Kenneth Woods- A View From the Podium

It’s happy hour on Sunday afternoon (in this case, it’s a caffeine oriented happy hour), and, although I could hardly be more tired, I’m in really high spirits, thanks to the efforts of the OES preparatory orchestra.

This youth orchestra is only in its fifth season, and has always been a young group. When the group was started, almost none of the musicians had ever played in an orchestra (other than their school string group). Even now, some of our three and four year veterans are actually only freshmen and sophomores. It has always been a chamber orchestra as we rebuild a string infrastructure in the region from scratch and there just isn’t that much here for young brass players other than those few who are incredibly motivated.

The upshot is that we’ve got some quite young musicians here who have already played Haydn 101, Haydn 104, Beethoven 1, Schubert 3, Schubert 8, mvts of Mozart 40 and 41, Beethoven 5, Mendelssohn 5, Marriage of Figaro Overture, Don Pasquale Overture, Barber of Seville Overture, Egmont and Beethoven 5 (we’ve even done a couple of commissions).

I think this is a great, and nice (if necessary) switch from the typical trends in training orchestras of quickly getting young kids playing big, Romantic works like Tchaikovsky or loud things like Bernstein’s Candide in order to give lots of brass players and percussionist opportunities.

This really made itself apparent immediately upon my arrival. They’ve had a few weeks rehearsal on Beethoven 8 with our rehearsal conductor, Travis, who does a great job, but I was completely unprepared for the level they were at, even considering that I conducted most of them at the OES camp in July. We read through the entire symphony with one stop at good tempos, with all the dynamics being observed, excellent ensemble and lots of confidence. Even two years ago, it would have been a serviceable concert by them. It was certainly much better than the first rehearsal with the non-youth orchestra on the same piece two nights earlier…. It had seemed lately as though ”my head” was coming into frequent and repeated violent contact with a “brick wall” at work. How great to be pleasantly surprised and impressed.

What was wonderful was that this was where we began the weekend. Starting from a level where everyone can play through the piece, playing their parts accurately and playing together, we had two long days of rehearsals on just the Beethoven, and I don’t think anyone in the orchestra thought we were anywhere near having run out of things to work on- I certainly felt like we could have used a few more days. It’s a paradox- the better you play, the harder you can work on a piece….

Even though on the surface it seems like one of the more user-friendly and harmless Beethovens, it’s incredibly intricate, challenging and complex- after all, he’d already written 7 other pretty good symphonies. For once we had the rare chance to take apart the contrapuntal writing in real detail, to work on playing properly in tune (instead of the usual working trying to not play out of tune), work on matching strokes, articulation, note lengths…. We even had the chance to just look at some of the cool things about the piece itself instead of just figuring out how to play it.

During the weekend, I got asked lots of perceptive and interesting questions. How refreshing to get a chance to really talk with young players about what makes a piece of music work, instead of just “is that long or short.”

Speaking of perceptive, probably the nicest comment after the recital on Friday was from two girls in the youth orchestra who came. Neither had heard any of the pieces before, and at the intermission, the movement they were both most excited about was the bleak and draining slow movement of the Shostakovich. “I couldn’t breathe at the end of that movement,” one of the young women said. That’s what it’s all about- knowing the message has gotten through to even one person….

[I had a couple of musicians on Thursday inform me that my tempo for the last mvt (not as fast as Beethoven’s actual metronome mark) was “impossible.” Funny, it wasn’t impossible this morning…. Be warned- how embarrassing would it on a side-by-side concert for the students to have to demonstrate for the teachers?] 

I’m just grabbing a bite of tasy polenta before my final recital rehearsal this afternoon.

After about 40hours in transit, I finally made it to Pendleton yesterday morning, fresh as a daisy. Nipped up to the office and grabbed my axe and managed a tidy 45 minutes of personal practice before hopping in the car for Tri Cities.

Sheila and I were rehearsing the rather enormous church she works at. It’s a nice piano and things sound impressive in there when you walk through the sanctuary, but I’d completely forgotten that there is a horrendous dead spot right where the piano sits. As if my poor brain didn’t have enough to cope with, it seemed to take about 25 minutes to get used to the feeling that my sound was coming from down the hall….

In any case, rarely have four hours flown by so quickly, and we didn’t even play the whole program. I then stumbled back down to Pendleton, arriving just before rehearsal with the orchestra, but in time to read some memos on my desk. I’m a pretty chilled out guy, in my opinion, but one thing I read really sent me over the edge of despair. I try to look at all things work related as solvable problems, and I’m sure this all was, but I was not pleased to have the aggravation of  something that I knew would not be conducive to a good night’s sleep.

