Kenneth Woods- a view from the podium

If it seems to the regular Vftp reader that I have lavished unprecedented coverage on last week’s CMEW concert, I apologize for any perception of favouritism that may cause. For instance, lost in the all of this was any mention of the fact that I had already begun rehearsals for the next week’s SMP performance in the final concert of the Guildford Spring Music Festival. Our programme includes one genuine rarity (Schumann’s Genoveva Overture as part of our Schumann Cycle) and two very well known favourites- the Sibelius Violin Concerto and Beethoven 5.

One could detect a certain delicious irony in the fact that I was rehearsing the piece most often listed as an over-played warhorse alongside a program of rather esoteric and obscure avant garde works from the 60’s, 90’s and 00’s. However, one man’s delicious irony might be read as another’s betrayal of principles- “playing Beethoven at the same time simply shows Woods to be a phoney who isn’t truly committed to the ideals of the revolution,” I can hear (and have heard) some saying, while others learn of this and say “you see, I knew there was something wrong with his Beethoven. Too much of that modern music kills your sensitivity, deadens your sense of phrasing, and probably turns you into a communist, and Beethoven was no communist!”

To these readers, and to some of my very, very esteemed colleagues, and whose opinions I respect, if not always agree with) who seemed to find nothing of merit whatsoever in my lengthy interview with Gordon, I offer this quote from Paul Mefano’s program note to his piece “Lignes” (1968)

“It is sometimes advisable to extend a warm welcome to one’s taboos and have a party with them.”

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After 100 years with pretty much only one option, conductors now have many choices of what edition of the Beethoven symphonies to use. So what parts have my colleageus been looking at, and what scores have I been? Why?

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I can’t help but smile at the fact that less than 24 hours after finishing my concert with the Contemporary Music Ensemble of Wales, I was rehearsing Beethoven 5 and the Sibelius Violin Concerto with the Surrey Mozart Players.

Preparing the ultimate “warhorse” piece at the same time as a preparing four very little known and “difficult” pieces of modern music can’t help but underline the qualities that music of our time and music of the past share, sometimes in spite of the wishes of the composers!

Anyway, this is my second Beethoven 5 since Christmas, and I thought the hard core conducting fanatics might be interested to know how the two projects stack up. First, we compare the two orchestras and look at assumptions about the “right” orchestra for Beethoven….

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I’ve been putting a lot of work in on Paul Mefano’s Intererences in the run up to this weekends sessions. Because of the open form techniques Gordon described in Part II of our interview, the notation is about as thorny as it gets. The challenge for the conductor is in managing the intersection of events that float in time and those that need to intersect at particularly moments.

The piece is in 3 “Fragments” (numbered IV, V and VI because the piece was originally much longer). It is the middle fragment which poses the most challenges for the conductor…

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I’m a bit concerned that this sudden outpouring of advice is making me look even more like a pompous gasbag than I do simply by virtue of being a conductor (and worse yet, a conductor who writes), but then there was this…. 

 In the comments on More Tips for Soloists, composer Rob Deemer asks-

Nice posts, Ken - I would be curious to have you take your comments about concerti commissions one step further to give us your thoughts on working with composers in general, both in terms of writing non-concerti orchestral works and “tips” on how to work with a conductor & orchestra during a rehearsal for a premiere. Many of your comments in your previous post in regards to etiquette sounded quite close to my own thoughts on composers in rehearsals. I’ve given my own composition students plenty of advice, but it’s always helpful to hear it from another conductor directly.

The piece below started life as a post on Orchestralist in response to one composer’s plea for help in getting their music programmed. It generated lots of comment at the time, including….

Dear Ken -

I am only now catching up with old orchestralist digests. I just wanted to drop you a line and thank you for your thoughtful and true posting concerning composers and conductors. Much of this I have been preaching for years and years, and I am glad to see a conductor saying it as well. And I found your descriptions of the opposition and preconceptions you encountered before the composer was even know to the board to be especially poignant. The same has happened to me on too many occasions, and I’ve actually had board members later come up to me and say, “hey I’m sorry that I didn’t want to give you a chance now that I hear your music. You’re stuff is nice!” Sigh.
    
But I especially found your comments on deportment and rehearsal protocols to be right on target. I’ve seen too many composers shoot themselves and everyone else in the foot with their own bad or unprofessional behavior in response to someone else’s bad or unprofessional behavior. I have found that it’s always best to make the best of things! Honey goes solo much further than vinegar!
       
