible to study and write about his entire surviving output much more quickly than would be the case for, say, Emanuel, whose collected music comprises perhaps ten times as many compositions.

When I began the process, I thought I knew Friedemann's music reasonably well. After all, I had performed a number of his sonatas and fantasias, and I knew his famous flute duos as well as recordings of several of his concertos and vocal works. I had examined the manuscript of his flute concerto almost as soon as it had become available in Berlin in 2002. The general impression I had from these was, as various scholars had observed previously, of a style that combined elements of his father's contrapuntal manner with the so-called galant style popular in the mid-eighteenth century, and more specifically the so-called empfindsamer version of the latter associated with Emanuel.

As I worked on the book, however, it became clear that this was an over-simplification. And although I found myself confirming some of the oft-repeated assertions about the peculiar challenges of Friedemann's music—and of his own personality—I realized that he was far more his own composer than I had realized, distinct from Emanuel and other contemporaries in certain aspects of his approach to both composition and performance. Forkel had reported that both brothers, realizing the impossibility of equalling their father, had determined to be original, musically distinct from Sebastian. Clearly they had also turned out to be distinct from one another as well.

How could two brothers, born in the same town into the same family just four years apart, have turned out so differently, in their music as well as in their careers and personalities? The biographical side of this question must remain obscure, for we simply lack the requisite documents, especially with respect to Friedemann. This is so despite the survival of unique sources such as the famous Little Keyboard Book for Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, a manuscript (now at Yale University) prepared for the young Friedemann by his father, or several pages of counterpoint studies that Friedemann, now a young professional in his twenties, wrote out jointly with Sebastian. These naturally deserved close consideration in the book, and I decided to devote a chapter to Friedemann's musical upbringing.

But as intriguing as Friedemann's personal development and character may be, our questions about it are largely unanswerable except within the realm of fiction—which may be one reason why he, alone of his brothers, has been the subject of a novel, plays, and even two operas. These largely ignore historical realities, although the 1941 film Friedemann Bach is surprisingly true to life in some respects. For instance, one scene depicts him improvising for an aristocratic audience; he performs fragments of three actual works, on a real eighteenth-century harpsichord that the historical Friedemann may have known, now in Charlottenburg Palace, Berlin.

The really interesting things in the life of a musician, however, are his or her works. I therefore chose to focus my book on Friedemann's compositions, which fall into three categories: keyboard works, music for instrumental ensemble, and vocal music. The last category was the most difficult to write about, for relatively few of the compositions are published. At first I intended to consider only representative examples—mostly sacred cantatas—especially as they were more or less dismissed by most commentators. Yet as I studied them, often in Friedemann's own barely legible manuscripts, I realized that—like the equally underestimated vocal music of Emanuel—they too deserve careful consideration. Particularly notable was a large secular cantata or serenata in honor of King Frederick the Great of Prussia—a musical monarch more frequently associated with Emanuel, yet important at least indirectly in the life of Friedemann, who, after starting his career in Saxon territory, eventually followed Emanuel (and Christian) to Prussia and its capital Berlin. Indeed, the journey of this son of Bach from Dresden, with its musical culture dominated by Italian opera, to a more northerly region where subtle chamber music reigned supreme, became an important theme of my book.

One challenge that I had to overcome in writing the book was the absence of legible or accurate scores for many of Friedemann's major works. Without such scores, it was simply impossible to evaluate works such as the serenata for Frederick or a keyboard concerto in G minor whose attribution to Friedemann had been dismissed by previous scholars. Nor could readers get a good idea of what these works are like. For this reason I found it necessary to create my own scores of many unpublished works, some of which I have put online. Some other works can be found in passably accurate editions at the International Music Score Library Project website, and all will eventually appear in the ongoing collected edition.

Nevertheless, in view of the difficulty of accessing this music, I determined to place far more musical examples within the book than is customary. I am grateful that my editors at the University of Rochester Press were able to accommodate me, and even secured a subvention from the American Musicological Society, for which I am grateful, to facilitate publication of what turned out to be a somewhat larger book than they originally bargained for. Of course, such examples create an additional challenge for many readers: lacking recordings of many of these works, how can they evaluate what they read about them or adequately judge what the music sounds like?

My solution to this problem has been to include on my website audio versions of all the music examples in the book. These audio versions are no substitute for recordings of actual performances; they're synthesized versions of the scores, generated automatically by my music notation software. But I hope they will help make the examples more usable for readers.

When I perform my own recitals of Friedemann's music, I am always asked two things: Was he really a drunk (as was alleged), and who was the better composer, he or Emanuel? I don't know the answer to the first question, and I don't think the second can have a simple answer. Friedemann is a more rigorous composer than his younger brother, maintaining three- or four-part imitative counterpoint and intensively developing a few memorable motives throughout many compositions. Emanuel's textures are lighter and his decorative approach to composition, which I've called “composition as variation,” can be more facile. Many of Emanuel's simpler pieces are frankly trivial, something that cannot be said of anything by Friedemann, who never wrote pedagogic pieces, strophic songs, and the like.

I think that Emanuel, at his best, is more imaginative and more capable of moving the listener. But Friedemann is capable of amazing, almost Beethovenian strokes in works like his F-major keyboard concerto (as yet unrecorded and unpublished in a modern edition). Even more extraordinary is the G-minor concerto, which remains almost completely unknown, although in my book I restore it to Friedemann's list of works. Here again one hears pre-echoes of Beethoven, particularly in its alternatingly meditative and rhetorical slow movement. Friedemann's famous flute duets, probably completed in his Berlin years, surpass anything else written for the instrument in the eighteenth century in their florid melodic writing and the density of their two-part counterpoint, not to mention their technical challenges.

Friedemann himself will remain an enigma. Even his personal appearance before his last years is mysterious. A widely reproduced portrait showing a lively figure perhaps forty or so of age actually depicts his pupil Johann Christian Bach of Halle—not to be confused with his brother of the same name. Yet Friedemann's music is invaluable. If his adherence to his father's tradition restricted him to some degree, it is also a continuing reason for interest in his music, which contains a fascinating and always original combination of stylistic elements belonging to both his father's generation and his own. More important, however, is Friedemann's uncompromising commitment to writing music that is at once rigorous and free, enlivened by wit as well as passion, challenging to both listener and performer and never satisfied with being merely pleasing.

We don’t usually run two posts on the same subject over two weeks but couldn’t resist the opportunity to wish this ‘enigmatic Bach’ a happy birthday. In addition to writing The Music of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, David Schulenberg is author of The Keyboard Music of J. S. Bach and Music of the Baroque, both now in their second editions. He also has edited several volumes of sonatas and concertos by C. P. E. Bach. He plays clavichord, harpsichord, and fortepiano and is professor and chair of the music department at Wagner College on Staten Island, N.Y.

Happy birthday, Wilhelm Friedemann.

The Enigmatic Bach

2010-12-07T17:11:00.004Z

You might be forgiven for imagining that Wilhelm Friedemann Bach is another invention of “Professor” Peter Schickele. However in a superb new study of the music of the eldest of J S Bach’s composer sons, David Schulenberg argues that we should afford his music more respect. In this extract from the book, we see how Wilhelm Friedemann differed from his more famous brothers:

In 1774, one of the most accomplished living European composers arrived in Berlin, the prosperous capital of the powerful Kingdom of Prussia. The composer’s works included a dozen or so extraordinary keyboard sonatas, a half dozen startlingly original concertos for one or two keyboards and orchestra, and perhaps two dozen or more vocal works for virtuoso soloists and ensemble. The list of compositions is small for a musician of his time and stature, but the surviving works are remarkably original, and we do not know how many have been lost. By any measure, it is a notable oeuvre.

Nevertheless, it was unusual for a musician of his age—he was in his sixties—to be traveling in search of a position, if indeed that was his purpose. By this point in their lives, most German musicians of his abilities had been long ensconced in lifetime court appointments, or, like Johann Sebastian Bach, as municipal employees in a church or school. Why Wilhelm Friedemann, Bach’s oldest and by many accounts most talented son, was seeking a position is just one of the many enigmas that surround this peculiar yet extraordinary figure.

Other questions also loom: Where was he and what was he doing during the decade before his arrival in Berlin? Why did he leave his two previous positions, as organist first in the bustling musical capital Dresden, then in the university town Halle? Why, despite his great gifts, did his career diverge so radically from those of his younger brothers Carl Philipp Emanuel and Johann Christian, who went on to fame if not fortune as royal court musicians in Berlin and London (and later, in Emanuel’s case, to a prestigious cantorship at Hamburg)? Distinct too was the life of the less well known Johann Christoph Friedrich Bach, who spent his entire career working quietly but apparently happily at the minor ducal court of Bückeburg.

No less puzzling than these biographical enigmas are those raised by the music itself. How did this son of Bach, who presumably received more or less the same training as his younger brothers, come to write compositions so very different from theirs? For whom did he write his often extravagantly difficult music? Where and by whom was it heard? How are we to make sense of it today?

Although never completely forgotten, especially in the German cities where he lived, the music of Friedemann Bach was never widely distributed. It remains little performed or published by comparison with that of Emanuel and Christian, and writings devoted to it have been few and far between. Hence, even for those that know something of him—flutists and violists fascinated by his challenging and rare duets for their instruments, adventurous keyboard players seeking things to complement the better-known sonatas and fantasias of Emanuel Bach—Friedemann has been something of a footnote in music history.

Yet 300 years after his birth, there are good reasons for taking a closer look at his music. Recent years have seen renewed interest among performers as well as musicologists in the music of his brothers Emanuel and Christian, and more generally in works of the so-called galant age. Musically speaking, this is the period that lies between the Baroque and the Classical; in terms of social history it corresponds to the last decades of monarchial absolutism, preceding the French Revolution. This was the period during which the foundations were laid for the European musical structures and institutions of the nineteenth century, many of which—the star performer, the composer as popular icon, the public concert hall—are still with us. Friedemann played at least a minor role in creating that world, not only as (perhaps) an early touring virtuoso but also as teacher of Sara Levy, great-aunt of Felix Mendelssohn and an important figure in her own right in Berlin concert life of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Still, had Friedemann not been born into the most famous musical family in European history, he probably would be remembered merely as one of many honorable but obscure musicians from a particularly busy period of music history. Like his younger contemporaries Johann Friedrich Kleinknecht and Johann Gottfried Müthel, he would be known for a few unusual compositions—in their cases, a couple of extraordinary flute sonatas and several astonishing keyboard sonatas and concertos—that command respect but perhaps not a great deal of affection, if only because they are so difficult to perform and to interpret.

Problematic, too, would be the seemingly narrow character of his output, which, although encompassing most of the familiar eighteenth-century genres, centers on music for keyboard. Stylistically, Friedemann’s best-known works seem limited to what is known today as the empfindsamer style. The German term, translatable as “sensitive” or “hyperexpressive,” implies a rhapsodic, proto-Romantic manner now associated especially with his brother Emanuel Bach. In fact, Friedemann’s music shows greater range than has just been suggested. But it is indeed less diverse than that of other major composers of his time, either because he actually wrote less or because less has survived.

Therein lies another enigma: Was Friedemann truly reluctant to write his music down, preferring to improvise at the harpsichord or organ, as was already reported by his contemporaries? Or was he such a perfectionist that he allowed only a small number of highly refined, carefully worked-over compositions to leave his studio? At a time when social conditions for musicians (and audiences) were changing significantly, did he fail to understand the need to produce more popular types of music—and more of it—if he was to attain the good repute and material well-being enjoyed by both his father and his younger brothers, who better recognized the need to adapt?

The Music of Wilhelm Friedemann Bach by David Schulenberg has just been published by the University of Rochester Press, and is available now from your favourite bookseller. A piece from the author and a further extract will follow over the coming weeks.

‘A locked door of which she had thrown away the key’

2010-11-29T13:50:00.006Z

In 2007, we published the highly acclaimed Imogen Holst: a Life in Music, the first full-length treatment of the life and music of one of the most fascinating and influential English musicians of the twentieth century. The book was intended as a celebration both of its subject’s centenary, and of the eightieth birthday of Rosamund Strode, Imo’s great friend and her successor as Benjamin Britten’s music assistant in Aldeburgh. Three years later the discovery of much new material has prompted the issue of a new revised edition that is able to explore more fully the creative and emotional development of this much-loved character, who for all her friendliness and charm, would in her later years dismiss talk of her past in a manner that reminded Rosamund of ‘a locked door of which she had thrown away the key’. What we now know is that the key was never thrown away, only hidden, and that, moreover, its owner was far from clear in her own mind about whether or not she really wanted somebody to find it and unlock the door. Christopher Grogan explains:

The newly discovered materials came to light in the aftermath of the decision by the Holst Foundation in 2008 to gift Imo’s remaining archive to its sister organisation in Aldeburgh, the Britten-Pears Foundation. What followed was a thorough sorting through wardrobes, boxes under beds, cupboards and filing cabinets to reveal a goldmine of documentation – unsorted and uncatalogued – relating to Imo’s life and covering all periods of her career. The discoveries included correspondence, travel journals and diaries and a wide range of ephemera; more intimately there were also examples of Imo’s early enthusiasm as an artist, two books of poetry written during her teens, and a wallet of nude photographs of herself, taken in 1931.