Beethoven 8- what can I say???? We’ve got serious work to do, but damn do I love that piece.

Sure enough, woke up grouchy from the memo and with my back giving me extensive and specific feed back on it’s impression of the value of intercontinental travel. Coffee in hand, I finally got behind the cello and tried to start lining things up. I always find that the first day back from being out of shape or the first day on a new cello is the easiest because you’re mostly working on instinct. Day two is usually tougher, and the first few minutes were a bit frustrating to be sure, but after about half an hour of long tones and thinking about the art of sitting, things came around. The rest of the morning flew by.

It’s one of the many ironies of my life that giving up the cello, or at least setting it aside to conduct, has made me love playing it, and probably made me play it better than I can remember.

I’m expecting a few fouls to be sure, but recitals are wasted on our student years, when we’re all too insecure and stressed out to enjoy it…. Show time is 7:30 at the Pendleton Art Center. Tix a the door, and receipts all go to musician compensation for the band.

Show time is 7:30 at the Pendleton Art Center. Tix a the door, and receipts all go to musician compensation for the band.

Speaking of bands… They were just playing one of my favorite Doobie Brothers tracks on the stereo here. Back in the 70′s, the Doobies were  considered a pretty good band. If they were at their peak now, they’d look like the greatest band of our times…. I wanna play some funky dixieland, pretty mama, gonna take me by the hand…. I mean, what more can you say?

From the “life’s little hassles” file….

Just as I was posting my last blog, I looked up and saw the last thing any weary traveler wants to see AFTER a trans-Atlantic, which is “flight cancelled” next to the last leg of your journey….

I’m a little bummed out, but it could have been worse. The earliest they could have gotten me to Tri Cities was tomorrow at 11:30. The problem was that I had a rehearsal in Tri Cities at 11, and my cello is in Pendleton, which is 70 minutes away. To get in to the airport, drive to Pendleton and back to Richland would have meant completely missing the rehearsal which is our only working rehearsal for this recital other than the run through in the hall tomorrow.

Shit….

In the end, I got them to re-route me to Portland tonight and on to Pendleton at 7:30 tomorrow. I’ll make the rehearsal, but will have lost the time tonight to get reacquainted with my US cello. It’ll probably be straight in with Sheila.

Pianists change instruments all the time, but string players almost never. If pianists had to cope with intonation, they’d be a lot more neurotic than they already are (god, there’s a thought….).

Anyway, I don’t mean to whinge, but why does everything always have to come down to the wire?!?!!?!?!?

For those young conductors out there… Word to the wise- it’s just as important to know the airline schedules as your scores. The agents did not seem to know about this possibility until I told them about it….

It also seems a bit perverse to make a trip to Portland that doesn’t involve seeing any of my friends, drinking any beer with said friends, or offer the possibility of Stump Town coffee in the morning. 

Let just hope the flight tomorrow goes on time. 

First, my apologies to anyone who has been unable to access the blog the last couple of days- my webhost seems to be having some kind of major technical problems, apparently this is a widespread problem. Anyway, it’s being worked on, and in the meantime, I am sorry it is so annoying. I hate to deprive anyone of their Vftp fix!

There have been some interesting comments since my last post on A/Tonality…John had an interesting comment, that left me wanting to make two points. First, John said
“I do believe that Serial music “HAD” to happen. Expressionism had taken itself to the breaking point, and there was no where else to go – Boulez certainly proved how FAR it could go.”

This is about as close to a generally accepted orthodoxy as anything about 20th Century Music- serialism and high modernism were inevitable and inescapable evolutionary steps forward from post Wagnerian chromaticism. Wager begot early (Verklarte Nacht) Schoenberg who begot middle (2nd Quartet) Schoenberg, who begot serial (String Trio) Schoenberg, who begot the rest of the 20th Century…

I think one reason that modern discourse about music is so, forgive the expression, fucked up, is that the historical lesson of the 20th Century is EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE OF THE BASIC PREMISE OF ALL 20TH CENTURY ARTISTIC MOVEMENTS.

For all the “isms” that came and went in the 20th C., one, all powerful, all-consuming idea unified them, and it’s power ranged from modernist art music to popular home design to literature.