Thanks again for your support of music of living composers, and again for your posting.

            All my best to you and yours -

                Linda                Linda Robbins Coleman

And this

Ken,

Spectacular posting on Olist!  Thank you for hitting the target so accurately.

Warm regards,

Jennifer Higdon  

Well intentioned advice from a conductor to (young) composers-

Helpful hints for getting your music played by an orchestra and surviving, even enjoying, the experience:                                                                                              

First, please remember that there is probably no initiative a conductor can take, except for firing a player, that will almost always generate more complaint and resistance than to program a brand new piece of music. Last year (2003), my orchestra (the Oregon East Symphony) had our first ever composer-in-residence (Emily Doolittle), and a year long focus on music by living women composers. Some members of our board literally tried everything they could think of to block this project. They even passed a resolution saying that our management was too busy to pursue funding, that the board was too busy to pursue funding, and that the orchestra, although comfortably in the black and ahead of our projections for grant income, was too poor to fund it ourselves. They also held up approval of the residency concept for so long that we were unable to apply for many of the normal grants for commissions. They literally forced me to go looking for funding myself and to prove that I wasn’t making the office staff help me. Imagine the reaction of the leader of that faction when we pulled it off and found a donor who would make the project happen!Some players are also notoriously skeptical about new works- they often start making judgments about the piece right away, when they may be playing it so terribly that there is very little of the composer’s vision on display.

Composers, rightly, ask a lot of conductors. We are your advocates, and we have to overcome the skepticism or outright hostility of players, funders and audience members. Any time we program new music, we know there will be complaints, extra work for us, extra expense for the orchestra and probably some lost revenue thanks to those members of the public who would rather sit at home sulking than listen to something they don’t already know.

In the end, the residency was very successful. We gave three premieres, one US, two world, of pieces by Emily, one per concert. Each was better received and played than the one before. We also featured her final piece, “green/blue,” which we commissioned, on our educational concerts as well as the subscription program. Emily made school visits, and spoke to the kids about the piece at the concert. We have a great visual art center and community here, and we tried to connect Emily to that network. The visual art world has a completely different attitude than the music world about new material- it is the heart of what they do and makes up the bulk of what they present. We found that there were board members at the art center who had given many thousands of their own dollars to support living artists who had never even thought of going to a new music ensemble concert or supporting a new composition. As some of their leaders watched the residency unfold, heard this composer’s breadth of style over several concerts, and got to know Emily they began to get very excited about watching a new piece of music come to life. They recognized the same thrill of discovery they knew from their work with painters and sculptors- an attitude our own board could have learned a great deal from.

For my money, here are some basic things to keep in mind, if you really want your music to be played and understood. This advice is not artistic in nature, only practical. I really believe that you, the composer, hold your own professional destiny in your hands to a much greater extent than you know, although it may feel that you have more power to damage your situation than to help it sometimes. These suggestions are not presented to be condescending, but just as food for thought from a friend. They are offered with love and the deepest admiration for what you do, knowing full well that for many readers, I’m stating the obvious.

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I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long time, as I think it’s probably a useful thing (based on my experience of seeing some very gifted people shoot themselves in the foot) to go on record with some tips for soloists who want to have long and successful careers. I’ve hesitated a bit because I didn’t want to write too soon after working with anyone who might think I was writing this as a reaction to their work!

Also, any number of my most valued colleagues will quickly recognize one or two things on this list that they don’t do, so the first rule is this—fun collaborations are the name of the game. If you play well and are easy to work with, nothing else really matters.

I tend to work with a lot of very bright young soloists who are bravely out there trying to make it in a brutally competitive field. What I fear is that some of them are making mistakes they don’t know about- what a pity that one would spend all those years practicing to lose opportunities for lack of common sense. I realize some of this may sound condescending in print- my apologies in advance! 

Readers may recognize a great deal of this post if they studied with Dorothy Delay. I’m not really her biggest fan on a musical level, but nobody understood the business better, and I learned a lot from watching her coach young soloists for many years at Aspen and Cincinnati.

So, how to be a soloist in 11 easy steps….

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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 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 an 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!

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 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 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

It’s generally accepted that if you want an orchestra to improve, you should rehearse and perform a great deal of Haydn and Mozart. True!

However, one thing I’ve been surprised at is what an effective orchestral etude Mahler 4 is. Perhaps it’s not surprising, since stylistically it’s his most classical work, but I think there are other reasons as well.

