Messiaen, the Not-Mystic

"When asked if he has ever felt the 'joy of mysticism' (a moment of epiphany, of certainty) during the act of composing, the response is a resolute, 'No, not at all. When I am working, there are so many things that require immediacy, so many details to manage, that all I can do is be attentive to what I am doing. I do not experience what you mean. I do not contemplate but act.'" (Olivier Messiaen, from The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen's Breakthrough Toward the Beyond, Sander van Maas, "It Is a Glistening Music We Seek".)

Simple, Hilarious, Popular, and Modern

Percy Dearmer prefaces The Oxford Book of Carols with the opening sentence,

"Carols are songs with a religious impulse that are simple, hilarious, popular, and modern."

How about that?

More Monody Argument

"The 'new music' immediately found imitators all over Italy and soon spread to other countries. The older contrapuntal art of the seventeenth century did not, of course, disappear; but the first half of the seventeenth century witnessed a gradual modification of the language of music owing to the interaction of the new monodic idea with the older contrapuntal principles, and the efforts of composers to find a means of reconciling the two. ...The integration of monody with the traditional practices of music and the earliest adaptation of the resultant new style to opera were achieved during the first half of the seventeenth century." A Short History of Opera, "The Immediate Forerunners of Opera", pg. 38-39.

The Monody Argument.

What Else Is New?

One of the most well-known moments in Western music is the stark tension of measures 12-16 in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde Prelude (1:17-1:50). The theme gets increasingly fragmented, increasingly higher, and always resolves on an unresolved dominant seven. At last, only two notes of the theme are left with no harmony underneath, until suddenly an unexpected chord bursts out of nowhere:









Wagner is taking advantage of the harmonic ambiguity in the third and fourth measures of the excerpt above. The passage can be put into simple chords as follows:









The question mark represents the lack of any harmony. What's this doing compositionally? It's creating a huge amount of tension. The listener is looking for resolution, and instead of giving it, Wagner simply takes away all harmony and leaves a two-note strand of music without any sort of context. While we're waiting for any sort of resolution, he suddenly gives us what we're not expecting—yet another unresolved dominant seven, this time an E-major minor-7 chord.

What's particularly interesting is that this isn't a new tactic. Harold C. Schonberg in his book The Great Conductors points out that "even the most important chords of the nineteenth century—the ones that open Tristan und Isolde—had previously occurred, almost note for note, in Liszt's song, Ich möchte hingehn, composed in 1845, more than ten years before Wagner 'composed' the Tristan opening." But the harmonic ambiguity Wagner uses a few measures later is actually a tactic used much, much earlier by none other than Johann Sebastian Bach in his Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248, Flösst, mein Heiland, flösst dein Namen.














Bach, too, is fragmenting his theme, taking away its unresolved harmony, and then surprising us with yet another dominant seventh chord. This can be analyzed similarly:











So, don't bother to do anything new harmonically. Chances are, Bach has already done. As Arnold Schoenberg points out in Style and Idea, Bach was really the first composer to use a tone row. Right there, in BWV 869, the final Fugue in the Well-Tempered Clavier! (Erm. Well, you get the idea.)

A Matter of Taste

"This is in sharp contrast to the relatively minor status of individual 'taste' in Western musical practice and aesthetics from the ancient Greeks until the late eighteenth century. To an earlier age, our contemporary idea of a complete relativism in musical judgment would have seemed nonsensical. One could no more make valid individual judgments about musical values than about science. Music was no more 'a matter of taste' than was the orbit of the planets or the physiology of the human body. From Plato to Helmholtz, music was understood to be based on natural laws, and its value was derived from its capacity to frame and elaborate these laws in musical form. Its success was no more a matter of subjective judgment than the laws themselves." (Who Needs Classical Music?, Julian Johnson, "Musical Values".)

Messiaen, the Theologian, not Mystic

"Pure music, profane music, and above all theological music (and not mystical, as the majority of my audience think) alternate in my production." (Olivier Messiaen, from The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen's Breakthrough Toward the Beyond, Sander van Maas, "It Is a Glistening Music We Seek".)