This has been the age of the zeitgeist, and the one law we’ve all been expected to obey is that, whatever you create, it must fit the spirit of the time. Therefore, for 100 years we’ve had roaring, pointless arguments about what is the music or the painting of this moment. Anything that isn’t was has to be now, is not relevant and shouldn’t be created.

I hope that now we’re starting to realize the stupidity of this world view, at least in the world of art, if not in fashion and commerce.

The real lesson of the 20th C. is that an infinite variety of styles, vocabularies, idioms- of universes, can exist side by side in time, and have no negative impact on each other whatsoever. Rachmaninoff can compose at the same time as Messiaen, Copland at the same time as Berg, Berio at the same time as Piston.

In fact, the real lesson of the last hundred years ought to be that style is meaningless, and the time of composition is meaningless. Rachmaninoff was a figure of ridicule to serious composers, then damned as only “popular,” but his music is so marvelously crafted and so powerful that we’re finally starting to be allowed to take him seriously. Can you believe there were no uncut recordings of the 2nd Symphony until the 1970s?

Who would have stood up for Britten as the greatest composer alive at the time of his death? Not most members of the establishment, who treated him as a quaint anachronism. His achievement is so overwhelming that I think it will take us another generation to figure out just HOW great a composer he was.

Now, it’s fashionable to say Arnie got it wrong, or that Berio stole my lunch money, but the strength of that music that will keep it in the repertoire.

I still find “postmodernism” a rather irritating and useless term. We do not live in the age in which we have outgrown innovation, but in the age when we no longer see innovation as process that proceeds in one direction down a single line.

Oh yes— Messiaen, tonal! Debussy, tonal.

I write this morning from the warm confines of the KLM Elite lounge at Birmingham Intl airport. Perhaps the only perk of spending so much time traveling is that, every once in a while, the airlines throw you a tiny little biscuit, such as being able to use the posh lounge for free…. It’s actually a bit grim in here, but at least I’m not with the general public..

Of course my presence here indicates that I’m en route to America. Although the blog does not entirely reflect this, my main project this week has been trying to become a cellist again in time for a recital on Friday. I recorded a good chunk of the program yesterday and was fairly encouraged- although the fireworks (Guy Fawkes Night has been expanded to Murder, Mayhem, Vandalism and Pointless Explosions Month) outside made an interesting backing track to the slow movement of the Rachmaninoff sonata. My back has more or less stopped hurting, unless I lean or sit wrong, when it flares up full blast. I feel like if I can get through a flight and two hard days practice without making the back mad, I can pull this thing off….

On the ride up this morning from Cardiff to Birmingham, I tried to be a good boy scout and listen to all my Rach recordings. More and more, when I listen outside the box to certain cello discs that are not on my list of favorite players, I’m brought back, in a somewhat bad way, to memories of music school, and the strange subcultures that are American instrumental studios.

In a few of the performances, I found annoying evidence of what I’ve come to think of as “secret handshake” performance. A “secret handshake  performance” is one that is held by some to be work of genius, but for reasons you would only know if you knew the secret handshake. Perhaps some of you will remember the experience of preparing a piece for a lesson or a class only to be told you were doing everything completely wrong. The basis for this, as well as the reasoning for what was therefore “right” always seemed something you only knew if you knew the secret handshake (or owned the great man’s recording).

You see, in this mindset, any fool can buy the music and study the score and practice the part. If that were all there were to it, anyone could play music, and we wouldn’t need the genius teacher.

But, in the world of the secret handshake, there is an unknown collection of laws of aesthetics that you can only learn slowly, over many years, for at least $100/hour (which is a bargain for a good lesson). The lesson goes like this “Yes, I see you’ve started on a down bow on the A string…”

“Yes sir, that was what was in the score, the urtext….”

“Yes, but you see Ken… that down bow on the A string is too bright!” Too bright for what, one might think…. “You must start up bow on the D string!”

“Of course, sir…”

“And…. Here! What were you doing! You sped up!”

Hmmm…. isn’t that what accelerando means???? The wise student doesn’t ask.

“You must take time here!”

Time for what, one might ask!

“Like this!”

Aha…. Well it must be better because he’s teaching at ______________. How could I not know that? God, I’m a moron!
The onslaught begins in earnest. “Here! What were you doing?!?!?! You must play louder, louder, then softer! You can’t do all those pianos in the first movement! They don’t work, but in the second movement, you must play softer, it’s too loud!” And then there’s the long withering look, as if you were a bit of stray matter stuck to their shoe that seems to say, “you obviously didn’t listen to my recording…””

Too loud for what? Why don’t the pianos work?