In particular, Mahler’s dynamic and articulation requests are so detailed and unusual that it forces everyone on stage to examine and think afresh about every aspect of their playing. With every possible variety of swell, lift, accent, sforzando, diminuendo and staccato on offer, and a mark on almost every note of the piece, players can’t simply descend into habit. Everyone has to think extra hard about how they use their air or their bow, or the markings don’t happen, and then I nag them.

The natural reaction of musicians under pressure is to adopt a triage approach- it’s easy, almost automatic, to say “this is so hard, so I have to leave out those dynamics or not try so hard to make a phrase so I can play the notes in tune.”

The problem with this is it always has an affect other than the one intended. The more you do what the music demands the more aspects of the sound you are attuned to, which means your sound, your intonation and your rhythm improve. Mahler 4 takes players about as far in this direction as a piece can while still maintaining a rather transparent, classical texture.

Still, every few minutes I can see there’s someone who seems to be thinking “this marking is wrong. Mahler couldn’t have meant that.” Well, there are a number of mistakes in the parts, but odds are, whatever is causing you to wrinkle your brow in confused disdain is exactly what the great man wanted, and I can pretty much guarantee is version is cooler than yours or mine would have been.

All this, and we’re doing Haydn too!  

Friday morning and I’m moving a little slower after a long rehearsal last night. We’ve now got about %95 of the out of town players here, so we’re starting to get a good sense of what the issues are going to be this week.

The Fourth may be the hardest Mahler symphony to rehearse even though it is far from the most technically difficult. It’s the piece in which Mahler seems to have announced himself to the world as a great contrapuntal composer. The vast majority of the piece is made up of overlapping, independent motivic cells and themes, and there is almost no doubling in the work. That means the best way to rehearse it is for everyone to really know it, because the piece lives or dies on how vividly each gesture is characterized. Absent that characterization, there’s not much a conductor can do but resort to coaching solo players or single sections, something that leaves much of the orchestra sitting around.

Of course, the conductor’s first job is to show as much as possible of the detail and characterization with one’s hands. Even here, though, there are problems because Mahler asks for so much independent dynamic detail that in showing a forte to one section, you can easily confuse the section next to them that are marked pianissimo.

Ah…. Pianissimo.  An orchestra’s pianissimo is the tangible manifestation of the musician’s shared musical conscience. Players can hate being nagged to play softer, softer but once the sound really clicks, you never have to ask again (at least for that concert). I could feel that progression throughout the evening last night, but we’re still not there. A real pianissimo from an orchestra is a beautiful paradox- everything gets softer and starts to disappear and in doing so, the room becomes more electric.

I was listening to the documentary “Remembering Mahler,” which follows on the CD I have of Mahler’s piano roll performances (including the last movement of the Fourth Symphony). In interview after interview, musicians who had played for Mahler 50 years earlier talked about the force of his personality, his musicality, and how he towered over Toscanini as a conductor and a man, and how he always let rehearsals out early….

Hey- we had a very polite, professional email from Breitkopf about the lost Bruckner. Still no word from Schirmer…

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

It’s been a quiet, rainy afternoon at Vftp Intl Headquarters.

I’ve mostly been perched at the piano going through the score of Schubert’s Fourth Symphony (in C minor, “Tragic”).

It’s a piece I’ve been wanting to do for some years since I covered it in Cincinnati in 1998 and fell in love with it. It’s rarely done, and it tends to get a bad rap. I think many commentators dismiss it as Schubert’s youthful and not-quite-successful take on Beethoven 5, but it’s a very different, and very Schubert-ian piece. Schubert loved and revered Beethoven, but unlike Brahms and Schuman, he never felt he had to answer the same questions that Beethoven did, he was unafraid to be his own man. Schubert Four rocks. It will kick you apart. It stands 18 feet tall, and bench presses Miami. The introduction to the first movement consumes over 200 pounds of raw meat every day, and hunts in a territory the size of Arkansas.

Anyway, all day long I’ve just been sitting there at the piano and thinking about all those famous chromatic third relationships we learned about in music school. This piece is full of them, sudden drops from E-flat to C-flat major and the like.

The thing is, we all know Schubert used that relationship all the time- one of my teachers even called it the “Schubert modulation,” but I’m fascinated, still, by what it meant to him. Why did this one key relationship obsess him in so many pieces and in pieces of all different moods? Was it a motto, a signature, a reference to an early song? Did he just think it sounded cool? Did his first harmony teacher tell him never to do it?