In her own treatment of these papers, Imo reveals herself as profoundly ambivalent about the possibility of any future interest in her life and career. Although to friends such as Rosamund (who knew her better than anybody) she repelled questions about her past, she kept all the materials that would one day provide a biographer with the route into her intimate thoughts and feelings. Towards the end of her life she went a step further and wrote out entries from her old engagement diaries into a series of exercise books, thereby mapping the days of her life in a way that suggests that she was thinking about either writing her own autobiography, or preparing the ground for a later biography. Most illuminatingly she wrote on the cover of one travel journal that it should be thrown away as being too old to be of any use. Significantly, however, she didn’t perform the act herself (which would have taken less time than writing the note on the cover), thereby dangling the journal in front of posterity and inviting those who were to come after to make the final decision about its worth. It is not surprising that this particular journal – covering the winter of 1928-9 – should record one of the happiest times of her life, when she enjoyed an Alpine holiday with the man she was then profoundly in love with, Miles Tomalin, a holiday that prompted her to write ‘Return’, one of a sequence of heartfelt love poems that light up Imo’s inner emotional journey through her late teens and early twenties:

After those days and nights of restless joy & agony,
Of vague desires, & uncertain hopes,
It is like drifting into a dreamless sleep,
A calm & deep peace, a long quietness,
To have your arms about me once again,
To feel your dear, familiar limbs pressed close
To mine: - your head lying on my breast.
To stroke your hair, & look into your eyes.
To laugh – so safe, & so secure at last.

The Imo that emerged from these newly discovered materials, and whose story is explored in the revised text, is a more complex, troubled and ultimately sympathetic figure than it was possible to present in the first edition. Raised by a loving but emotionally stilted (and frequently absent) father and a disinterested mother, she found the forging of close emotional connections painfully difficult, often falling hopelessly in love during her early years but never letting on, pouring out her desires and frustrations into her poetry instead. In Miles Tomalin she found a partner who allowed her to recreate her relationship with her father; the closer the two became the less able they were to express their feelings (both resorting once again to poetry to do this) and the relationship eventually foundered on their mutual inability to commit themselves emotionally. In the years that followed, Imo gave herself into relationships that were more physically intense but left her emotionally untouched, before the death of her father sent her spiralling into feelings of guilt and shame, ostensibly because she hadn’t offered to help him more in his professional life, but in reality because she had never been able to express or share the depth of her love for him.

Thus it was that she chose to dedicate her life to his memory and began to shut herself off from her own emotional fulfilment. On a visit to Santa Barbara in 1936, recorded in a diary not available when the first edition came out, she tearfully weighed up her options before coming to a final decision:

I decided that this was obviously the place to live, and that the sensible thing to do would be to earn a lot of money writing music for the films and then retire to Santa Barbara with a small house, a large garden, a select library and a lover. (The last being essential in such a climate.) After ten minutes reflection, however, came to the conclusion that Primrose Hill and celibacy would be more satisfying for any length of time … I was in the depths of gloom by the time E. [her uncle Ernest Cossart] rescued me with the mention of food.

This decision was to inform Imo’s creative journey over the next half-century, laying the foundations on which she was to build her achievements, but also affecting profoundly her approach to relationships, appearance and lifestyle. Moreover it puts into context the shattering emotional impact of her falling in love with Britten, fifteen years after her Santa Barbara decision and at a time when she believed she had put such things behind her. With Imo’s early life and emotional journey now so much better understood, her infatuation with the composer no longer comes out of the blue, but can be understood as a complex reliving of her teenage crushes, repeating the dynamic of her relationships with both her father and Miles Tomalin. In the wake of all this turbulence, it now seems much less surprising that this most self-effacing of creative musicians should finally decide to dedicate her whole existence to opening out the genius of Gustav Holst and Benjamin Britten, whilst locking away her own past and hiding the key.

The revised and updated edition of Imogen Holst: A Life in Music by Christopher Grogan is available now in paperback.

When Leon Met James

2010-11-19T13:41:00.005Z

Harvard Square — a loosely defined ten- to twelve-block area in the heart of Cambridge, Massachusetts, articulated by a maze of streets and characterized by the interpenetration of university and commercial interests—is full of life, crowded, stimulating, and noisy. Cars, taxis, buses, and a subway station service a constant and remarkably diverse flow of humanity. Students and professors represent only a small fraction of this international, polyglot urban population. Musicians, jugglers, glass harmonica players, and political activists vie for prime sidewalk locations, while youth in punk attire add color. And yet, immediately adjacent to the square, there are a few quiet, narrow, one-way streets lined with buildings from the nineteenth and even eighteenth centuries. For four decades Leon Kirchner made his home in one of these idyllic havens, at 8 Hilliard Street.

On August 12, 2003, I visited him there to continue the series of interviews that I had been conducting over the previous two years. Even at eighty-four, Kirchner’s erect and imposing six-foot-one inch frame had lost very little altitude to the ravages of time. Admittedly, his movements were slow, and he carefully settled into the low sofa across from me, his lanky legs stretched out, almost bridging the distance between us. He had just returned two days earlier from a trip to New York City, and—totally without preamble—he launched immediately into a report.

“We were at a cocktail party and met scientists from Cold Spring Harbor where McClintock, the Nobel Prize winner, had worked. They invited us out to their laboratory. But I was nervous about going, because Watson was going to be there. After what had happened years ago, I didn’t want to encounter him.”

Assuming that I knew something about Cold Spring Harbor, McClintock, and Watson (which I did not) he apparently was not going to offer further explanation. The mysterious Watson intrigued me most, so naturally I probed: “Who was Watson, and what had happened?” It turned out that he was James Watson, a distinguished molecular biologist and former Harvard professor. Kirchner had first met him under unusual circumstances almost forty years earlier.

At that time, because of Kirchner’s reputation for “being from Hollywood,” he was invited by Paul Doty of the Harvard Chemistry Department to attend a reception, ten days hence, for the Greek actress Melina Mercouri. In addition to appearing in Never on Sunday and many other films, she later served, from 1981 to 1989, as the flamboyant and controversial Greek minister of culture.

Although Kirchner had only recently assumed his Harvard post, the University of Chicago was courting him, and just prior to this reception he made a trip there to explore their offer of a university professorship. In Chicago he stayed with Saul Bellow and was wined and dined by university officials. One of the conditions that Kirchner imposed on his acceptance of the position was the guarantee that he could bring in whomever he wished to study composition, even if his choice fell on a candidate whose résumé did not fit the usual standards.

Kirchner discussed this topic at length with George Beadle, the president of the university, emphasizing his conviction that sometimes the most talented and brilliant individuals simply do not conform to traditional expectations in regard to degree acquisition as well as other professional credentials and social skills. Beadle, a distinguished geneticist and Nobel Prize winner, readily agreed with him and related his own experience with just such a case, a highly gifted but problematic scientist named James Watson whom he had supported, against strong opposition from his colleagues, years earlier at the California Institute of Technology. (At this point Kirchner digressed into an explanation of why he eventually turned down the Chicago offer: because of “its location in the middle of the country, the harsh climate, and the distasteful experience of seeing thousands of white fish dying in Lake Michigan during his visit.”)

A few days later, back in Cambridge, Kirchner went to the reception for Mercouri. While most of the guests were hovering around the fascinating actress/ politician, he fell into a pleasant conversation with a faculty member with whom he was not acquainted. Their discussion focused on the topic of extraordinarily talented individuals who sometimes just do not fit in. This of course led to Kirchner’s recent trip to Chicago, and he began to recount his meeting with George Beadle and their conversation about a graduate student at the California Institute of Technology, who, in spite his of great intellectual gifts, had experienced some personal and even academic difficulties. Before Kirchner got very far, the unknown man interrupted him: “I think I should tell you that my name is James Watson.” Kirchner had been so embarrassed that he avoided Watson for years on the Harvard campus.

Returning finally to his trip to New York City the previous week, Kirchner said that his friends had made a call to Cold Spring Harbor, which I learned was a research facility on Long Island, and had determined that Watson remembered Kirchner well and would be delighted to have him visit. The trip was a wonderful experience. The physical beauty of the location was beyond compare, and Kirchner had been fascinated by the laboratory’s biochemical research on brain functions, which he described in vivid detail. At one point Watson had expressed doubt that concert pianists, who by necessity have to practice so many hours a day in order to master the technical demands of their instrument, could be broadly educated intellectuals. Naturally, Kirchner took umbrage and suggested that this misconception would be cleared up if he could meet two outstanding pianists, with multifaceted academic credentials, who had recently been championing Kirchner’s music: Jeremy Denk and Jonathan Biss. It turned out that the laboratory ran its own small concert series each year, and Kirchner recommended that these young artists be engaged.

I have related this encounter in such detail because it provides a rich and characteristic entry into several aspects of Kirchner’s persona: his love of storytelling, his interest in science, his wonderful sense of humor, and his outgoing sociability. He delighted in relating personal anecdotes, and his colorful career provided a rich reservoir of material. Moreover, he was a brilliant raconteur, with an astounding memory for details of past conversations and events, and, when needed, the talent to mimic the accents and mannerisms of his protagonists.

With him, however, one anecdote rarely came alone. His conversation was governed by an active stream of consciousness in which associations constantly triggered new ideas and memories. An encounter with Kirchner was always an adventure— stimulating, challenging, and surprising. Sometimes, as in the story described above, the episodes fit neatly inside each other like a Russian nested doll, but one often had to ask for clarification or additional information in order to follow his fleet and fertile chain of thought. It was always worth the effort.

Kirchner’s keen sense of humor always served him especially well in his roles as teacher and conductor. He could be very entertaining and was not above laughter at his own expense. One of his favorite stories concerned an experience at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont where he had performed as pianist in his Sonata Concertante with violinist Alexander Schneider at the beginning of a concert. During the intermission, the violinist Jaime Laredo, who was in the audience, overheard a conversation between two elderly women seated next to him. One asked if the pianist, Kirchner, had indeed composed “that work.” Her friend assured her that he had. “Then,” she pursued, “did all of those notes come out of his head?” “Well, yes, they did,” the friend replied, to which the other retorted, “it must have felt awfully good to get rid of them!”

This extract comes from the opening chapter of Robert Riggs’ new biography, Leon Kirchner: Composer, Performer, and Teacher. Readers of this blog may buy this book at 40% discount until the end of November (shipping extra: US $5.95 UK £3.00 Europe £6.50). Simply visit the book’s page on our website and follow the order instructions, quoting reference number $10358 in the US and Canada and =10307 elsewhere. Do hurry, this offer can only run until 30 November 2010.

Once upon a time in Vienna

2010-11-15T11:44:00.006Z

Marc Moskovitz’s superbly readable biography, Alexander Zemlinsky: A Lyric Symphony, has already attracted some enthusiastic reviews. Zemlinsky’s Zelig-like progress through the fin-de-siècle Viennese musical world has obscured his own achievement. In this excerpt, we witness the composer working with another figure who had to wait for the fame he so richly deserved, Gustav Mahler:

At the start of the twentieth century Zemlinsky experienced one of the greatest triumphs he would ever receive at the hands of his fellow Viennese. When Gustav Mahler led the premiere of Zemlinsky’s newest opera, Es war einmal (Once Upon a Time) on January 22, 1900, Zemlinsky was forced to acknowledge the ovation — including the war-whoops from the younger members of the audience — at the conclusion of each act. Both thrilled and embarrassed, Zemlinsky bowed awkwardly from the Hofoper stage. Such accolades had been commonly accorded to composers like Johann Strauss jr. or Franz Lehár, darlings of Vienna’s operetta world, or even occasionally to Johannes Brahms, particularly toward the end of his life, but ovations of this nature were something Zemlinsky had only experienced once before, at the premiere of Sarema. Coming off that opera’s success, it appeared Zemlinsky had found his calling.

Brahms’s death three years earlier had left Zemlinsky without vital support in the musical establishment, but Mahler quickly moved to fill the vacuum. Following the successful Munich debut of Sarema, Mahler, who was looking at a Hofoper diet comprising Mozart and Wagner, along with occasional productions of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin, Thomas’s Mignon and Smetana’s The Bartered Bride, approached Zemlinsky about bringing Sarema back to Vienna. While doubtless flattered at the prospects of having a work premiered under such auspicious circumstances, it appears that Zemlinsky sought to convince Mahler that he was capable of much better. Keenly aware of the success Engelbert Humperdink, Karl Goldmark and Hans Pfitzner had had with fairy tale operas, Zemlinsky too wished to try his hand at the genre and indeed had already sketched out some ideas. Mahler gave his consent, and in August of 1897 Zemlinsky set to work in earnest.