Well, now I know the pianos don’t work because they’re not loud, and the fortes don’t work because they’re not piano, because there has to be a mystery to the great performer. There has to be something that only the truly blessed, the chosen, know about how to perform. At this school, it’s one set of rules, but at that one it’s another!

Then you hear the recordings of the “great teacher,” and you’re left scratching your head… Older and wiser you can’t help but feel that the last thing Rachmaninoff or Beethoven really wanted to do was mark the exact opposite what he wanted. Of course, in the world of the secret handshake, the piddling wishes of the poor composer are to be ignored at all costs.

“Well of course! Ken! You can’t take it so literally- he was a composer. A composer . Composers don’t understand performance, they don’t know how the piano really works or the cello really works, or where you have to take time. If you don’t take time where you have to take time, it doesn’t work, because it’s  not time-takey enough….” Yes, those poor composers ala Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. What a pity they understood so little about performance….

Thank god for the teachers who are secure enough to tell you the truth- that there is no secret handshake, and that you don’t need a guru to rewrite the masters for you. Pity they’re too often not the most famous in their field….

Here’s a short excerpt of last week’s performance by the Rose City Chamber Orchestra of Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet as arranged by Mahler and me. Without changing a single note of the work, Mahler’s version makes ingenious use of divisi and a very few doublings in order to make both the balances and virtuoso writing more manageable for an orchestral performance.

For those curious about where I’ve tampered with Mahler, there is one conspicuous change at the very beginning of the excerpt. Mahler omits the basses from the unison that you hear at the start. His thinking was both practical and harmonic. Practical in the sense that he didn’t feel an 1890′s bass section could cleanly execute a passage like that, but also harmonic, because he did use the double basses to reinforce the cellos at the end of the phrase when the music suddenly shifts from A to F major, one of those all-important Schubert third relationships.

Remember, however, that Mahler was orchestrating this for a performance with the entire Vienna Philharmonic string section, an enormous group. He omits the basses to allow a huge string orchestra to maintain more of the precision and transparency of a quartet. I use one double bassist here to make a very small string orchestra sound more like a large orchestra in a passage where I felt it was called for. These days, a modern double bassist can dispatch a passage like this cleanly enough that Mahler’s concern about technical precision is no longer an issue- kudos to Mike Murphy, the bassist on this performance.

In both his quartet arrangements (this one, and Beethoven’s Serioso Quartet, op 95), Mahler uses the basses with restraint bordering on trepidation. For a man who wasn’t afraid to ad E-flat clarinet to Beethoven 9, he certainly seems overly cautious about adding basses to a string quartet. His caution was not neccessarily ill-advised. Transcriptions like this one are now both common and popular, but in the 1890′s, this was unhead of, and there was an actual riot at Mahler’s one public performance of the arrangement

Guest Review for Surrey Advertiser

Surrey Mozart Players (SMP)

at Holy Trinity Church on Saturday 6 October 2007

Attending a concert by the SMP for the first time on 6th October I was most impressed by their performance under their conductor, Kenneth Woods; high praise from an aficionado of the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam!

The opening Mozart Overture from Der Schauspieldirektor paid generous homage to the orchestra’s namesake, lively and rousing as it was.  This was followed by Fauré’s Suite Pelléas et Mélisande, in which the orchestra demonstrated a contrasting mood with sincere sensitivity.

The pièce de résistance was, of course, Parry Karp’s stunning performance of the Saint-Saëns Concerto no 2 in D minor for cello.  Mr. Karp produced a sound so beautiful that it was truly a rare and thrilling experience.  Not only was his sound magical, but his technique in this most difficult of works was outstanding.  He was well supported by the orchestra too, giving the performance a cohesive wholeness.

This was followed by the Romanza for cello and orchestra by Richard Strauss which was a further treat for the senses as once again we were transported- the church venue lending itself to soaring phrases and dynamic nuances of both cello and orchestra.  We felt honoured to have had this opportunity to hear such an artiste perform.

The concert closed brilliantly with the vivacious Sinfonietta for orchestra by Poulenc to end the most enjoyable evening.

Margaret Morley 7 October 2007

12 Tone music is dead.

Yeah, right….