Of course, the beauty of a unique part of a composers voice is that there’s no simple answer, any more than we’ll ever understand what Shostakovich’s signature use of three rhythms as the backbone of almost all his music meant to him.

What I do know is that this relationship sits there on the page in piece after piece, context after context and dares you to riddle out its meaning. Even as you know it’s an unanswerable question, Schubert calls you back in, as if to say “come on mate, the answer is right in front of you….”  

This post is part two of a group that began here. 

I’m currently in rehearsals for a performance of the ever-popular Ravel orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. 

I doubt there’s any classical fan reading this who hasn’t heard this beloved warhorse many times- in fact, there’s no doubt that Ravel’s version has long since eclipsed Mussorgsky’s original piano piece in popularity. Out of the entire piece, of course, the last movement is the best known- “The Great Gate of Kiev.” 

However, this very well known piece offers us a interesting example of the simple challenges of reading music. Perhaps after thinking about this example, you might conclude that you’ve rarely heard the notation for this music read accurately. 

If one looks at a page of the score, you’ll quickly see that there are lots and lots of grace notes. Grace-notes are one of the most troublesome bits of standard notation, not because their meaning is imprecise, but because their meaning is flexible. 

Other kinds of notes, crotchets, eighth-notes, whatever you like to call them, all express mathematical relationships to the unit of pulse. In the Great Gate, the rhythmic language is quite simple and foursquare, so all of the rhythmic relationships are easily figured out by the players and conductor.  

Grace-notes, on the other hand, express a duration of time that can only be read given the context that they are in. In classical music (Mozart and Haydn), we have elaborate rules for knowing when a grace-note is on or before the beat, and what it’s duration is. In this music you quickly learn that a gracenote does not simply mean to play the note as quickly as possible. 

On the other hand, very often grace-notes should be played very close to the beat and very fast, so often that many musicians forget that is not always the case. 

The problem in orchestra is that often we play them so fast that they are no longer heard at all. 

So how does one know how fast to play a grace-note? As fast as possible? If that’s wrong, how are we supposed to know that it’s wrong? Surely this is an example of the limitation of notation?

Nope, sorry. The problem in “Great Gate is that the orchestra version is a transcription, so the performers are reading the notation out of context. Notation creates context, so notation out of context loses some of its clarity. If one goes back to the piano version, you can see that the pianist has to jump and reset the hands in a new block chord after the grace note, so the grace note has to be played before the beat and not very fast. Most orchestras play these notes either so fast they’re not heard at all, or even worse, on the beat (this is a mis-reading of Ravel’s indication to play the grace-notes down bow in the strings near the end. Musicians look at those down bows and think “aha! he wanted those on the beat,” but what he wanted was for them to be really, really loud so they would have a similar prominence to what they have in the piano version). 

Ravel could easily have omitted the grace-notes altogether as his not limited to having on one person to play all the notes in the chords, and, when you don’t hear them in an orchestral performance, you wouldn’t know you were missing out on them. However, if you look at the score, for instance the last two pages, you can see that he took a great deal of care to transcribe the grace-notes in the piano version as honestly and imaginatively as possible. He knew they were an important part of the original, so HE MADE THEM AN IMPORTANT PART of the transcription. (In fact, there’s a lot of important harmonic information in the gracenotes. At first Mussorgsky just uses them to lay down an e-flat pedal, but later, the harmonies move in the grace-notes).

If one knows or has even played though the piano version, you won’t be tempted to play the grace-notes any faster than a fairly broad eight-note, not the thirty-secondish note you usually hear. You’ll also know that, as the writing gets more massive and the leaps in the piano part get bigger, the grace notes must get slower and heavier. 

Have a listen first to a decent performance of the orchestral version, then visit Evgeny Kissin’s piano performance. Do the fast, largely in-audible grace-notes in the orchestral performance still seem like an accurate reflection of the notation?

…. notation? *

Back in Music History class we all learned how philosophers used to differntiate between “music of the spheres” and “practical music.” The now-quaint terminology masks a somewhat interesting and important differentiation that is actually an important part of any musician’s relationship to music.

The original concert of “music of the spheres” came from imagining the mathematical interplay of the movement of celestial bodies as expressing an idealized form of music expressed as pure mathematics, or pure mathematics expressed as music. This idea later evolved into a broader concept of a “pure” form of music that exists in the realm of concept, not in performance. If one thinks of “spheres” music as being that which exists in your inner ear, in your imagination as opposed to the “practical” music one hears ringing in space, then maybe it allows one to see music notation in a different light.