Atonality Out of Necessity

"The method of composing with twelve tones grew out of a necessity. In the last hundred years, the concept of harmony has changed tremendously through the development of chromaticism. The idea that one basic tone, the root, dominated the construction of chords and regulated their succession—the concept of tonality—had to develop first into a concept of extended tonality. ...[I]t became doubtful whether a tonic appearing at the beginning, at the end, or at any other point really had a constructive meaning. ...In this way, tonality was already dethroned in practise, if not in theory." (Style and Idea, Arnold Schoenberg, "Composition with Twelve Tones".)

Compare with this.

Music Is Community

"Music is communal property, made and played as a shared activity whether it is carried on by a solitary individual or a large group. The difference between the band performing at a huge open-air concert and the person who plays a guitar in the privacy of his or her bedroom is much less significant than it appears. The activity of making and listening to music involves us in something that is never merely personal. In this sense, music is like a language; when we "speak" or "listen" in musical language, we participate in a signifying system that is communally shared and defined, something that is larger than our own use of it and that we enter whenever we involve ourselves in music." (Who Needs Classical Music?, Julian Johnson, "Musical Values".)

Why Sing Goudimel?

This is something I wrote a while back, attempting to explain why Goudimel uses so many root and so few inverted chords. It's not as clear as I'd like it to be, but it's a start.

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Our goal is congregations with ever-increasing, corporate activity in worship. One of the oldest tools for enhancing this activity, especially in early Protestant traditions, is the singing of hymns in parts. The problem with this is that congregations don't know how to sing in parts. They don't know how to begin to learn. This goes back to a deeper problem, an attitude that musicianship is a mater of talent, of divine gift, of genetics. It's not. It's a combination of two things - discipline and conditioning.

Claude Goudimel gives you both. Goudimel's approach to part writing is, at best, unusual. But it's a conscious attempt to compel a congregant into becoming a musician. His method is simple - give each person a sense of identity with one of the four voices of a hymn. Your identity as a soprano, alto, tenor, or bass is something that has a tangible application in the sound. Your section has a distinctive way it jumps around or honks a note. The best of it all is that this means you don't have to read music to learn, but learning how to sing naturally ends up teaching you how to read.

It starts with the melody, which is usually pretty catchy. This doesn't really pose a problem. The next part that we naturally want to hear is the bass, since it gives us a sense of the harmony of the piece. Theoretically speaking, if you're a bass, there are three possible notes you can sing with each melody note without creating dissonance, since Goudimel's policy is almost always to have the bass note sing the root position of any given chord. But, of course, nobody really thinks in those terms when they're singing. Simply due to the fact that most other possibilities than the one Goudimel writes are awkward and unsingable, it's intuitive for a bass to sing it the way Goudimel wrote it. From the point of view of someone learning, there's simply a distinctive sound that accompanies his identity as a bass. From the composer's perspective, Goudimel simply never (well, hardly ever) writes an inverted chord.

From hereon out, it's pretty simple. You have a soprano and a bass line in place. The rest essentially fills in the blanks. The alto and tenor parts, which would seem to be more difficult since they're close to each other, again, have that intuitive sense of what not to sing because the other parts are already singing it. To dip again into the theory behind it, at any point, either the alto or the tenor is going to be singing a note that neither the bass nor the soprano are yet singing. For the person who's learning, it sounds funny otherwise. To help distinguish between the two parts, either of the two middle parts at any point is going to be doing something melodic, while the other is honking on one or two notes. Simply by virtue of the fact that there are only two possibilities for each voice at any given time, and neither can do both at once, possibilities are limited and parts become intuitive.

What's important to realize is not how it happens but that it happens. Goudimel is forcing people who aren't comfortable with music to listen to themselves, listen to those around them, distinguish notes from notes in thick textures, and identify themselves with a particular sound. This is, perhaps, why the people who usually end up looking down on Goudimel are those who know the most about music. Not all Goudimel hymns are created equal, and most of them are milk. As long as we keep in mind that the meat is, say, Bach, we're on the right track. But Goudimel is good for where we are now - introducing the idea of sanctifying corporate worship. It's a matter of creating better musicians through a delicate mix of discipline and conditioning.