The philosophy of music: or the music of philosophy ?
Is period-instrument reconstruction of Baroque and Classical music the new contemporary music ? And should performances by modern orchestras or pianists using contemporary pianos take period-practice into account ? Would Mozart and Beethoven have approved ?
Thoughts on all these questions and more in my article published on Bachtrack this morning: click here to read.
1913 was a year of destruction: it saw the beginning of the First World War, and the première of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring which smashed the homogeny of the orchestra, as well as principles of rhythm and harmony.
But it also witnessed annihilation on a smaller scale: Erik Satie, the master of Arcueil, took on Mozart and destroyed him. Satie turned his satiricial eye on Mozart’s famous Rondo alla turca in his set of three piano pieces forming the Croquis et agaceries d’un gros bonhomme en bois.
Satie’s exaggerated parody in the first of these, his Tyroliene Turque, skewers Mozart harmonically, rhythmically, and structurally.
Satie has introduced strange dissonances into Mozart’s harmonies, and altered the time-signature from Mozart’s original 2/4 to a rhythmic feel of three beats in a bar (although, by this stage, Satie had long abandoned anything so traditional as time-signatures and bar-lines, so the score has neither). The right-hand octaves in Mozart’s piece have been split by Satie, such that the melody is distended further by having each note repeated an octave higher.
And then: the music returns to the opening ostinato, which seems to be in G major, but with a prominent flattened seventh on the third beat of each repetition suggesting that the music may move to C major – which, being Satie, of course it does not. These repeating, endless patterns, implying harmonic motion on the one hand whilst denying it on the other, are typical of Satie: ” listen, I’m going to modulate: oh, wait, no I’m not!”
That’s the great thing about Satie: his music is murderous in a brilliantly concise fashion. Don’t underestimate him: there’s always more to Satie than meets the ear.
WXQR, New York’s classical radio station, is currently streaming a concert performance of Varèse’s remarkable Amériques for eight hands on two pianos.
Originally scored for large orchestra, including an eleven-player percussion section which uses sirens, it’s a vibrant and often alarming tone-poem depcting the city of New York itself.
Hearing it in Varèse’s own two-piano transcription, which was not discovered until recently, offers a remarkable perspective on an already notorious work.
Ahhhh: with only a week to go until the BBC Proms season begins, it’s time to start getting excited. With every concert broadcast on Radio 3, and some of them televised on BBC4 (mainly) and BBC2, it’s possible to enjoy Prom season even if you’re not living in, or planning to go to, London.
If the excitement’s almost too much, then you can alleviate it slightly by browsing the new BBC Proms Archive, a veritable treasure-trove of information, covering every single Prom performance since Sir Henry Wood first stepped up to the podium in 1895. That’s 115 years’ worth of music-making, catalogued for users to explore.
I’m sure cultural historians are drooling at the prospect of being able to discern listening trends, composer popularity and how tastes in music have changed over the years; viewers can trace how often a work has been performed, who is the most-often performed composer (answer: Wagner – personal acquaintances of mine will know my reaction to that!), and see how the vogue for particular pieces and composers has ebbed and flowed over the years.
It’s one way of distracting yourself from the excitement of waiting for this year’s season to get underway, especially since England’s departure from the World Cup.
In the meantime, vintage footage of Sir Henry Wood in action to tide you over until a week on Friday.
Call me what you will, but I believe there’s an inherent snobbery about how concert audiences are expected to behave.
In the sacred cathedral that has become the Modern Concert Hall, audience members are expected to adopt an almost religious state of silent obeisance before The Music: they must enter the hall with trepidation and awe, with veneration in their hearts, and are expected to listen in a state almost bordering on ecstasy. Not until the end are they permitted to move a muscle, at which point they are then permitted to clap politely – nay,enthusiastically (although not too much of course) – and, if at a jazz gig or a promenade-type concert, they are occasionally allowed to whoop.
Now don’t get me wrong: I understand that listening to music is a deeply personal experience, and I can get as annoyed as anyone by inconsiderate or rude behaviour from someone in the same audience as myself. But if someone has been so moved by a piece that they feel the need to express this, why shouldn’t they ? I have a fantastic live recording of a performance of Walton’s First Symphony by the National Orchestra of Wales at the Albert Hall; for anyone who doesn’t know this piece, the first movement is of such epic proportions (it’s about fifteen minutes long) that it seems like a whole work in itself. It has pounding rhythms, stirring melodies, and a relentless energy that drives the music to a tremendous climax in a fierce final gesture, punctuated by timpani. In the recording, a smattering of enthusiastic applause breaks out spontaneously at the movement’s conclusion amongst some of the audience who just can’t help themselves: the music is so rousing, it just demands a response.
Yet the Apostles of the Sacred Mysteries of the Concert Hall frown upon those who don’t know any better than to actually clap between individual movements, rather than waiting until the piece is finished. The slight rustling of a programme attracts fierce stares.