In America, by and large, when young people are taught to read music (which they are only done grudgingly), they are taught to read notation as instructions for physical action- “when you see a note on the bottom line, that’s first finger on the g-string… that’s half note, so you hold the note for two counts.” Even at the conservatory level, many students never look at a piece of music without their instrument. There is only limited training in learing to read music as an internal process.

However, perhaps notation should really be a road-map to hearing the elusive “music of the spheres.” Perhaps we should look at it as a visual representation of the concept of music, not a set of instructions for how to execute a performance of music. So many performers are quick to point out the “limitations” of notation as license for subjective performances, but if one is only used to reading notation with an eye to knowing what to count and where to put your fingers, you’re going to miss a lot of the information.

I once heard Barenboim say (in the Great Conductor’s series of video) that (and I paraphrase) music on the page doesn’t exist until it is played. I might suggest that actually, Beethoven’s music is more honestly represented on the page, maybe even perfectly represented on the page, and that the only limitation  of his notation is our ability to read it as well as he could. 

The other day, I said that “composition is analysis.” Today, I might well say that “composition is notation.” Of course, what I really mean is that “classical” composition is notation, but after all, so much of what makes art music unique- counterpoint, developing variation, subtle and multi-layered use of harmony as both a coloristic and structural device, control of tone color- all of this vocabulary could not have evolved without notation. Any of us can hear a tune in our heads or plunk out a melody at the piano- a composer, on the other hand, can notate a self-contained work of art. The art is in the notation, not in coming up with the tune.

Next time, I’ll look at simple example of  a case where it seems as if notation fails us, but it is really us who fail it…

In the meantime, I’m braced for some strong words from those for whom I haven’t perhaps made my point clearly enough. It’s not that music cannot be created without notation, or that music created without notation is somehow lesser in value. It’s just that we gave up the distinction between songwriting, improvisation and composition sort of in the name of political correctness. If composition has been divorced from notation, then how we do we talk about the process in a way that reconnects creativity, craft and the act of creating a re-performable, self-contained work of art that CAN be experienced silently (and, in theory, in a purer form than in performance)? If we can connect to that concept, perhaps we can get more out of notated music?

*and cognitive science, or so I am told….c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

From my inbox comes a nice question from Felicity in Colorado, which gives me a rare, and nice, chance to answer a cello related question.

“Dear Ken,” she writes, “when you’re playing the Bach Suites, do you use a baroque bow or baroque cello, what sort of A do you tune to and so on? I’m a freshman in college and trying work my way through them for the first time, having just learned bits of the first two in high school. Any tips for me as I work on them?”

That’s a huge question, and probably worth several whole posts, but here are a couple of quick thoughts.

I play Bach on my regular cello, which is a 1690 Italian instrument with a “modern” set up, and I do use an endpin. My bow is a Tourte copy, so also, “modern.” I’d love to own a baroque cello, but it’s hard to justify as I can fool almost anyone into thinking I’m playing a baroque instrument on mine (and its old, anyway!).

For me, the most important stylistic consideration in Bach is the vocabulary of bowstrokes I’m going to use. When I perform the Suites, I always use a baroque bow grip on my modern bow; that is, I hold the bow along the stick a few inches above the frog, and not at the frog where we hold the bow for more contemporary and romantic works. This kind of bow hold makes all of the string crossings and uneven groupings that are such an intrinsic part of the suites much more idiomatic. I would strongly, strongly, strongly encourage all young cellists to begin learning to switch back and forth between their “normal” grip and a baroque one from an early age. It helps to have a spare bow, as you’ll no doubt get some finger grease on the bow hair as you practice.

On the other hand, I also practice the suites almost anytime I get the cello out of the case using a modern grip, precisely because it is so unidiomatic that it challenges every aspect of my technique. If you can make the suites sound effortless, clean, articulate and idiomatic with a modern grip, you’ll have a flexibility and precision when you come to later music that will really serve you well. If you’re playing say, the Thrid for a recital, try preparing it with a baroque grip and then warming up every day with a different movement from one of the others with a modern grip.

When you’re young it’s so easy to fall into the trap of feeling too much time pressure as you try to learn each suite for lessons and recitals. You have your whole life to work on them, and from the beginning, it’s good to get to grips with the idea that they exist as much for us to learn from as to perform.