Zemlinsky turned to Holger Drachmann’s Der var engang, a grand five-act national drama that had been played in Vienna in 1894. Drachmann’s fairy tale pivots around a Princess for whom no courtier is good enough and a Prince who is determined to win her love. Tricked into marrying a gypsy (the Prince in disguise), the once haughty Princess is reduced to living in a forest hut and selling pots in the marketplace. Though initially contemptuousness of her new life, she gradually re-evaluates her world and her desires and develops a genuine affection for her husband and their simple life together. The fidelity of the former Princess is soon put to the test, but her love for the gypsy remains steadfast, even in the most tempting of circumstances. By the story’s close, the Princess confesses to having found a love greater than even a Prince could provide. Her transformation complete, the gypsy-prince finally unveils his true, aristocratic identity.

At the end of June of 1898, Zemlinsky submitted an early draft of Es war einmal’s piano score to Mahler, but Mahler’s initial impression was far from encouraging. There was no question that the younger man possessed a formidable talent and technique. Zemlinsky’s characters possessed distinct musical profiles, and his language was efficient and refined, with rhythmic and melodic vitality that never overpowered the voice. It was the work’s overly derivative nature that troubled Mahler. Some degree of outside influence could be expected, since building on the ideas of others was a natural part of the learning process and Zemlinsky had not yet turned thirty. Nevertheless, the manuscript Zemlinsky presented to Mahler was “so full of resemblances and plagiarisms” that its composer “must have a very bad memory to have failed to avoid them”.

Mahler had put his finger on a critical issue : Zemlinsky had learned all that can be taught and had a complete grasp of the elements associated with orchestral and vocal writing. What he had yet to find was the one thing nobody could give him : a distinctive sound, a sonic fingerprint, the unexpected turn of a phrase that says “Schubert”, or the unique orchestration that renders Mendelssohn or Shostakovich or Copland immediately recognizable. Zemlinsky would, of course, find his personal idiom, a voice distinctly his own, but that ownership was still years away. In the meantime he continued to rely heavily — far too heavily, Mahler thought — on the music of others to help lead the way. The critics would concur.

To his credit, Mahler was willing to have his misgivings allayed. Zemlinsky took Mahler up on his offer and played the opera through for him at the piano. Whether because of the conviction of Zemlinsky’s own interpretation, the realization that the work did indeed have potential, or the reaffirmation of Zemlinsky’s undeniable talent, the music director agreed to accept Es war einmal for performance. But the offer came with a caveat : the score would have to undergo significant modifications. For Zemlinsky, Mahler’s proposal held two benefits : first, Mahler’s experience with the demands of the theater would help transform Zemlinsky’s efforts into an opera worthy of being offered up to Hofoper audiences and critics who had come to expect productions of the highest caliber ; second, the project would again place Zemlinsky directly under the wing of one of Vienna’s most influential and powerful musicians. Zemlinsky didn’t have to think twice about the offer.

Mahler’s own knowledge of the theater stemmed more from his dedication to the operas of others than to his own stage works. his only personal operatic attempts had occurred much earlier, and he had long since given up on the idea of composing opera. Years in the theater had taught him what was needed to bring a story — even a fairy tale — to life, and this was precisely the information and experience for which Zemlinsky thirsted. Under Mahler’s direction, the entire opera — music and text — was overhauled, resulting in significant cuts, modifications and rewrites. Mahler’s understanding of stagecraft — the complexities of which Zemlinsky was only beginning to learn — also resulted in a number of practical suggestions and revisions, such as lengthening the Interlude to Act I, which allowed greater time for a costume and scene change. In December of 1899, the full score was complete and the following month the curtain rose on Es war einmal for the first time.

Alexander Zemlinsky: A Lyric Symphony by Marc Moskovitz is available from your favourite bookseller or, in case of difficulty, direct from Boydell and Brewer in the US or the UK.

The Past and the Future: Britten's War Requiem

2010-10-21T16:43:00.006+01:00

The fifth volume of Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten, edited by Philip Reed and Mervyn Cooke, will be published soon. In this post, Reed examines one of Britten's most controversial and impressive works, the War Requiem:

The most public and indisputably most popular of Britten’s works from the period covered by volume 5 of Letters from a Life is War Requiem, commissioned by the Coventry Cathedral Festival in October 1958 to mark the consecration of Basil Spence’s uncompromisingly modern building, which sought to be a symbol of peace and reconciliation in a city that had been flattened (including the destruction of the ancient cathedral) by German bombers in the Second World War. Spence’s building incorporated significant works from leading artists of the day, including John Piper, Jacob Epstein and Graham Sutherland. The arts festival celebrating the new cathedral’s consecration in 1962 was inspired to emulate the building’s artistic environment by commissioning new music from some of the most distinguished British composers of the day. Tippett and Bliss, as well as Brian Easdale, a colleague from Britten’s pre-war days at the Group Theatre, had new works performed at Coventry.

The Festival gave Britten a free hand in his choice of the genre of work, and he took the opportunity to fulfil a long-term general scheme to write a major choral work that had been at the back of his mind since the late 1940s. Mea culpa, his planned oratorio with Ronald Duncan from 1945 in protest at the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the projected ‘Gandhi Requiem’ of 1948, both fed into the ideas behind War Requiem. So, too, must Britten’s plan, realistically aborted owing to lack of time, to write a choral-and-orchestral Mass setting for Lord Harewood’s Leeds Centenary Festival in 1958. Of greater personal significance for Britten, however, was the platform the Coventry commission gave him to make a public statement about his strongly held pacifist beliefs. In War Requiem, Britten could speak out in opposition to war, violence and inhumanity.

It seems likely that Nocturne, the orchestral song-cycle Britten wrote for the 1958 Leeds Festival instead of the Mass setting Harewood had originally hoped for, was the source of the idea for Britten’s incorporating the sequence of Wilfred Owen settings into War Requiem. Among its typically Brittenesque anthology of poetry on the theme of sleep and dreams, Nocturne included a setting of Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Kind Ghosts’. The song-cycle was written quickly in the late summer of 1958, but Britten was considering the shape and content of the piece earlier in the year, when he read widely in his search for possible poems to set. Interestingly, many of the texts he selected for inclusion in the BBC Radio programme Personal Choice broadcast in July 1958 reflect his current compositional preoccupations. ‘The Kind Ghosts’ was not chosen for the BBC programme, but another of Owen’s poems was – ‘Strange Meeting’, in which dead soldiers from opposing sides in the conflict confront each other and are reconciled. A setting of lines from this poem forms the final, cathartic duet for the male soloists in War Requiem. Owen’s poetry therefore was very much in Britten’s mind before the letter came in October 1958 inviting him to write a piece for Coventry Cathedral.

Unless directly collaborating with a librettist such as William Plomer, Britten is generally circumspect about his current projects in his letters. Readers looking for revelations about War Requiem will be disappointed: apart from arrangements concerning the commissioning of the work, and the inevitable consultations over the engagement of singers and the conductor for its premiere, there is little to be read about the piece other than an occasional progress report. Britten’s letter of 16 February 1961 to the German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, in which he invites him, ‘with great temerity’, to sing in the premiere of War Requiem, summarizes his own view of the work at a point only a few weeks before he began work on the composition draft:

I am writing what I think will be one of my most important works. It is a full-scale Requiem Mass for chorus and orchestra (in memory of those of all nations who died in the last war), and I am interspersing the Latin text with many poems of a great English poet, Wilfred Owen, who was killed in the First World War. These magnificent poems, full of the hate of destruction, are a kind of commentary on the Mass; they are, of course, in English. These poems will be set for tenor and baritone, with an accompaniment of chamber orchestra, placed in the middle of the other forces. They will need singing with the utmost beauty, intensity and sincerity.

Otherwise, Britten’s decision to incorporate Owen’s poetry, its selection and its mapping into the timeless Latin of the Mass for the Dead, where it forms an integrated Owen song-cycle, is seldom mentioned in the correspondence beyond mere reporting of the fact.

Much of the impact of the anti-war message of War Requiem lay in Britten’s strategic placing of his Owen settings in relation to the Latin Mass, where the horrors of the poet’s experience in the trenches are used to undermine the ritual mourning of church and state. The immediacy of the musical expression of the work – for example, its obvious allusions to the Requiem of Verdi – touched the wider public in a way that no work by Britten had previously, with the possible exception of Peter Grimes in 1945. Against the background of contemporary anxieties about the Berlin Wall, the Cuban missile crisis, the expansion of hostilities in the Vietnam War, and the fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War in 1964, Britten’s lament for the dead of two world wars and the consequences of war could not have been more timely, and the socio-political climate of the early 1960s undoubtedly made its own contribution to War Requiem’s international success. Such unprecedented acclaim for the work was unexpected by Britten, who seems to have been genuinely taken aback by its popularity.

In the immediate aftermath of the premiere, which, musically, was beset by problems concerning the cathedral’s acoustics and the unavailability of the Russian soprano Galina Vishnevskaya (she was refused permission by the Soviet authorities), Britten remains modest in his response to the tidal wave of congratulatory letters and telegrams: ‘I am, at the moment, only too aware of where it falls short of the idea, which is so close to my heart’, he writes to Plomer on 5 June 1962 in response to a warm letter from the writer; and to others the composer generally deflects comments about the music, preferring instead to concentrate on the fact that the message of the work had been understood – ‘the main point really’, as he told the director Basil Coleman.

The exchange of letters between Britten and the sculptor Barbara Hepworth about War Requiem is one of the most interesting in volume 5, touching not only on the work’s message but also the music’s emotional power. Hepworth, whose work Britten admired but whom he did not know well personally, somehow gets to the heart of the matter.

After listening to the BBC Third Programme live radio broadcast of the premiere on 30 May 1962, Hepworth wrote immediately to the composer:

I was profoundly moved this evening listening to the War Requiem. I felt it to be a truly magnificent work, and of tremendous importance to all of us both intellectually and emotionally. The visionary quality of the balance between the finest of what is past and the understanding of the new orientation towards the future, seemed to me sublime [. . .] As a sculptor I am deeply grateful for the experience of listening to this great work, with all its strange sweeps of sound and texture, and its absolute strength and purity of conception. [Quoted in Sophie Bowness, ‘“Rhythms of the Stones”: Hepworth and Music’, in Chris Stephens (ed.), Barbara Hepworth Centenary (London: Tate Publishing, 2004), p. 27.]

Britten’s response (4 June 1962) – a photocopy of the letter was given to the Britten–Pears Library by Sir Alan Bowness, Hepworth’s son-in-law – reveals how pleased he was by her understanding of this balance between past tradition and fresh endeavour; his appreciation of her understanding of his aims was no doubt enhanced for him by the fact that she was a fellow creator, someone with whom he could share, despite their different disciplines, common cause:

My dear Barbara Hepworth,
I did appreciate your writing about my War Requiem, & the things you said. A tribute from an artist I admire, as much as I admire you, moves me greatly. I have been treasuring the idea of this work for ages, & endeavoring to find the language to express it; just this balance between the old & the new. But I am surprised that you think it only possible in music at this moment – I feel most of the musical world is hopelessly bogged down in just exploring new techniques, with a very few exceptions; the visual world seems much more relaxed. But this is too long a subject – & I wanted you to know quickly, how touched & grateful I am for your letter.
Greetings from Peter [Pears] too –
Yours,
Ben Britten

Whatever the long-term critical assessment of War Requiem – and that has vacillated fairly widely during the fifty years since its premiere – its impact in the years immediately following its premiere in 1962 was considerable, with performances springing up throughout Europe and America in double quick time. Extracts from the piece were even performed in March 1964 by students from the Leningrad Conservatory (using pirated scores), with Britten in the audience; and the recording made in January 1963 under the composer’s direction and featuring the three soloists for whom the work was intended –Vishnevskaya, Pears and Fischer-Dieskau – was an instant best-seller.

Fifty years on from its premiere, War Requiem has firmly established itself as a cornerstone of the twentieth-century repertoire, and is regularly performed in circumstances that its composer would probably find surprising. For him, it remained a special work, in which he had articulated his own profoundly held beliefs. As co-editor Mervyn Cooke observed at the conclusion of his survey of the work’s critical reception in his handbook to War Requiem, ‘It is one of the richest ironies of the War Requiem’s performance history that a work embodying fundamentally anti-establishment sentiments, attacking both the inhumanity of war and the complacency of conventional religion, should have become one of the most enduring bastions of the British musical establishment.’ It is an irony, one suspects, that would not have been lost on its composer.