Given the fact that the stats, email and the comment page tell me that my rather arcane post on tonality from Saturday is one of the most read and discussed posts I’ve ever done here, I would say that this music still has almost unlimited power to inflame, incite and challenge the imagination…

I’ve been finding myself gradually creeping intuitively towards a new path that I find helpful in better understanding serial music, which is that I want to be more honest and thorough in understanding what it isn’t and what this language doesn’t do, and in doing so, perhaps I, as a performer can better understand what it is and how it works.

The very fact that nothing in music gets people so fired up as serialism is still, for me, one of the most important arguments for its relevance. That power of fascination is at the heart of so much art since 1900.

Anyway…. I just wanted to come back to tonality a bit more. Everyone who has seen it remembers the original Star Trek episode with the parallel universe, where Kirk finds himself in the cosmos with the ruthless Spock and the barbaric Federation, right??? The idea is simple- placed in another universe, the same things (Kirk, Spock), exhibit a nature contradictory to their behaviour on a familiar one.

This is the essential attraction of tonality, of keys, of tonal centers. A key is a universe- move the same note or the same interval to another key, and the same material has a different meaning. A leap from g to c in C major means something quite different than in E minor. What about the same two notes in E-flat major? Same pitch set, same interval, same interval vector, but place it in a different universe, and it means something different, which means our expectation of what might follow it will be completely different. Whether the composer chooses to fulfil our defy our expectation, the ability to create expectation, and quite sophisticated expectation at that, is about as powerful a compositional tool as one could ever have, and I’m not sure that serial music, whether that of Schoenberg or Boulez or Dallapiccola or Webern really has kept that tool in the tool box.

Remember, one of the early ideas in serial music was that to liberate music from the restraints of tonality, one should generally avoid intervals associated with tonal arrival and expectation- avoid thirds and sixths in favour of seconds and sevents. Tritones are good, but they can never resolve inward to thirds! It’s been called the liberation of dissonance, but it could also be called the elimination of expectation.

I  tried to talk on Saturday about the how the elimination of tonality makes it hard to organize forms on a large scale. The obvious example is progressive tonality as found in Mahler- one could not begin to construct a form on the scale of the Second Symphony without keys. The keys are the form in that piece, and how amazing that in a symphony in C minor, he’s able to wait an hour and ten minutes before giving us our first cadence in the relative major of E-flat!

The example I gave above shows the problem of creating phrases and rhetoric on a much smaller scale. Haydn and Wagner might be the greatest masters of playing with expectation in tonal music. I’ve written here many times about the fallacy of Haydn as the ultimate arbiter of normality- again and again we here people say, “normally, in, say, a Haydn symphony, the music would do this,” but Haydn almost never does what one expects. He is simply without peer in creating expectation then suspending it. Both Haydn and Wagner play with my example above in remarkably similar ways. Play the two notes- G and C, then make the audience wait, perhaps interject a commentary in another voice. Their expectation may be that this strong rising fourth surely implies C major, and that therefore, we are establishing a tonic, but any number of things are possible. Perhaps Haydn repeats those two notes again. Perhaps the audience assumes this is a way of reiterating the strength of that implied tonic? Then, after a third repetition, we might finally get a chord, but not C major, try B7! The C over the B7 creates a wonderful, very dark b9 chord, and then you can just walk down by step from the C back to the G and resolve the B7 to E minor. Wagner would do the exact same thing but resolve the 7th chord deceptively….

Now, just think about how that harmonization would shape the audience’s expectation of what they will hear next anytime they hear a fourth in that piece! The composer may NEVER AGAIN harmonize that interval in the same way, but once heard like this, all future expectations in the music have to be changed!

In the 20th C. it became fashionable to refer to common practice (tonal) music as music in which certain rules limit the composer- Chord A or Interval X “have” to resolve to Chord B or Interval Y. The Liberation of Dissonance, Debussy, the musical history of the entire 20th C all mean that Chord A can now go anywhere, that Interval X can go anywhere. The problem is that, within stylistic boundaries, that’s always been true. Chord A was always free to go just about anywhere, but that first, generally speaking, it created an EXPECTATION in you, the listener, that it would go to Chord B.

Haydn makes you think that what goes up must come down, but then shows you that what goes up may turn left.

In its obsession with avoiding the cliché, in avoiding the predictable, serial music risks losing the possibility of the unpredictable. If you cannot generate expectation, you cannot unleash surprise.