I’m not too bothered about playing at a lower pitch- there is enough evidence now that says pitch in that era varied so widely that I don’t see the point in tuning down, although 440 is really high enough, and anything beyond 442 is too much for Bach. Some American, Japanese and German music schools that have their students playing at 444 and upwards are making the instruments so tight (higher pitch means more tension on the instrument) that it’s almost impossible to get them to speak easily and ring effortlessly (and it is bad for the instruments).

Everyone’s got their favourite recordings of the Bach Suites- mine right now is Pieter Wispelwey’s, but what you should really listen to is OTHER BACH. So many cellists play these pieces as if the only Bach they’ve ever heard is other cellists playing the same pieces, and as a result, we hear them with a lack of rhythmic spine that is totally foreign to the music. Remember, they’re dance suites, not cadenzas.

Yes, composition is analysis. 

Let’s start by remembering I didn’t say composition is only analysis.

Take for a moment Sibelius’ Fifth Symphony, which I wrote about here.

If one sits down and carefully analyzes the piece in its final form, you can’t help but be struck by how logically and organically it is constructed. The large scale structure of the piece seems to be a perfect reflection of the small scale structure of the individual ideas and motives. You get the sense that Sibelius had a complete, organic design for the work from the first note to the last.

However, when one then turns to the earlier versions of the piece, particularly the first version, you can see that, in fact, Sibelius struggled for many years to find that organic perfection which is the hallmark of the finished piece. Far from having had the plan for the work from the beginning, Sibelius struggled for some years to find a form that was right for the material he was working with. That process is analytical in nature- just as a theorist or a conductor may dissect the musical ideas of a work to figure out how the relate to each other in a finished work, many composers work in a similar way in the sketch process- generating melodies, phrases and large structures from the musical DNA of a few notes.

This was Beethoven’s main working method- beginning with quick notes of a musical idea or motive, which he then began to work out – not necessarily in the context of the form of the work. Motives become phrases which become periods. In one work he might have begun with the big picture- symphony in c minor, perhaps. In another case he might have simply begun with a theme and taken up the challenge of figuring out what he could do with it. The classical example of that method might be the works based on the theme of the last movement Eroica Symphony, which also include the Finale from Creatures of Prometheus and the Variations and Fugue for Piano, op 35.  Go here for a short excerpt from an essay by Elliot Forbes showing some examples of Beethoven’s sketch process in the first movement of the 5^th Symphony.

As I mentioned yesterday, it’s Mahler 4 which is on my desk right now. I’d like to save the bulk of my discussion of this piece for a little later, but let me just point out that Mahler composed the song, Das himmlishe Leben, which became the finale of this symphony about eight years before he composed the rest of the work. In fact, he long intended it to be the finale of the 3^rd. As a result, we have in the 4^th a symphony that was not composed from beginning to end, but from end to beginning. Mahler had to essentially dismantle his finished work (the song) into it’s component parts so that he could create three movements that seem to culminate in the finale. For the listener they do culminate in the finale, but the music was not written that way.

Virtually every theme and motive in the first three movements of the symphony has a connection to the musical material of the finale, sometimes very explicit and easily audible (i.e. the music of the opening bars of the symphony in the flutes and sleighbells appears to return in finale at Figure 3, although we now know Mahler extracted the opening from that passage), and sometimes more subliminally (in addition to his lifelong obsession with the perfect fourth, this symphony shows an obsession with the rising major sixth, which is the first interval of the melody of the song).

For all that we hear the 4^th Symphony as inspiration, and as a voyage from beginning to end, from a child’s view of the world to a child’s view of heaven, the work was written from end to beginning. That process was primarily analytical, and, like Sibelius in his 5^th Symphony, Mahler (who had, after all been thinking of this song as a final movement of a symphony for eight years and had, in essence, tried to write the 3^rd Symphony with this song as a finale), knew when he’d finally succeeded at the end of the summer of 1900. Just as the process had been analytical, so it was an analytical impulse that told him when the work was finished- when the micro and macro elements of the piece were perfectly balanced and related, and when he had found a way of working out his musical ideas that was true to the ideas themselves.

And it is this idea I leave with- it is a cliché to speak of a finished work as somehow true to a composer’s vision. However, what really makes a piece work is when the finished piece is true to its materials, when the composer has found a context for the ideas that is true to their nature. When someone other than the composer analyzes a piece of music, we are trying to understand that truth, to understand why the music does what it does. When the composer builds a work from analysis, she or he is trying to understand what the music needs to do.

c. 2007 Kenneth Woods

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