Letters from a Life: The Selected Letters of Benjamin Britten will be available soon from all good booksellers.

‘More perfect than any singer I have heard.’

2010-10-13T16:01:00.005+01:00

Irving Godt was already working on his book about Marianna Martines when he met John Rice in the late 1990s. When Godt died towards the end of 2006, his daughter asked Rice to revise the typescript for publication by the University of Rochester Press. As he says in the Editor’s Note to the book, “I welcomed this opportunity to contribute to an important project and to the memories of a talented and accomplished composer and a knowledgeable and tenacious scholar.’

Here is an edited extract from the Introduction which demonstrates both her reputation among her contemporaries and the sort of barriers that existed for female artists of the time:

The music historian Charles Burney spent several weeks in Vienna in 1772. One of his most cherished ambitions was to meet the court poet Pietro Metastasio, whose librettos, set to music hundreds of times, had helped to shape the music of his age. But once in the presence of the great dramatist, Burney found his attention distracted by the entrance of a young woman, “who was received by the whole company with great respect. She was well dressed, and had a very elegant appearance.” This was Marianna Martines, whose family had lived with Metastasio for about forty years and whose education he had supervised. She had developed quickly into a fine singer, keyboard player, and composer, and was now, at the age of twenty-eight, at the height of her creative powers.

Martines’s singing left Burney at a loss for words:

To say that her voice was naturally well-toned and sweet, that she had an excellent shake, a perfect intonation, a facility of executing the most rapid and difficult passages, and a touching expression, would be to say no more than I have already said, and with truth, of others; but here I want words that would still encrease the significance and energy of these expressions. The Italian augmentatives would, perhaps, gratify my wish, if I were writing in that language; but as that is not the case, let me only add, that in the portamento, and divisions of tones and semi-tones into infinitely minute parts, and yet always stopping upon the exact fundamental, Signora Martinetz was more perfect than any singer I had ever heard: her cadences too, of this kind, were very learned, and truly pathetic and pleasing.

After these two songs, she played a very difficult lesson [i.e., sonata], of her own composition, on the harpsichord, with great rapidity and precision. She has composed a Miserere, in four parts, with several psalms, in eight parts, and is a most excellent contrapuntist.

The woman who charmed Burney so completely, impressing him as both a performer and a composer, was one of the most accomplished and highly honoured female musicians of her century. Her first music teacher was the young Joseph Haydn. Vienna knew her as a gifted aristocratic singer and keyboard player who performed for the pleasure of the Empress Maria Theresa. The great composer Johann Adolf Hasse praised her singing, keyboard playing, and composition. The regular private concerts she held in her home attracted the presence and the participation of some of Vienna’s leading musicians; Mozart enjoyed playing keyboard duets with her. She composed prolifically and in a wide variety of genres, vocal and instrumental, writing church music, oratorios, Italian arias, sonatas, and concertos. Those who study, perform, and listen to her music today will understand easily why it captivated Burney.

Yet a few decades after her death a critical tradition hostile to the music of Martines and to women composers in general began to influence opinion. The prolific Viennese novelist Caroline Pichler was herself an accomplished musician in her youth, having studied with Mozart. She took part in private musical events given by her father in the 1790s, when Martines presided over one of Vienna’s most celebrated musical salons. (Thus she had reason to think of Martines as a rival.)

In memoirs published in 1844, a year after her death, Pichler gave notice to two female composers: the blind pianist Maria Theresia von Paradis and Martines. Pichler was ten years younger than Paradis, twenty-five years younger than Martines. Her musical tastes were clearly those of a generation different from Marianna’s; but she expressed no great fondness for the music of Paradis either: “I found neither her compositions nor those of Fräulein Martinez (the only works by female composers that were known to me) to be of much interest.” This statement led Pichler to a short disquisition on female composers:

It is an altogether strange observation . . . that not a single woman has yet succeeded in distinguishing herself as a creative musician. There are successful women painters and poets, and if not a single woman in any art or science has ever achieved as much as men have, they have nevertheless made significant strides forward. But not in music. And yet one would think that this art, which demands the least preliminary study and more feeling and imagination than the other arts, would be the proper medium in which the female spirit might express itself.

She went on to disparage not only Marianna but the whole sisterhood of women composers, beginning with a rhetorically useful concession that Paradis and Martines wrote some good music:

Both produced fine things, but not at the highest—indeed not even at the middle level, while women in painting and poetry, even if they have produced nothing comparable to the works of the leading masters in these crafts, have brought forth valuable things without any allowance for their sex. But should not one expect that music, resting as it does on instinct, on inner impulses, on feeling, and on imagination, would be better adapted to the female character than the fields of painting and poetry, in which experience, clear concepts, technical skill, etc., are required? Yet it is not necessarily so, because up to now we have seen a Sirani, a Rosalbe, an Angelica Kaufmann, a Lebrun, etc.—but not even a somewhat significant woman composer.

Marianna Martines: A Woman Composer in the Vienna of Mozart and Haydn by Irving Godt, edited by John A Rice, is now available from the University of Rochester Press and all good booksellers.

Father and Son

2010-09-30T12:30:00.006+01:00

Svetlana Belsky’s translation of Grigory Kogan’s classic study, Busoni as Pianist, has already been featured on this blog. However, to fill the two week gap as we ply our trade at the Frankfurt Book Fair (hall 8, stand C930 for anyone planning a visit), we thought you might enjoy the following excerpt from the book which describes Busoni père’s attempts to make a little Mozart out of his son. Anyone interested in musical and cultural history should read Belsky’s Preface to the book (see Google Book Search for example), which includes a chilling and evocative account of artistic life - and death - under Stalin.

In the north of Italy, in Tuscany, near Florence lies a little town called Empoli. There, on April 1, 1866, the future great pianist was born. He was the only son of the Italian clarinetist Ferdinando Busoni and the pianist Anna Weiss, who was Italian on her mother’s side and German on her father’s. The boy’s parents concertized and led a wandering life, which the child, too, was obliged to share.

Eleven months after birth he was taken away from his native town, and, travelling from place to place, in 1869, found himself in Paris where the family planned to settle. However, the Franco-Prussian War that began in 1870 forced Busoni’s parents to abandon this intention. The boy’s father set off on an extended concert tour of Italy, while Ferruccio and his mother settled in Trieste in the home of his grandfather, Giuseppe Weiss.

In Trieste—an Italian city, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire— Busoni’s musical education began. His abilities, as is usual among great musicians, manifested themselves early. By four years of age he already played the piano by ear. The first lessons of piano and musicianship were given by his mother, and soon the pupil could perform small four-hand pieces of Diabelli with his teacher.

Busoni’s mother was a good pianist, quite successful on the stage (eight days before her son’s birth she performed in Rome in the presence of Liszt); her son remembered in her playing a faultless technique, great facility, and a certain “salon” approach “in the spirit of Thalberg’s art.” In 1872, after an absence of two years, suddenly his father came back, and the boy’s life underwent great changes.

Busoni’s father was a colorful, original personality. Far from lacking in talent, but deficient in general education and professionalism, he continually nurtured grand plans, which usually greatly exceeded his rather modest real gifts. He did not wish to play in an orchestra, considering that beneath him, and, quite possibly, could not, for, according to his son, he could not manage rhythm or sight-reading any too well. But solo concerts, which had brought him “small fame,” could not entirely satisfy his ambition, either. In search of the road to success he tried many and various ventures: now attempting to write and publish poetry, then “making” his son’s career, and so on. Ardent and outspoken, unceremonious and despotic, always “temporarily” without a penny to his name, but nevertheless full of unwavering faith in the future, he often evoked ironic smiles in those around him and materially complicated the lives of his family members.

His father’s fantasies left their mark on Busoni’s life from the very start. By his wish, the newborn was given four names: Ferruccio-Dante-Michelangelo-Benvenuto—in the naive belief that the “patronage” of the three great Tuscan artists (Dante Alighieri, Michelangelo Buonarroti, and Benvenuto Cellini) would guarantee the child’s glorious future. Naturally, having reached the age of awareness, Busoni hurriedly discarded the “heavy responsibility” tactlessly laid upon him by his father, rejected the two middle names, and, eventually, also the fourth, leaving himself only the name Ferruccio.

Back with the family, his father immediately commenced furious activity. Having insisted on moving the family away from the home of his father-in-law to a separate apartment, he dismissed his wife from further instruction of the child, and, thoroughly unembarrassed by his incompetence in questions of pianism, undertook the boy’s education himself. These lessons are colorfully described in Busoni’s “autobiographical fragments”:

My father knew little about piano playing, and, in addition, did not have very good rhythm, but he compensated for these faults with absolutely indescribable energy, severity, and pedantry. He could sit by my side for four hours a day, controlling every note and every finger. There could be no indulgence, rest, or slightest inattention on his part. The only pauses were precipitated by explosions of his unusually irascible temperament, which were followed by reproaches, dark prophecies, threats, an occasional box on the ear, and ample tears. Finally, there was repentance, father’s consolation, and assurance that he wishes only the best—and the next day it all began again.

Having put it into his head at all costs to make another Mozart out of his son, Busoni’s father decided that the boy was most likely to reach this goal by following, step by step, the artistic path of the author of Don Giovanni. The latter, of course, studied music from the age of four and performed at six. Busoni’s lessons began at the “correct” time. It only remained to prepare him successfully for a public debut, which took place—alas, with a certain delay in “the plan”—in Trieste, on November 24, 1873: the seven-year-old Busoni took part in his parents’ concert, playing the first movement of Mozart’s C-Major Sonata, the F-Major Sonatina of Clementi, and two pieces from Schumann’s Album for the Young: “Armes Waisenkind” and “Soldatenmarsch.” The little pianist appeared under the dual name Weiss-Busoni—the father’s new idea, in the belief that the combination of two “big names” would create good publicity for the young prodigy.

Readers of this blog may buy this book at 35% discount during the month of October (shipping extra: US $5.95 UK £3.00 Europe £6.50). Simply visit the book’s page on our website and follow the order instructions, quoting reference number $10296 in the US and Canada and 10249 elsewhere. Do hurry, this offer can only run for the month of October 2010.

“Haydn’s Ribbits and Beethoven’s Cheep-Cheeps”

2010-09-22T13:24:00.006+01:00

In a previous post we shared Daniel Albright’s intriguing preface to his recent book Music Speaks: On the Language of Opera, Dance, and Song. Below we reprint some typical passages from several of the book’s chapters. Perhaps “typical” is not even the best word, considering how playful and inventive his writing and thinking is. As Paul Griffiths (renowned author of The Substance of Things Heard: Writings about Music and The Sea on Fire: Jean Barraqué) noted with regard to Music Speaks: ‘“teasing” -- in the senses of gently mocking, of pulling out, and indeed of titillating -- is . . . [Albright’s] modus operandi.”

For Wittgenstein, music isn’t like speech; instead, speech is a special case of music. Some of the things you say to me I understand in the way I understand Mozart; some of the things in the way I understand Cage; some of the things in the way I understand Britney Spears. But in all cases, speech is a game with sounds, just as music is a game with sounds–neither strictly possesses meaning, or conviction, but meaning and conviction may glide around either....

[If] language is beset by the same problems of jarring and incommensurable, un-unifiable models that beset music, then music and language are in exactly the same uncomfortable situation. Yes, Strauss’s tone poem Till Eulenspiegel lurches wildly from narrative to speech-inflection to exasperating tangles of unconstruables; but a written chronicle of Till’s adventures would behave identically. So we are left in paradox: the more we try to understand music as language, the more strongly it resists that understanding; and the more we try to understand music as the opposite of language, the more sweetly, strongly, plainly it speaks to the ear. We understand the siren’s song only at the moment when we stop trying to understand it. [pages 13-14]

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Poets have always been listening. The meanings they seek to convey in their poems often seem to lie half outside the words, in the rush of wind or water, in the thunder, in the cries of birds, as if poets were trying to translate into human language a poetry that pre-exists in the whole body of the world’s sounds. Composers also listen; and when they read poems, they listen both to the music of the words themselves, and to the music on the far side of the poems, the music that the poets themselves were attending to. So–when Haydn sets a passage in The Seasons in which frogs appear, he sets the orchestra a-croaking. The philosopher Schopenhauer greatly deplored this tendency in Haydn, on the grounds that music should strive to align itself with the deep urgencies hidden in the heart of things, and not to imitate external phenomena. But it’s futile to try to argue Haydn out of his ribbits, or Beethoven out of his cheep-cheeps in the song Die Wachtel, The Quail. In a poem about sound, the external sound is an irresistibly potent metaphor for the poem’s meaning. [page 105]

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At the beginning of Ottavio Rinuccini’s libretto to La Dafne, Ovid himself descends from Elysium to warn the spectators that they’re about to see a play about the dangerousness of love: beware, you might fall in love with a girl only to find her turned into a tree. Immediately after this brief prologue, Apollo kills a dragon with his bow and arrow. The whole protocol of this opening is all wrong by the standards of Greek tragedy: if there is a prologue, it is a god (as in Euripides’ Hippolytus), not a poet; and monsters are killed offstage and enter the play as a form of narrative (also as in the Hippolytus). The early opera writers quite liked combats with monsters: in the third intermedio from La Pellegrina (music by Marenzio), Apollo slays the monster at Delphi. To some extent we might say that opera labored to bring into the theatre what was in the world of the Greeks indecorous—obscene in the root meaning of the term, that is, incapable of being presented onstage. Ovid’s poetry seemed to offer opportunities for sex and violence beyond what was permitted in serious Greek or Roman drama.