Boulez, who as a performer has become just as ardent a champion of Mahler and Bruckner as he has been of Nono and Stockhausen, once said “Classical tonal thought is based on a world defined by gravitation and attraction, serial thought on a world which is perpetually expanding.” I would respectfully say that he has slightly missed the mark in his description of tonality. It might be more accurate to say that classical tonal thought expresses the relationships of different tonal worlds (as opposed to a single world), of nearby planets and distant galaxies and the ways in which their movements and behaviors are dictated by gravitation and attraction- the gravitational pull between D and A major are very different from that between D and Bb Major. But then, I come back to the idea of parallel universes, because if keys were merely worlds, then the laws of physics in each one would remain the same- in every world, what goes up comes down, but in tonal music the expectation, the very laws of musical physics, change depending on what key you are in. The what goes up must come down in C major, perhaps, but in A flat, what goes up may well keep going up or turn right or boil or solidify….

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

PS- Equal temperament sucks!

UPCOMING CONCERT

Kenneth Woods, cello

Sheila Zilar, piano

SYMPHONY Chamber Series

Pendleton Arts Center

Friday, November 9, 2007

7:30

Sergei Prokofiev- Sonata in C Major for Cello and Piano

Dmitri Shostakovich- Sonata in D minor for Cello and Piano

Sergei Rachmaninoff- Sonata in G minor for Cello and Piano  

Well, this is a bit of a change. No Haydn symphonies?

I’ve written often here about how much I miss playing cello, especially chamber music. Over the last few years I’ve found that the pressures of the conductor’s life mean I rarely get the cello out of the case unless I’ve got a performance coming up, so I try to fit things in where the schedule allows, but then I get these horrible moments when I realize I’ve been resting a bad back for nearly two weeks and have recital in seven days. Yikes!

I was able to start work in earnest on Friday, and have through Tues to get my act together. Then Wednesday is a travel day, probably a washout as it’s a painfully long trip from Cardiff to Pendleton. That means I have just Thursday and Friday to get used to my other cello (how I ended up with two cellos that are so totally unalike is beyond me!) and put things together with Sheila. This isn’t the way it used to be in school when you’d work hours a day all year on a program then coach with your pianist for weeks before the hearing before the concert!

Anyway, it occurred to me to just make this a week of immersion in cello, since it kinda has to be anyway, so I’m putting my scores on the shelf till further notice (well, except for a rehearsal or two). I’ll see if I can make this a cello blog for a week….

Meanwhile, if you’re in Eastern Oregon/Washington, ring the OES office to buy tix 541 276 0320. We’re donating 100% of the ticket sales to player compensation in the orchestra. It’s my way of at least putting my time and effort, and in a sense my money since I’m not paying myself, where my mouth is. It’s pretty easy to raise money for things like new chairs and stands or recorders for convicts, but it’s the toughest thing in the world to get people to give money to actually pay the musicians who make music happen….

12-tone music is popping up all over the blogosphere lately, or, that is, discussions about it- how all those empty halls for performances of Beethoven symphonies were actually caused by Milton Babbitt and about how so much insipid monotonal neo-pasctichio music is actually a deeply personal response to the traumas of having studied with someone who knew Berio.

Elaine Fine recently wrote a quite thoughtful and perceptive piece on 12-tone music and music reservata, but it still left me feeling like something was left out.

Of course, a lot of these things read like group therapy. It seems that 80 years on, people are still mad about the longstanding tradition of  overblown rhetorical flourishes begun with Schoenberg (“this new method will insure the supremacy of German music for the next 100 years)” to Boulez and Stockhausen. Word to the wise- don’t take these things to seriously. Public pronouncements from composers are a great tool for getting noticed, and hopefully getting their music played more often, but you don’t really believe what Stravinsky said about Beethoven and Gounod, do you? You don’t really believe what Debussy said about Wagner or Saint-Saens, do you? He copied too much from both of them for that to be true. People like to talk about how the serialist bullies dominated academia in the 60s and 70s, but didn’t Piston, Creston, Diamond, Schuman and Hanson all have academic positions in the US? As with everything, at all times, don’t believe all the hype.

However, nothing I’ve read lately seems to have captured what the real problems are with atonal music and the real strengths are with tonal music. To read most commentary, the problem with atonal music is that it is ugly and the strength of tonal music is that it is pretty. People like pretty music and don’t like ugly music. Those planet-raping modernist “composers” such as the diabolical Berio like ugly music and don’t like pretty music, which is why they write atonal music.

To quote Richard Taruskin: Balderdash!