But perhaps it’s a cultural thing: after all, the etiquette of modern concert audiences is relatively recent. Until the end of the nineteenth century, audience behaviour was completely different; people went to be seen as much as to see the concert: it was a social occasion at which they talked, ate, and drank during a performance. Modern rules were laid down, according to Alex Ross in The Rest Is Noise, by the composer-conductor Gustav Mahler, who instilled in audiences the ideas of complete, attentive silence and no applause until the end of a piece.
And some semblance of the old culture still survives: Italian opera-goers give standing ovations (or vehement boos) after a particular singer has given a great (or disastrous) rendition of an aria. In the middle of an opera. It’s an accepted, even expected, part of the performance experience. Conductors will pause at the end of arias where they know this will happen, even if the music is supposed to carry straight on. The audience are expected to voice their reaction during a piece.
As long as their response isn’t disruptive, I don’t mind if someone is so moved by their experience that they applaud between movements. People go to concerts to be moved, to be emotionally engaged.
How do you think audiences should behave ?
I was talking to a colleague over a lugubrious coffee recently – it happens – and we came to the conclusion that broadcasting music can be a dangerous thing. You see, when programmes such as Radio 3 play music, there’s a dangerous assumption that what’s being broadcast is automatically good, simply because it is being played on the radio. Lazy listeners to Radio 3 and Classic FM can easily assume that what they are hearing must be of a suitable standard, otherwise it wouldn’t be aired.
The same danger lurks around the printed word: readers assume that, if something is typed, or printed, it Must Be So. Newspapers have an aura of omniscience as a result of this. Wikipedia seems to thrive on this assumption, and how many people have taken Wikipedia’s information as factually correct, when it often isn’t ?
I’ve heard some pretty terrible performers on the radio: soloists with otherwise eminent, reputable period-instrument ensembles, whose performing I wouldn’t even sit through if they turned up at the local community hall. There’s a sense that the performance is condoned by the broadcasting company in the act of putting the music on the air: as though the act of broadcasting confers some seal of approval on it.
As listeners, we need to be wary of accepting that performances we hear on the radio, or sometimes see on television, are acceptable (I hesitate to use the word ‘good’ here, as the judgement of one person may not be that of another: but we can all at least (I hope) distinguish between performers who are in tune, or engaging, and those that simply are not). We are often too passive as cultural consumers, reaching readily for newspaper reviews to tell us what concerts are ‘worth’ attending, what art exhibitions are ‘worth’ visiting, what films are ‘worth’ seeing.
It’s time we listened (and watched) more pro-actively; time we stopped believing in the benign, assumed sanctioning by radio and television of mediocre, even bad music-making, and started making cultural decisions for ourselves.
Writing from the front-line: it’s Saturday morning, 11 o’clock, and we’re present at the University of Kent Open Day, having begun at 9 o’clock.
We’re wireless, and able to show visitors for the first time the department website and the blog straight away. The Director of Music is industriously working her way through a jumbo-bag of Rowntrees’ Pick ‘n Mix, and I’m taking the opportunity, in a brief lull in the morning, to report on how it’s going.
It’s been different this year, as visitors have registered in advance to come today: here at the Music at Kent stand, we’ve had a steady stream of visitors enquiring about making music. People have come from Chelmsford, King’s Lynn, Frome in Somerset, Slough, Camberley, Peterborough, Sissinghurst, Bournemouth, and even my hometowns of Worthing and Lancing, Sussex. We’ve also had international visitors, including one from Luxembourg!
It’s now 1pm, and I still haven’t managed to publish this to the blog: it’s been extremely busy this morning and it’s now lunch: I’m sure they’ll all now arrive as we decide to open our sandwiches: it usually happens… We’re about to avail ourselves of the bounteous foodstuffs provided by hospitality, so there’ll definitely be a queue form as I broach the sandwich cartons. I’ll publish this now – finally.
2.20pm: quite a few pianists, singers and brass players making enquiries: I wonder who won the BBC Young Musician of the Year about twelve years ago, when they were making decisions about which instrument they were going to take up ? Two trombonists, two tenor-horn players, a cornet player and a trumpeter: interesting…
3.30pm: with half an hour to go, there’s a lull in the thronging masses: I suspect Uruguay-South Korea or Petzschner-Nadal is commanding people’s attention now. People are still coming through the doors, though, and we’ve had a busy and productive day on the Music stand. If these enquiries translate into successful student applications and Music Scholarship students, the standard of music-making in 2011-12 will be very high indeed, and we’ll have to run several orchestras, a brass group, several choirs and a ensemble comprised entirely of pianists as well as the regular ensembles: Six Pianos by Steve Reich, anyone ?!
With World Cup season in full swing (love it or hate it), time to reflect on the links between classical music and its love-affair with the beautiful game.
My article has just been published to Bachtrack: click here to read about football and opera, and listen to Pavarotti and … erm… John Barnes rapping.