In later times, actual Greek tragedy made its way onto the operatic stage, but hesitantly and in much altered form. The most important Greek tragedy, for operatic purposes, was Euripides’s Alcestis, the subject of substantial operas by (among others) Lully, Handel, and Gluck. I suspect that part of the reason for this popularity was (1) the fact that the plot—a harrowing of Hades for a beloved wife—was the closest thing in Greek tragedy to the plot of Orpheus, the gold standard in operatic story lines; (2) the story had a happy ending, unlike that of Orpheus, though with some wrenching and hammering a happy ending for Orpheus was usually contrived (Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo had an unhappy ending according to the published libretto of 1607, but not according to the published score of 1609); and (3) the luxury-uxorious aspect of the tale flattered an increasingly bourgeois taste—here was a G-rated opera fit for the whole family. [pages 122-23]

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The great master of the inconsequential ballet was of course Meyerbeer, who thought it a fine thing to provide, in Le prophète (1849), a little relief for the bloodthirsty, war-torn Anabaptists in the form of a delicious ballet in which provisions-sellers on ice-skater, simulated with that newfangled contrivance the roller skate, take a break from their capitalist enterprise by dancing. Wagner considered that a Meyerbeer opera was a series of effects without causes, “a monstrously piebald, historico-romantic, diabolico-religious, fanatico-voluptuous, frivolo-sacred, mysterio-jaunty, sentimento-knavish dramatic hodge-podge.” You might get the impression that Wagner disapproved. But you have only to hear Wagner’s words to understand that Meyerbeer’s time has come: no pithier description of the Postmodern sensibility exists. Rauschenberg’s goat plugged into an automobile tire, Serrano’s Piss Christ, Schnittke’s Dr. Faustus, the whole canon of Damien Hirst–what are these but more recent manifestations of the piebald, diabolico-religious, sacro-frivolous, mysterio-criminal? Maybe the patron saint of our age is Giacomo Meyerbeer. [pages 163-64]

Music Speaks is available from all good booksellers. Read more on Google Book Search.

Lessons of the Masters

2010-09-01T14:27:00.004+01:00

As we approach the official publication date of Tully Potter's long-awaited life and times of Adolf Busch, here are two short extracts which demonstrate how Adolf and his brother Fritz were willing to learn from others. First, we join the brothers in Pyrmont:

More progress in broadening and deepening his repertoire was made that summer, when Fritz had a second season as Pyrmont Hofkapellmeister and Adolf again agreed to be his concertmaster. This time there was no chance of reinforcing the moth-eaten orchestra with young, unpaid students; worse, there was little music of good quality for the ‘court musicians’ to play. Chamber music came to the rescue. […] Fritz also arranged a small Schumann Festival, at which Adolf performed the Fantasy and the renowned tenor and reciter Ludwig Wüllner took part with his sister Anna in Manfred: the chorus was provided by visitors to the baths, augmented by the local male-voice choir. After the morning rehearsal, Fritz asked Wüllner for his comments and was told: ‘Young man, you are doubtless gifted but you have not the slightest idea what lies behind the notes of this magnificent work. The spirit, the true beauty of this music is a completely dead letter to you, and I am afraid you will never grasp it, as you are much too conceited’. That afternoon Wüllner gave Fritz a three-hour tutorial in the interpretation of Schumann’s music; and the evening concert was an experience neither of the Busch brothers ever forgot.

Most of the time, the musicians were expected to grind out selections from operettas by men such as Paul Lincke, the particular local favourite. Fortunately the chief director of Simrock, publisher of Brahms and Dvořák, was taking the waters at Pyrmont. When he heard of Fritz’s plight, he sent for the scores and parts of all Dvořák’s available orchestral works and made the young Kapellmeister a present of them. The Busch brothers already liked the Bohemian composer’s music but this chance happening led to a lasting love for it: they played it ad infinitum that summer of 1910, until the regular clientele began to complain and Kurt von Beckerath ordered Fritz to lay Dvořák aside and give the customers their usual fare. Adolf then suggested the ingenious ploy of announcing Lincke’s music on the programmes but playing Dvořák’s. All went well until Lincke, who unbeknown to the brothers had been taking the cure at Pyrmont, presented himself to Fritz and complained that he kept seeing his own name on the programme and hearing the strains of Dvořák. Adolf made a strategic exit, leaving Fritz to pacify the angry composer by suggesting a special series of Lincke evenings in the park, to be conducted by the composer himself with red illuminations; there would also be Lincke pieces in the morning concerts – which Fritz did not conduct. Thus honour was satisfied on both sides and the brothers could go back to their lodgings to play Beethoven and Bach sonatas.

A little over a year later, Adolf Busch found himself playing in New York with the great maestro, Toscanini:

Then came the most demanding test, Busch’s first concert with the Philharmonic-Symphony of New York under Toscanini, at Carnegie Hall on Thursday, 26 November. The programme would seem curious today: Mozart, Symphony No. 29; Bach, A minor Violin Concerto; Franck, ‘Morceau symphonique’ from Rédemption; interval; Beethoven; Violin Concerto; Overture, Der fliegende Holländer. During a run-through of the concertos at the Astor with Giesen at the piano, an amicable argument arose over a detail in the Bach, as Piero Weiss related:

In the last movement there was a grace note that Busch interpreted as a long grace note. Toscanini disagreed and wanted him to play an acciaccatura, not an appoggiatura – short, not long. Years later, Busch came to him and said: ‘Maestro, you were right about that note in the Bach Concerto, because I was just the other day reading Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s treatise on keyboard playing and there he quoted a passage that was exactly the same’. Toscanini said: ‘Mio caro Busch, either you feel it here’ – touching his heart – ‘or you need to read a lot of books’.

It appears that, at the concert, Busch played the disputed note Toscanini’s way. After the conductor had taken his final bow, green, pink and yellow slips of paper rained down from the top gallery, bearing the legend: ‘Long live the great Maestro Arturo Toscanini! Mussolini and his Black Shirts do not represent the spirit of Italy. Viva Arturo Toscanini!’ But Busch had his share of the evening’s ovations and cabled home: ‘Greatest success. Wonderful music-making. Maestro happy with me’. Fritz in Dresden received a similar telegram, signed by Toscanini and Kreisler – one of many string-players present. The programme was repeated on the Friday afternoon; but before then Busch had read some of the best notices of his life.

The two-volume set of Adolf Busch: the Life of an Honest Musician by Tully Potter is available from wherever good music books are sold.

Svetlana Belsky's Busoni

2010-08-26T14:27:00.005+01:00

The time came, as it inevitably must, in any DMA program, when the Director of Doctoral Studies looks sternly at the class and asks if all are ready to submit their dissertation proposals. The program in question was a performance doctorate; and we had just recently found out exactly how many degree recitals were required for graduation! So the answer all around was a pained “no”. I searched my brain for ideas, none came, but, undaunted (or not much), I appealed to the fount of all wisdom, pianistic and otherwise, my dear teacher, Nina Svetlanova.

The gleam in her eye was more frightening than the Director’s frown. It appeared that she had been waiting for the question – and had the answer. Shortly, I found myself with a well-thumbed tome in my hands, a masterpiece written by her own teacher that badly needed translating into English and I was just the person to do it (having command of Russian and English, a love for the piano and an inability to say no). The book was Busoni by Grigory Kogan (GK’s original one-word title, standing like a marble statue), putting it down once I started reading was impossible, and practicing suffered greatly for the space of those few days. (Little did I know how much future practicing time would suffer, along with teaching, housekeeping and motherhood, in the course of the writing itself!).

That first reading was somewhat of an interactive experience. I was frequently heard muttering to myself about the fabulousness of this idea or another, and occasionally bursting out with an “aha, so this is where that genius fingering from my last lesson came from!” The wheel of time turns inexorably, and, since the publication of the book in January, my own students, presented with some pearl of wisdom, have been known to exclaim – “this is right out of Chapter 11!”

Like most young pianists, I had only a passing acquaintance with the name Ferruccio Busoni. I knew him as a fabled pianist of the Golden Age, and the composer of impossibly difficult works. The name of Grigory Kogan, on the other hand, was very familiar to me. To any pianist, and, indeed, musician, brought up in the Russian-speaking world, he was a legend and a giant. The great Russian and Soviet pianistic tradition would not have existed without Kogan’s teaching, playing and writing. Other great pedagogues wrote works about the “hows” of piano playing, Kogan discussed the “whys”, those psychological aspects of listening, imagining, practicing and performance, without which any pianist, no matter how technically proficient, can never become an artist. Many of Kogan’s iconic works on piano playing unfortunately remain un-translated and unpublished, but I may quote them in my lessons with impunity!

Kogan’s Busoni as Pianist (the translation’s new and more precise title) s the first and only work of its kind – dedicated to painstaking study and discussion of Busoni’s place in the pianistic Pantheon. It is Kogan’s fascinating thesis that, unlike many great pianists whose careers shine bright but change nothing in the prevailing zeitgeist, Busoni’s contribution to the history of piano playing is as revolutionary and game-changing as that of Liszt, Chopin or Anton Rubinstein. Busoni’s esthetic was radically opposite that of the decadent style of Hofman and Leschetizky, in all aspects of technique, sound production, repertoire and even general approach, and served as a sort of counterweight. My very favorite chapter of the book contrasts the recordings of the Liszt-Verdi Rigoletto Paraphrase by Busoni himself and Anna Essipova, Leschetizky’s favorite student and wife; the revelation here is that Essipova’s playing is much more immediately attractive and pleasant, Busoni’s takes time and effort to understand and appreciate, and then becomes irresistible. The school of piano playing that emerged in the years after WWII, especially the Russian, is a wonderful amalgam of the two great movements of the decades before, and was indelibly influenced by Busoni’s art.

Outside of Busoni’s importance as a study of both theory and history of piano playing, the book is fascinating as a product of its time and place. Written (or, at least published) in 1964, during that brief period of relaxation of Soviet government’s iron censorship of every aspect of creative and literary life, the book was still required to include the prescribed amount of genuflection towards the powers that be and the usual socialist-realist cant which any Soviet reader would simply ignore. Because I cannot imagine that any reader not schooled in the art of instinctively skipping, on even the first reading, any paragraphs which include the word “bourgeois” and “Lenin”, will be able to discard those passages written clearly and exclusively for the censor, I felt it was imperative to provide an in-depth explanation of the “life and times” of the book. Lovers of history, or those not well acquainted with the history of the Soviet Union, might enjoy both the products of my own labors, and the little vignette of the time now passed unlamented.

Svetlana Belsky's translation of Grigory Kogan's classic study, Busoni as Pianist, is now available, published by the University of Rochester Press. An excerpt from this beautifully translated work will be published in a later post.

The Afterlife of a Maverick

2010-08-17T17:21:00.009+01:00

John Cunnigham’s study of The Consort Music of William Lawes 1602-1645 has just been published by the Boydell Press. In this post, the author examines how his reputation declined and rose again after his dramatic death fighting for King Charles I at the Siege of Chester in 1645.

The cover of my book is graced with the recently discovered full-length version of the portrait depicting (the person thought to be) William Lawes. Although we may have expected the sitter to have been holding a viol or theorbo etc., the cane he actually holds gives us the impression someone who thought of himself as a gentleman, and who wished to be portrayed as such. This iconographic separation of Lawes from his music can also be observed in the conception and preservation of his reputation as the maverick Cavalier composer: a reputation that long outlived those familiar with his actual music. Lawes’s battlefield death ensured that his memory was quickly draped with a symbolic cloak of Royalist martyrdom; although his music was no longer fashionable (and rarely performed) by the late seventeenth century, Lawes’s reputation enjoyed a great deal more exposure in the centuries betwixt his and ours.