I actually think one of the liabilities of much tonal music, especially the very best like Haydn and Schubert is that it is too pretty for modern ears. Especially for the young, emotionally intense crowd that we’re trying to attract, 20 seconds of Haydn can just sound like background music for a tea party. All the sinister wit and deep pathos, warmth and irony is completely missed- they find it just as incomprehensible as many others find Stockhausen. Noise music, atonal music, electronic music- all of these demonized modernist idioms- have all long since become mainstays of popular culture in rock, rap, dance, techno and movie music, while voice leading, modulation, tonal centers and structural chromaticism have long since been excised from the tool box of the popular song-smith.

No, ugly and pretty have NOTHING to do with it. I know, some of you reading think I’m wrong, and that you really cannot stand the abrasive cacophony of “modern” music, and you’d rather have a tooth pulled than listen to 10 seconds of a mature Schoenberg Quartet. Trust me, you’re wrong- you actually do like that sound, you just don’t know it yet, because you have not made an emotional imprint of that sound-world.

The real strength of tonal music has nothing to do with how pretty it is, or how harmoniously all those overtones ring in a triad, because the strengths of tonal music are apparent in modal, quartal and highly chromatic music. The amount of dissonance doesn’t seem to matter. What tonal music has is tonality, which is to say tonal relationships.

Tonality is possibly the most powerful tool ever invented for creating musical form, and it is no surprise that long forms grew out of an era in which composers were discovering ever more powerful expressions of a wider range of tonal relationships.

Tonality is all about relationships between keys. In our modern world, it is easy to see the classical voyage from tonic to “not the tonic” and back to the tonic as a bit too neat and tidy for a world of genocide, nuclear weapons and Dick Cheney. However, tonality doesn’t mean that you always return home, it means that tonal areas have specific relationships to each other, and that these relationships have intrinsic emotional meanings and resonances.

Whether it’s the magic and mystery of Schubert’s chromatic third relationships or Mahler’s metaphysical understanding of the myriad meanings of progressive tonality, Beethoven’s life and death struggle to get from D minor to D major or the simple perfection of a binary form tonic-dominant-tonic dance movement, tonality gives composers an unbelievably powerful tool for creating compelling musical architecture.

Musical architecture, form, structure- these are all rather cold sounding words. In another art form you could call these story, plot or even just meaning. Meaning is what brings people to art- when a listener gets to the culmination of a work and can feel the cumulative impact of everything they’ve heard so far, whether it’s a Beatles song or a Berg opera, that is the point at which their brain really begins to latch onto and bond with the sound world, the pretty and ugly, of the piece. If you’ve never felt the form of a piece of atonal music, your brain has never then gone that extra mile to imprint and internalize the rhetoric. Form is metaphor- tonal relationships give music the chance to express patterns of nature, of life, of distance and loss, of return and release. Tonality is the most flexible and powerful tool for expressing tension, for expressing distance,  and for creating a musical landscape as infinite, four dimensional and complex as the world we experience and try to understand in our daily lives.

This is not to suggest for a second that atonal music lacks form, but to point out that tonality (not prettiness) is the most powerful tool for creating and expressing form. In its purest form, 12-tone music eliminates that hierarchy completely, making all pitches equal, and only the order of pitches has meaning- the prime form of the row replaces the tonic.

The problem of form in serial music is one that many composers have meditated on and worked at for nearly a century with hundreds of spectacular successes. Some have resorted to sneaky forms of tonality- Boulez’s Messagesquisse, the subject of my DMA lecture recital, has a very clear tonic pitch of e-flat and a very clear dominant of a- natural, the first two pitches of the set SACHER (eb-a-c-b-e-d) the piece is based on. There are thousands of other ways of expressing form, but tonal relationships are such a simple and powerful tool, one does away with them at one’s peril, and if one does away with that tool without realizing the value and the power of the tool you’ve given up, then you’re really in trouble. I’d like to do a post on Berio’s Les mots sonts allés, which expresses in a very short time span and incredibly powerful and relevant form. Stay tuned….

NOW- hear some more hideously ugly, despicable music of Berio, that lout, that vile killer of all things beautiful. This is KW conducting a performance of one of the folk songs with Patricia Rozario from a recent broadcast. Listen carefully and you’ll get a sense of just how much he despised melody!

c.2007 Kenneth Woods

I was delighted and genuinely surprised this morning to see something completely unexpected as the main story on Salon.com- an extended discussion of Alex Ross’s new book, The Rest is Noise from Kevin Berger.