Lawes’s modern reputation primarily rests on his instrumental music, most of which seems to have been composed after he was appointed to that elite section of the Royal Music, the ‘Lutes, Viols and Voices’. Tracing the popularity of Lawes’s music in contemporary sources gives us a good idea of how well it was disseminated beyond rarefied court circles; judging from manuscript sources, the fantasia-suites and viol consorts were popular, the Royall Consort particularly so. However, in his own day Lawes’s songs and catches were also popular; indeed, the first music by him to be printed was vocal – Choice Psalmes (1648). Published by Henry Lawes in memory of his brother, Choice Psalmes carried some of the earliest seeds of William’s reputation. The volume included eight elegies set to music, most notably by John Jenkins. In the preface, Henry also referred to ‘those Elegies which many of his noble Friends have written in a peculiar [i.e. special] Book’. This volume is lost; however, Robert Herrick, Robert Heath and John Tatham all published elegies. William was clearly well liked and respected among contemporary poets and musicians. Few musicians, however, inspire grief in kings. According to Thomas Fuller’s famous account in A History of the Worthies of England (1662), upon ‘hearing of the death of his deare servant William Lawes, [Charles I] had a particular Mourning for him when dead, whom he loved when living, and commonly called the Father of Musick’.

Lawes’s death was encapsulated in Thomas Jordan’s well-known punning epitaph:

Concord is conquer’d; in this urn there lies
The Master of great Music’s Mysteries;
And in it is a riddle like the cause,
Will. Lawes was slain by those whose Wills were Laws.

Lawes’s music remained popular in the decades that followed his death, thanks in part to John Playford’s re-vitalisation of music publishing in England. Playford – a staunch Royalist – emblazoned Lawes’s name on the title-page of his first music publication, A Musicall Banquet (1651). The Banquet included a section of two-part airs ‘By the Rare and accomplished Master in Musick, Mr. WILLIAM LAWES, Deceased And by severall other Excellent Masters in Musick, now living’. Lawes’s music went on to feature prominently in many of Playford’s printed collections, last appearing in a Playford print in 1673. The last seventeenth-century printed collection to include William’s music was Banister and Low’s New Ayres and Dialogues (1678). In terms of manuscript dissemination, the Royall Consort was easily Lawes’s most popular ‘collection’; dances from it are found in manuscripts copied as late as the 1680s. After this his biography and reputation comes to the fore; over the next three centuries William was primarily remembered as the brother of the more famous Henry (friend to the poets), and for the circumstances of his death. The political symbology of Lawes’s death had lost its immediacy, though his name could still evoke images of martyrdom and tragedy.

The first significant biographical account is by Fuller (1662); it formed the basis for many subsequent accounts, including that of Anthony Wood in his ‘Manuscript Notes’ (?c.1680). However, he also noted: ‘William Lawes … an excellent composer for instrumentall musick – but to indulge the ear – he broke sometimes ye rules of mathematicall composition.… His things before and after ye restoration alwaies culled out’. In addition to attesting to the contemporary popularity of his music, Wood’s comments typify Lawes’s subsequent reputation as a musical maverick, though this was not always presented in a positive light. This is perhaps best reflected in Charles Burney’s account of Lawes (and his contemporaries) in A General History of Music (1776–89). His description of the Royall Consort is (in)famous: ‘always mentioned with reverence by his admirers in the last century [it is] one of the most dry, aukward [sic], and unmeaning compositions I ever remember to have had the trouble of scoring’. Burney also used faint praise to damn Lawes’s anthem ‘The Lord is my light’: ‘the best and most solid composition that I have seen of this author; though it is thin and confused in many places, with little melody, and a harmony in the chorus … which I am equally unable to understand or reconcile to rule or to my own ears’. (The anthem had been in use since the Restoration; its inclusion in William Boyce’s Cathedral Music (1760–73) kept it in the repertoire until well into the nineteenth century.) It is easy to understand Burney’s attitude to Lawes’s music: he couldn’t relate it to the ‘rules of mathematicall composition’ that governed the music of his day. Unfortunately, his remarks did much to silence the music of Lawes and his contemporaries for the next century or so.

One finds biographies of William and Henry Lawes in several histories published in the nineteenth century. Such references generally favour Henry (in length and praise), and demonstrate the influence of Burney’s disparaging assessment of the instrumental music. A revival of Lawes’s music did not begin until the 1890s. Sir Frederick Bridge, who (as Professor of Music at Gresham College) gave several lectures on ‘old English music’ in the 1890s, dedicated two lectures to the Lawes brothers: ‘He said it was the custom of musical historian to speak slightly of these distinguished brothers.… He wished to direct a more wide-spread attention to their skill as musicians and their melodious writings.…’ Significantly, musical illustrations were played at both lectures. ‘The Professor said that though some sounds were unfamiliar to modern ears there was so much real music that it could not fail to be appreciated on being heard. The music was not only melodious, but was worth careful study, and he hoped a taste for it would be revived’ (The Morning Post, 11 November 1891). These were among several lectures given by Bridge in which Lawes’s music was played as an exemplar of ‘old English music’. Nonetheless, it was Henry Lawes who was counted as one of his Twelve Good Musicians, from John Bull to Henry Purcell (1920).

Concerts featuring William’s music were also given at the turn of the twentieth century by Sir Hubert Parry. However, in The Music of the Seventeenth Century (1902) he was clearly disappointed with Lawes’s ‘long and elaborate Fancies’: ‘His reputation might well give rise to a hope that they would be interesting. But they are indeed dry and mechanical to quite an extraordinary degree, and do more credit to the composer’s patient ingenuity than to his common sense’. Parry’s analysis is typical of the apologetic stance adopted by nineteenth and early twentieth century English music historians in reference to native music in the seventeenth century before Purcell. Over a century on, Burney was still casting a long shadow.

Arnold Dolmetsch also played a central role in the modern revival of Lawes’s music, and reputation. He and his students gave many concerts in the 1890s that included Lawes’s vocal and instrumental music (including Bridge’s lectures, 1890-92). Lawes’s music also regularly featured in Haslemere programmes; indeed, a performance of a six-part fantasia and ayre at the 1931 Haslemere Festival prompted Rupert Erlebach’s paper on the composer which appeared in The Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association (1932-33).

It was, however, Murray Lefkowitz’s pioneering monograph (1960) which brought Lawes’s music to the attention of the post-war Anglo-American musicological community. Lefkowitz, a former GI, first came across it while stationed in England during WWII. He was the first musicologist to investigate Lawes’s life and music in detail; fifty years on, little has been added to his biographical account. He included a catalogue of Lawes’s works and autograph sources (then-known). His sensitive and enthusiastic discussions of the music exerted a profound influence on subsequent researchers. Lefkowitz also noted the absence of editions of Lawes’s music, an essential aspect of modern performance: his volume of Select Consort Music in the Musica Britannica series (1963, 2/1971) was another landmark in the revival of Lawes’s music.

In the years since studies have been published on many aspects of Lawes’s music, by notable scholars such as Gordon Dodd, Peter Holman and especially David Pinto. Perhaps the crowning glory of Pinto’s Lawes research is his edition of the Royall Consort and accompanying monograph (1995). Pinto was also a participant in the conference held in Oxford in September 1995 to commemorate the 350th anniversary of Lawes’s death; many of the papers given were published in 1998, edited by Andrew Ashbee. My own book is inevitably indebted to the work of previous scholars. In it I have attempted draw attention to the autograph sources (which have never been systemically examined), exploring how Lawes went about composing and what role his music played in the cultural context of Charles I’s court.

Since his death William Lawes was primarily remembered as a talented yet maverick composer, a tragic victim of conflict. In literary and musico-historical accounts, he became one of the symbols of ‘old English Music’. However, writers such as Burney and Parry could not reconcile his reputation as the man whom Charles I ‘commonly called the Father of Musick’ with his tendencies to sometimes break the ‘rules of mathematicall composition’. Today, historical perspective places us in a much greater position than Burney et alia to understand Lawes’s reputation and the music at its heart, and allows us to reconcile the two.

The Consort Music of William Lawes 1602-1645 by John Cunningham is available now from good booksellers.

Berlin, 1 April 1933

2010-08-11T17:26:00.007+01:00

Tully Potter's two-volume exploration of the life and turbulent times of the violinist and composer, Adolf Busch, will soon be published by Toccata Press. In this extract, Busch and his colleagues in the quartet are confronted with the reality of life in Nazi Germany:

The Nazis had named Saturday, 1 April, as the first day on which they would enforce a boycott of Jewish shops and businesses (in Munich local thugs jumped the gun, beginning it at noon on Friday). The ban was to last from 10.00 a.m. to 10.00 p.m.: Nazi cells were to appoint themselves ‘commissioners for the staff’ in Jewish firms, forbid dismissal of non-Jewish employees and demand the sacking of all Jewish colleagues. At 3.00 p.m. all employees of Jewish concerns were to leave the premises and demonstrate outside. Cameramen would tour every city, filming people who bought from Jewish stores. All such premises were picketed by stormtroopers and bore a placard with a yellow circle on a black background, reading: ‘Closed as a protest against the Jewish atrocity propaganda at home and abroad – the Jewish proprietor of this business is responsible for the safety of this placard, which must be prominently shown’. In Berlin Jews were denied access to the Stock Exchange, Prussian State Library and University; virtually all cafes and cabarets were closed and knots of people stood about, jeering or waiting for trouble to start. The Gestapo made their presence felt, calling at Jewish addresses and taking people away – just an intimidatory move at this stage. ‘Most of us stayed indoors that day,’ Berthold Goldschmidt said, ‘though people were not actually being assaulted in the street.’ Among those defying the boycott and visiting the few Jewish shops which had dared to open was Frau Julie Bonhoeffer, 91-year-old grandmother of the anti-Nazi pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer – she ‘ostentatiously walked through the SA cordon’ to shop at the Kaufhaus des Westens. Carl Flesch Jnr, then 22 and working as an unpaid civil servant or Referendar – until he was barred from entering his office that morning – walked through the Berlin Westend reflecting that as he had lost his job, he had all the time in the world on his hands. He later wrote:

I was amazed by the attitude of the thousands of ‘nice’-looking Germans who crowded the streets. There was no obvious fanaticism, but rather an atmosphere of harmless fun, like a bank holiday on Hampstead Heath. They pointed out to each other and their children gleefully, but usually without sounding in the least malicious, the various insulting graffiti on Jewish shops and the SA men in front of them stopping the occasional defiant customer from entering (although most of the establishments had prudently remained closed anyway). It was then I realised that, for the time being, every layer of the German nation had become infected and there was nothing one could do about it in the foreseeable future.

The atmosphere in Berlin that Saturday was the last straw for Busch and his colleagues, who had to hold their rehearsal at the height of the disturbances. ‘On the way to the church, they saw people smearing stores with swastikas’, said Lotte Busch, ‘and on the way back they saw the mob again.’ The effort of concentrating their minds on Haydn’s most elevated music was harrowing in the circumstances, but a reviewer concluded: ‘The Busch Quartet played the profound pieces […] with the beautiful combination of expression and objectivity that distinguishes its interpretations of classical music’. […] After the concert, the players were openly saying that they could no longer work in Germany. Members of the audience who had come backstage, many of them Jews, were tearfully pleading: ‘You must not leave us. Now we need you more than ever’. But the die was cast. […] Years later Gösta Andreasson reminisced to his opposite number in the Amadeus Quartet, Siegmund Nissel, that Busch called the others to his hotel room at 2.00 or 3.00 in the morning to make their final, agonising decision. Irene Serkin-Busch remembered that her father telegraphed to a few German concert organisations that very night from Berlin, to cancel imminent performances. And Maltschi Serkin, who was staying in the Riehen house, testified that

Frieda was a very impulsive person. Busch, on the other hand, was very quiet but when he was in a rage, he was like an element. He was so enraged that when Frieda saw him in that state, she just quietly packed the suitcases and took him home. If he had shown the rage that was in him, he would have ended up in a concentration camp.

On their way back to Basel, Adolf, Frieda and Rudi were waiting for a train connection at Frankfurt station when they ran into Gustav Havemann. This was the man who in 1932, with the composers Paul Graener and Max Trapp, had proposed forming a Musikkammer to embrace the whole profession, demanding that it should be politically and racially pure – which meant devoid of Communists and Jews. […] ‘The movement is not directed against artists such as Serkin’, he now tried to assure Busch who, with the memory of the anti-Semitic demonstration at the Düsseldorf sonata recital still fresh, angrily brushed him aside. […] At home in Riehen later that day, Adolf was examined by his physician, who diagnosed a severe depression and said he must on no account play in public for the time being. Next day he telegraphed to the organisers of concerts scheduled for Breslau, Darmstadt, Frankfurt and Bremen: ‘Impossible to come, sadly. Letter follows’. The letter, copies of which were sent to the press and interested parties such as HMV, read:

I am sorry that with my sudden telegraphic cancellation I necessarily placed you in a disagreeable situation. Because of the impression made on me by the actions of my Christian compatriots against German Jews, which are aimed at displacing Jews from their professional occupations and robbing them of their honour, I am at the end of my spiritual and physical strength, so that I find it necessary to break off my concert tour in Germany.

Adolf Busch: The Life of an Honest Musician by Tully Potter will be published shortly by Toccata Press as a two-volume set with two CDs of Busch's music, both as a performer and a composer. It is available from all good booksellers.

Finding Zemlinsky

2010-08-05T17:19:00.006+01:00

To call Alexander Zemlinsky a forgotten composer would be an exaggeration: a quick search on the site of a leading online retailer shows nearly a hundred available recordings of his music. Yet how many of us can name more than a handful of his works beyond the Lyric Symphony? Marc Moskovitz’s new biography will help train a spotlight on this composer/conductor/pianist, lover of Alma Schindler and brother-in-law of Schoenberg. Here is an edited extract from the book’s preface:

My interest in Alexander Zemlinsky began in 1995, when I taught an honors seminar focusing on fin-de-siècle Vienna. In the course of my preparations, Zemlinsky’s name occasionally turned up, but always in the context of more famous contemporary figures. Perusals of music histories and biographies rarely included more than the most basic facts about his life : Viennese born and trained ; a conductor in Vienna, Prague and Berlin ; lover of Alma Schindler; brother-in-law to Schoenberg. More often, Zemlinsky’s name was simply absent from the general English-language musical literature. Also around this time I performed a concert of works by Viennese composers, among them Zemlinsky. My reaction was similar to many who encounter his music for the first time — how has a composer this gifted remained so obscure ?

Although Zemlinsky was associated with some of the most influential and talented musicians and artists of his generation, he kept no diary, left no memoirs and remained nonchalant about correcting biographical errors that appeared in print while he was alive. Alban Berg, a composer strongly drawn to Zemlinsky and his music and who recognized the value of Zemlinsky’s contributions, once considered undertaking a biography about him, but sadly he died and the work never materialized. Had Berg’s plan come to fruition, it might well have bolstered Zemlinsky’s reputation, particularly toward the end of his life and in the immediate years that followed. At the very least, Berg’s efforts would have provided valuable information for future scholars. As it is, there are gaps in Zemlinsky’s life that are unlikely ever to be filled.

Fortunately, much of Zemlinsky’s early, unpublished musical manuscripts have survived, along with his later published compositions, and the music often provides answers and insights into his life when words or hard facts are absent. Certainly the most significant details about Zemlinsky’s life are found in his letters, two collections in particular which must be mentioned. The first is Horst Weber’s superb edition of Zemlinsky’s letters to and from Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and Schreker, published in 1995, which remains the definitive source of information concerning Zemlinsky’s whereabouts and activities at various times between the years 1901 and 1923.

Second are the letters Zemlinsky sent to Alma Schindler during their courtship in the first years of the twentieth century. These letters reveal an intimate portrait of Zemlinsky and provide insight into nearly every aspect of his life at the time, including familial relations, his manner of dress, and his personal attitudes toward art and love, all the while capturing his frailties, sensitivity and humor. To read them is to appreciate the core of Zemlinsky’s nature, for they unveil the passion in everything he did and reflect the rollercoaster of emotions he endured at Alma’s hands. Only the most dispassionate reader could not fail to be moved by the frustrations, disappointments, and endless longing to which Zemlinsky here gives voice. Although Zemlinsky confided that he had great difficulty expressing all he felt, at times it seems that to read more would be unbearable, a breach of privacy.

Writing this book was also my way of trying to understand how one of the great musicians of the early twentieth century faded so quickly from European musical life and was passed over by music historians. Zemlinsky’s talent alone should have ensured him a place in posterity. As one of the last in a long line of Viennese “complete musicians”, Zemlinsky excelled as a pianist, was a conductor of the first rank, and wrote significant compositions in all genres: lieder, chamber and choral music, symphonies and opera. Few of his peers could make such claims. But then neither did Zemlinsky, and his modesty, though arguably a personal virtue, proved detrimental to his career and legacy. He never developed the skills necessary for self-promotion, and he rarely programmed his own music. Zemlinsky was fully conscious of his abilities, which he believed should have secured his reputation, and his seeming inability to promote his own cause :

I most certainly lack that special something that one must have — and today more than ever — in order to come out on top. Amidst such a crowd it does little good to have elbows — one must also know how to use them.

Years later, the theorist Theodor Adorno took up Zemlinsky’s cause :

a man may be cheated of his desserts by nothing more than a lack of ruthlessness. It is possible to be too refined for one’s own genius and in the last analysis the greatest talents require a fund of barbarism, however deeply buried. This was denied to Zemlinsky.

But barbarism wasn’t part of Zemlinsky’s persona. Although he had a pronounced influence on a number of other Viennese composers, including the young Arnold Schoenberg, Zemlinsky possessed neither a dominant nor controlling personality. As a conductor he lacked the powerful ego and ruthlessness required to obtain and maintain a world-class position, such as that held by Gustav Mahler or Otto Klemperer. And while he demanded the highest level of artistic competency in every theater he worked, he did so through inspiration, conviction and intelligence, not through intimidation. Zemlinsky was “a conductor for the ears and not the eyes”, and an artist who gave himself tirelessly to his craft. his actions, almost without exception, were diplomatic.

Of course, the issues surrounding Zemlinsky’s struggles and subsequent descent into obscurity extend well beyond his personality, although had he been eccentric, flamboyant or megalomaniacal — all fashionable characteristics of the artist that so often captivate the public and lead to posthumous celebrity — his reputation may actually have fared better. For one, there was the issue of poor timing, bad luck, or both, which dogged Zemlinsky throughout his life. There was also Zemlinsky’s complicated relationship to Vienna, the city of his birth, a city that held seemingly unlimited possibilities but which often failed to support the talent in its midst. And finally, in the opening years of the twentieth century, a time that often welcomed — almost demanded — innovation and modernism, Zemlinsky was unable to forge a new musical path, unable to embark fully on his own Weg ins Freie or “road into the open”, to borrow a phrase from Arthur Schnitzler. All of these themes worked in concert. They shaped the fabric of Zemlinsky’s life, affected his reputation both during and following his lifetime, and are essential to understanding his musical and historical persona.

I have attempted to describe Zemlinsky as he lived and worked, whether in the opera house or the coffee house, revealing him as a victim of musical politics and world wars, as a musician who championed modern music but remained unwilling to forsake his classical pedigree, and as an artist living among, yet always in the shadow of, musical giants. In spite of my unapologetic affection for Zemlinsky, I have tried to be fair and unbiased in my portrayal of his professional and musical successes and failures. My desire was to create a readable and broad picture of his life and art, which blossomed as Habsburg rule disintegrated, and faded with the unforeseen rise of an art-student-turned-Führer named Adolf Hitler. Among the most gifted musicians of his age, Zemlinsky was both a product and a victim of his time, and his story is a compelling tale and a window into that world.

Alexander Zemlinsky: A Lyric Symphony by Marc D Moskovitz is published by the Boydell Press and available now from all good booksellers.

Music Speaks

2010-07-27T13:31:00.007+01:00

“Criticism so relentlessly intelligent is rarely so buoyant, so ready to charm while it challenges.” Thus did Scott Burnham (author of the widely acclaimed book Beethoven Hero) welcome Daniel Albright’s Music Speaks: On the Language of Opera, Dance, and Song upon its release by University of Rochester Press in November 2009. Albright, who holds a named chair in the English Department at Harvard University, is the author of two previous books for the Press: Berlioz’s Semi-Operas and Musicking Shakespeare: A Conflict of Theatres. The new book, Music Speaks, is indeed brilliant, and its subject matter is remarkably diverse, ranging from subtle art songs by Schubert to Brünnhilde’s full-throated war cry (in Wagner’s Ring Cycle), and from Stravinsky’s hieratic oratorio Oedipus Rex to a dreamy painting of dancer Loïe Fuller by Toulouse-Lautrec. Below we reprint Albright’s tasty preface to this important—and unceasingly delightful—book of studies on the interactions of music with literature and dance.

Music Speaks is a sort of rehearsal-piano reduction of a number of multimedia lectures I’ve given in the past few years.

I might argue that there’s a hidden unity behind its miscellaneous character by pointing to some of the features that bind these essays together. My continuing preoccupations are these:

1. How to deal with the problems of articulating the meaning or meanings of music.

2. How to deal with the larger question of how music and language interact, whether music is “like” spoken/literary language, whether it transcends language, whether our musical apperceptions are of a different sort from those we engage in regard to words or visual images.

3. How, especially in the world of Lieder, text-setting highlights certain areas of meter, or theme, or ironic undertone, and leaves others in darkness.

4. How a musical composition can behave as a critique of a previous composition: how it can be an homage, or an act of affectionate mockery, or a full-scale repudiation.

5. How music interacts with bodily gesture (and, again, how both become “legible”). Sometimes dance seems to spell out words with an alphabet of the whole body; sometimes it refuses to constitute itself as a language.

6. How one might rehabilitate certain underappreciated or much-scorned figures, such as Meyerbeer, by showing that the very terms of invective used against them can be seen, from another angle, as an indication of what is exciting in their work.

I mean to show how music history has an aesthetic of its own, and how music history interacts with intellectual history (from Rousseau and the Encyclopédistes to Paul de Man). The method of these essays is juxtapositive: by abutting music against literature and painting, and by abutting the musics of different centuries, I try to frame a particular work, to isolate what is arresting and important in it.

Some readers are likely to object to my preference for a contrapuntal rather than a linear mode of argument. Almost all of the chapters take detours, forward or back in time, sometimes a few decades, sometimes centuries. But I hope that the lack of chronological boundaries, or genre boundaries, or language-region boundaries, might be seen as natural extension of the freedom that the individual chapters allow themselves—to make one genre comment on another, to make one era comment on another, to make one artistic medium comment on another.

I might also note that this book can be understood as a tribute to mechanical reproduction—to the LP record, the compact disc, the .mp3 file, which have integrated music into our daily lives in a way once scarcely available even to kings, and which have not only gratified an appetite for music but also created one.

All these pieces (except one) were written in a span of four years (2004-8), and mostly concern the music of the last two centuries. During much of this period I was working on Jacobean and Restoration music for a project on Shakespeare, and I found it most pleasant to turn from Robert Johnson and Lanier and Purcell—delightful though they are—to the composers treated here, my oldest loves. As to the two essays on dance that conclude this volume, they were called forth by my friend Simon Morrison of Princeton University, who, on the Day of Judgment, may have to answer for them.

In a future posting, we shall provide some sprightly excerpts from various chapters of Music Speaks: On the Language of Opera, Dance, and Song.

Adrian Wright's Salad Days

2010-07-20T16:16:00.006+01:00

It’s not all Mahler, Britten and Berlioz at Boydell & Brewer and the University of Rochester Press. We enjoy a hummable tune as much as the next person. It is therefore an enormous pleasure to publish Adrian Wright’s A Tanner’s Worth of Tune, his magnificent look at the post-war British musical. Here they are, the writers and composers who forged an identity that owed little to Broadway: Noel Coward, Sandy Wilson of Boy Friend fame, Julian Slade, Lionel Bart and many others. For Adrian Wright, it all began with a Marmet pram and his Aunt Beryl…

The Wrights have never been a rich family, but my childhood was – so far as the world could tell – charmed. My maternal grandmother was a dictatorial creature, a Court dressmaker (when such titles were common parlance) whose demanding standards affected my young and impoverished parents. As a child, I was apt to startle, dressed as I was from head to foot in the finest white satin. My pram, a Marmet (the Rolls Royce of such vehicles, according to my mother), had been selected, indeed commanded to be brought from a highly reputable local store, to my parents’ home: my grandmother’s choice, for which my poor mother had to pay. The pram, like me, was decked out in white satin coverlets and satin blankets and satin pillows and no doubt a little satin bonnet to finish off the effect, as it finished me. I probably had a specially commissioned crest painted on its side. It should have come as no surprise to my mother that one day, despite the fact that she had securely strapped me into position within the perambulator, she looked down and to her astonishment saw nothing. Except a pram with a space where a space shouldn’t have been. The effect of satin on satin had done its worst: I had slipped out of the Marmet, and was later discovered at a location that would doubtless have appalled Lady Bracknell. To all appearances, this was merely payback for being such an ostentatious family, and I suppose some of the blame must attach to me (I was a great wriggler), although I was innocent of being dressed in all that satin, and at the age of twenty-one struck out on my own and shed the slippery garments that were by then exciting much unwanted comment.

What, one may ask, has all this to do with having written a book about the British musical in the twentieth century? Indeed, the first book ever to be devoted to the subject. Because money matters, and appearances matter, and looking at a pram in a shop window and actually being the privileged little person taken for a blow in it are two completely different matters. A fascination with theatre of any kind is, after all, a luxurious pursuit. You need money to buy theatre tickets; nowadays, a very considerable amount of it, with which I am increasingly unwilling to part. Only recently, I happened to be in London and thought I should see the Broadway production of Hair which was playing on Shaftesbury Avenue, having missed the show the first time around (on purpose; I mean, all that group nudity and those dreary songs). Even now, in 2010, it was not that I particularly wanted to see Hair, but that I needed to see it, working as I am on a book about the American musical in London. I asked the price of a ticket. ‘That will be £65 please.’ After recovering my breath, like the reporter at the striptease club I made an excuse and left. I wanted to say ‘Don’t you know that I saw Liza of Lambeth at the Shaftesbury Theatre in 1976 for £3.50? Front stalls! It was only 75p to get into the balcony! When I was a student in London I used to go every matinee to Sadler’s Wells to see the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company. You could get in for a patter song! Where is all this money going anyway? What am I going to see that is worth fifty pence a minute? How are young people today ever going to be able to see decent theatre? Evelyn Laye was getting £15 a week starring in a West End musical in the mid-1960s! And they’ve all got little voices that need massive amplification! And half of them don’t know how to behave on stage! This is a joke, isn’t it? Come on, mate, you’re having a laugh!’

But, let me repeat, the Wrights were never rich. I was reminded of it again, or perhaps realised it for the first time, when my mother took me to London one day (in a year that I will not specify, although I was still in all that white shiny stuff). I think she had booked for us to see Liberace at the London Palladium. What long-term effect this experience had on any of those who saw him one can only guess, but fortunately I can recall nothing of him, not even a candlestick. I seem to remember we went to Lyons Corner House at Charing Cross, an exotic complex of restaurants now gone. I certainly remember that we walked along the Strand, nothing in itself to get excited about. Indeed, one has always wondered what was in the mind of the man who celebrated that most boring of thoroughfares in the music-hall song ‘Let’s All Go Down the Strand!’ One wanted to ask, ‘Why?’

On this day there was, as it happens, a reason. My Aunt Beryl had recently taken me to a touring version of Salad Days, a musical by Julian Slade and Dorothy Reynolds that had somewhat unaccountably run for over five years at the Vaudeville Theatre. It had just come off, in fact, and the Vaudeville was now presenting another Slade and Reynolds musical, Follow That Girl, a slight, whimsical fantasy about a modern miss who goes back in time and becomes a Victorian miss. She jumps off the Albert Bridge and meets some mermaids in the Aquarium and then comes back into the present because Julian and Dorothy had written a number about London’s public transport ... well, I did say it was a fantasy! And, of course, the Vaudeville Theatre is in the Strand, and there we were, just before we had a date in the evening with Liberace, outside the Vaudeville Theatre.

By this time, by that moment when I stood outside the Vaudeville Theatre, I was already obsessed with the British musical, and obsessed by Julian (and Dorothy). Looking at the blown-up photographs of the cast outside the Vaudeville, I stood on that pavement enraptured. I was caught in an inexplicable world of magic, ready for those images to cast their spell over me. But I was outside. Unable to get in. Excluded. No Can Do. At that (unspecified) age I didn’t anyway have money of my own. I was an outsider, and in a way always have been, and that has brought its own rewards and disappointments. Standing there, and bringing away the memories of those hoardings, those glorious black and white blow-ups of Susan Hampshire as the girl that everyone on stage inside the Vaudeville would be following, I was a changed person. Coming home from London to Norwich (probably on the coach, a bilious end to the day) I never thought that when I was older I would become a great friend of Julian’s, sit beside him at the Vaudeville to see yet another revival of his Salad Days, become a person who has had some sort of small voice about the British musical. A passionate one, I hope; a voice from outside the theatre.

A Tanner’s Worth of Tune was described by the Stage as ‘an instant must-have’ and is available from good booksellers.

‘The Life of an Honest Man’

2010-06-30T16:11:00.008+01:00

Thirty years in the making, Tully Potter’s monumental two-volume Adolf Busch is now at press and will be available in the UK at the end of July and elsewhere the following month. ‘Eagerly awaited’ hardly begins to describe the level of anticipation that surrounds it.

Adolf Busch was not only a remarkable musician but an admirable man living in desperate times. Potter’s biography will look at his life and work in detail and will certainly remain the definitive source for many years to come. Two CDs accompany the books, providing an opportunity to hear Busch’s playing as well as his own compositions.

If anyone is thinking of following in Potter’s footsteps and starting a biography of a many-faceted musician, here is how you begin:

We had the Glyndebourne recording of Don Giovanni at home when I was growing up, so I was aware of the name Fritz Busch. But I probably first heard of his brother, the violinist and composer Adolf Busch, in the early 1960s, through LPs issued by EMI as ‘Great Recordings of the Century’. I remember finding his violin tone strangely haunting. Living in South Africa had made me aware of the evils of racism; and when I learned how well Adolf Busch had behaved during the Third Reich years, when many of his colleagues had behaved abominably, I began to be interested in him as a man, not just as a musician.

Back in Britain from 1966, I developed a fascination for string quartets, although I had been led to believe that Beethoven’s late quartets were rather daunting. When I actually acquired the three LPs of the Busch Quartet that were available from Germany, I discovered that all one had to do was listen – and this I did, often into the early hours of the morning. I count myself lucky that my introductions to Beethoven’s Op. 59/3, Op. 95, Op. 131 and Op. 132 came via the Busch ensemble. The only drawback has been that the playing of Busch and his colleagues has spoilt me for anyone else.

Gradually I discovered that a number of Busch’s friends and pupils lived in London. By 1975 I had begun collecting memories of him; and it was borne in on me that these precious recollections were unique. Hearing Rudolf Serkin in concert and speaking to him further fired my enthusiasm; and whenever anyone from Busch’s past came to London, I would try to see them. I also wrote to many people, such as the delightful widow of his younger brother Herman. In due course many members of the extended family were helpful to me, the sole exception being Fritz Busch’s son, Hans.

I went up to Edinburgh on the milk train to interview the composer Hans Gál, a friend and contemporary of Adolf and Fritz Busch. The train was five hours late and I only just made it to the interview in time, but it was a memorable meeting. Dr Gál, a tiny man in his late 80s, had heard both Joachim and Mahler and could recall what they were like as musicians. He kept leaping up to demonstrate something at the piano. I twice interviewed Sir Robert Mayer, who could remember Brahms, and I travelled to Paris to meet the American pianist Eugene Istomin. Hearing him in concert, I was amazed when just about every wind player in Paris turned up to boo the evening’s other soloist, Gervase de Peyer, because he was using an English clarinet.

I got to know Paul, the son of Busch’s violist Karl Doktor; and Björn, the son of Busch’s second violinist and assistant Gösta Andreasson, was supportive – sadly Gösta himself had already retreated into a twilight world. I missed speaking to Horszowski, because I did not realise at first how well he had known Busch. Fortunately, with his wife’s help, I was able to make up this particular lack.

Discovering, through contacts with the Busch Society in Germany, that Busch’s brother-in-law Otto Grüters had compiled a detailed chronology of his life, and had noted down many of their conversations, was another spur. Although Dr Grüters had understandably made mistakes – some of which sent me on wild goose chases – his frequent personal contacts with Busch had provided invaluable material.

Over more than 30 years, I have written and rewritten, checked and rechecked. One particular paragraph took me something like 20 years to get right. When I started out, most Continental orchestras and other musical organisations had very little available in the way of archives – many German sources had been destroyed by Allied bombing. But much has been recovered over recent decades and digitised.

In 1984 a friend and I published a little home-made paperback called Adolf Busch: The Life of an Honest Man, Volume 1. It was full of mistakes and, as so often happens, Volume 2 never materialised. The title came from something written by Charles Péguy, which was a favourite quotation of Busch’s: ‘The life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity.’

I am grateful to Martin Anderson of Toccata Press for the opportunity to issue a much expanded biography. I have changed ‘Man’ to ‘Musician’ in the title and I am taking the precaution of publishing both volumes simultaneously! My text is very detailed in places and there are a dozen appendices but I believe that Busch’s importance, as a leading figure in tumultuous times, demands this exhaustive treatment. I hope I have managed to provide a picture of a whole era – among Busch’s friends were such giants as Max Reger, Fritz Steinbach, Albert Einstein and Arturo Toscanini.

Working on Busch’s life has been worth every minute and far from getting bored with him or beginning to dislike him, as has happened to many other biographers vis à vis their subjects, I now like him more than ever. Meeting many of his friends, among them Serkin, Gál and Sir Ernst Gombrich, has enriched my life.

Adolf Busch: the Life of an Honest Musician by Tully Potter will be published shortly by Toccata Press, distributed worldwide by Boydell & Brewer.

Discovering Jenkins

2010-06-11T12:43:00.001+01:00

Andrew Ashbee's acclaimed introduction to the life and works of John Jenkins (1592-1678) has recently been published in paperback by Toccata Press. Jenkins was the most prolific and the most esteemed of English composers between the death of Byrd and the rise of Purcell. Here, Dr Ashbee reveals how he discovered this underrated master:

I was first made aware of a composer called John Jenkins in a book: Maidstone 1549-1949, commemorating the quarter-centenary of the granting of the town’s royal charter. It opened with ‘A pageant of history’, compiled by the curator of the Maidstone Museum, Mr. L.R.A.Grove, and included a paragraph about Jenkins sandwiched between two unedifying entries: ‘1590: The quarters of some traitors are displayed upon two poles set upon the battlements of the county prison’; and ‘1600: a baker is put in the stocks, with a sample of his bad bread placed before him, as a punishment.’ 1949 was the year I entered Maidstone Grammar School, becoming a flautist, and Jenkins was put out of mind. On moving to the Royal Academy of Music I noticed (in my first year) that the Peter Latham Prize was available to a third-year student presenting a 5000-word essay on a musical topic of their choice. I determined to enter, with John Jenkins as my subject, and during the intervening years found out what I could via the Academy’s library and that of the University of London. ‘John Jenkins and his times - a biographical introduction’ was ready for presentation at the due time, but no notice of the competition appeared. On enquiring why not, I was told that the competition had garnered no entries in the years since it was first offered, so it would not be held!

The exercise had naturally stimulated my interest in the composer, although my research had indicated that there was little published about him. Nor were there more than a handful of pieces by him available. In my fourth year I was fortunate to be included among a small group of students for a one-year course ‘The Performance of Early Classical Music’, which Sir Thomas Armstrong had arranged. We had the experience of some of the finest scholars and musicians as our tutors: Thurston Dart, Denis Stevens, Paul Steinitz, George Malcolm, Geraint Jones. We learned for the first time about microfilms and Xeroxes, about editing early music and ways to perform it. I also completed my B.Mus degree that same year. One invaluable off-shoot was that I was able to gain a Reader’s ticket to the British Museum (as it was then), giving me access for the first time to a wealth of Jenkins’s music in contemporary manuscripts.

The next logical step was to work towards a Ph.D. degree with Jenkins as my topic. A working title proved difficult to establish and I was sent to see H. K. Andrews at Oxford, who devised a lengthy one. But Thurston Dart, newly appointed Professor at King’s College, London, threw this out and we eventually agreed that Jenkins’s four-part music would be an ideal subject: of manageable size, with music varied in style and form. He offered the further temptation that my music examples could become a volume in the Musica Britannica series - this materialised in 1967 as volume 26.

When I began, I had no idea of the quality of Jenkins’s music. I became aware that two American scholars, Robert Warner and Helen Sleeper, had both studied him. Warner’s dissertation on Jenkins’s fantasias (1951) was the only substantial work. Helen Sleeper published very little before she died, except for a fine edition of various Jenkins pieces (Wellesley Edition, No. 1). But her notes are at the Pendlebury Library of Music, Cambridge, and these gave me many leads. When I compare the bibliography I made for the Academy competition with what is available now, I am gratified that I have played some part in bringing Jenkins’s music to a wider audience. Today editions of virtually all of his major works are published or planned. The one or two recordings of his music available in 1961 have been replaced by a substantial list of CDs. Likewise the few pioneering viol consorts of the 1950s have been replaced by a great number of amateur and professional groups, encouraged by the Viola da Gamba Society. My assessment of Jenkins in Harmonious Musick I as ‘the most important and successful mainstream composer of instrumental music in England in the fifty years between the death of Gibbons and the emergence of Purcell’ holds true. Of course his great contemporary William Lawes tends to acquire all the publicity. Lawes’s music is flamboyant, extrovert, angular and daring, compared with Jenkins’s quieter, smoother lines, with their subtle exploitation of harmonic and key colours. The one boldly fought for (and sacrificed his life for) his King, the other served his time quietly in the country, supporting Royalist families in those ‘Barbarous and Calamitous Times’. Both enrich our musical life immeasurably.

The Harmonious Musick of John Jenkins I: The Fantasias for Viols by Andrew Ashbee is available now in paperback from all good booksellers.