I read Salon everyday, and have for some years now, but not for its arts coverage, which can only be called pitiful. The internet has been a boon to classical music, but not the top electronic newspaper. Salon is supposed to be news for the smart crowd, but their main cultural interests are network TV and mainstream film. They also religiously feature one thought-provoking essay per-week on what Brittney Spears tells us about society.

So how does a zillion page overview of 20th Century music end up as their main story? It’s the power of the blog, I’m sure. Although the New Yorker is great magazine and great publication, I’ll wager it is Alex’s blog that has really built the buzz behind this being the most talked about book on classical music since The Maestro Myth.  Ain’t that ironical?

No review here, as yet (a performer reviews a critic? don’t hold your breath….). I’ve ordered my copy to pick up in Oregon next time I’m there. I had hoped to catch Alex in Portland last week, but got in an hour too late.

However, Berger’s first excerpt from the book put me in the mood to be devil’s advocate….

From 1900 to 2000, Ross writes, classical music “experienced what can only be described as a fall from a great height. At the beginning of the century, composers were cynosures on the world stage, their premieres mobbed by curiosity seekers.” When Mahler walked the streets of Vienna in the 1900s, passersby would stop and whisper to themselves, “Der Mahler!” “A hundred years on,” Ross writes, “no one whispers, ‘Der Adams!,’ as the composer of El Nino walks the streets of Berkeley.”

Almost all the discussion of what has happened to classical music over the last 15-20 years, whether from those who say these are the darkest of days, or those of us who are more hopeful, has focused on the impact of non-musical trends: the removal of classical music from public school curricula, the over-saturation of the CD market, downloading’s impact on CD profitability, a steep increase in anti-intellectualism in Anglo-American culture, the disappearance of government support for the arts, a shift in wealth from established philanthropic families to boom-bust new economy millionaires (many of whom are the product of a business centered education and whose liberal arts backgrounds are nearly non-existent), the erosion of diversity of media ownership and the disappearance of locally owned newspapers and radio stations.

It’s a long, and depressing, list.

Everyone else blames Berio, it seems…

However, are there any musical reasons for the difficulties we’ve all experienced?

Far be it from me to compare the enduring musical qualities of Mahler and Adams….. er, ah…. But…. I would suggest that if one looked just at orchestras around 1985-1990, compared to 1990-2000, or 2000-today and considered who was conducting where, I think it’s possible that one might draw the conclusion that some orchestras are worse off economically now because they are producing a product that is in some ways less artistically compelling to that of 25 years ago.

Alex himself offered a potentially relevant positive factoid on his blog

Some good news from Chicago, via John von Rhein: “For the second straight year, the [Chicago Symphony] exceeded 85 percent paid capacity in ticket sales, including a more than 3 percent increase in single ticket sales from the previous year. Roughly 30 percent of CSO main series concerts were sold out or exceeded 95 percent capacity. The renewal rate for CSO main series subscriptions was more than 87 percent, the highest in 11 years, according to orchestra officials.”…

Is it worth considering whether the changes in artistic leadership that took place a little over 11 years ago and in 2006 might have had a direct and measurable economic impact? Is it possible that in the post-Solti years, some members of the Chicago public were staying away NOT because of all the cultural and economic trends I listed above, but simply because they felt the concerts were not as interesting, exciting or just plain good as they had been? Is it possible that they’re now seeing an upsurge in audience support that coincides exactly with a change in artistic leadership?

I’m just,er… asking….

I would say, however, that I grew up going to CSO concerts and was always impressed at how incredibly knowledgeable the audience there was….. knowledgeable and passionate about the orchestra…. musically literate and sophisticated…. I’d also say that I never saw a boring concert at Orchestra Hall in all those early years…

In the name of not completely torpedoing my career, I’m going to stop, but you… go on… have a think…. What other super-elite orchestras have had similar changes during this time? How many of the very top orchestras in the world can really be said to have superior artistic leadership in 2000 compared to 1980? Is there a correlation between those orchestras that downgraded or upgraded their artistic leadership and the long-term health of their economics? It’s too early to tell which way we’ve gone since 2000, but I do think that the artistic quality of our music making (and not just the technical perfection of our playing) will have some impact on how we’re doing in 2020.

Just asking….

NOW- Listen here to the sounds that ruined classical music. KW conducts the music of the accursed Luciano Berio, destroyer of music and stiffler of creativity around the world.  This is his Serenata for Flute and 14 Instruments from a recent broadcast.

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods