Friday, July 24, 2009
Atonality
"The forces that ultimately to lead to the breakdown of the tonal system, or at least the end of its dominance of Western music traditions, may be viewed as the logical extension of the direction in which music had been developing since the beginning of the nineteenth century.... We might also note that melody was gradually released from its traditional harmonic associations, with the result that melodic and harmonic successions began to exist in their own coloristic right." (Tonal Harmony with an Introduction to Twentieth-Century Music, Kostka and Payne, "Tonal Harmony in the Late Nineteenth Century.")
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Musical Education and Presuppositions
Lewis' quotation should have made the thoughtful, modern reader suspicious. If we were to educate our children, as Plato suggests, to have a specific emotional reaction to a waterfall or a Beethoven symphony demanded by the intrinsic value of the waterfall or the Beethoven symphony, we would be presupposing and imposing a conception of what is good, true, or beautiful on our children rather than educating them generally and allowing them to decide according to their own aesthetic intuitions. In imposing our cultural standards on our children, one might say, we are taking away a facet of their free will, and this, according to fellows like Kant and Locke, would be holding their individuality in contempt and thwarting their freedom to make choices based off who they are, rather than choices based off what their parents want them to be.
This sort of reasoning is primarily effeminate in its refusal to adhere to absolute values. To say that there is an absolutely wicked act or an absolutely magnanimous act is to suppose that, regardless of what other opinions are, the act is either wicked or magnanimous absolutely. It is not a matter for you to decide - it simply is. Hitler was a bad person. So far, my ostensibly effeminate audience would agree. But if I were to take this absolute truth to its obvious conclusion - that anyone who says otherwise is wrong (and is either ignorant and bad himself) - my audience would squirm and backpedal and qualify. No one would suppose that aesthetic tastes (especially musical tastes) are so clear-cut as moral judgments. But just because the path to adherence to an aesthetic standard is hard to follow does not mean that the path does not exist or should be abandoned.
This sort of reasoning is also foolish in its blind hypocrisy. Fish can't walk, donkeys can't fly, and men can't stop presupposing a conception of what is good, true, and beautiful. These cultural impositions on our children are always present, and never more than today. In the pedagogical act of refusing to draw a judgment on a waterfall or a Beethoven symphony for the sake of not imposing cultural, aesthetic standards, a teacher imposes the cultural, aesthetic standard that there are no cultural aesthetic standards. This is what he teaches, unwittingly or not, to his students with his ambivalence.
Musical education, like all education, always presupposes a conception of value. A student of Derrida or Nietzsche (as most modern educators are) would probably tell you there is no intrinsic value in art or music, which is, if nothing else is, a value judgment on the art or music. But a Medieval education presupposes that mimesis of the Trinity is always intrinsically good, true, and beautiful, which is why counterpoint, symmetry, and the antiphon demand a certain emotional response.
This sort of reasoning is primarily effeminate in its refusal to adhere to absolute values. To say that there is an absolutely wicked act or an absolutely magnanimous act is to suppose that, regardless of what other opinions are, the act is either wicked or magnanimous absolutely. It is not a matter for you to decide - it simply is. Hitler was a bad person. So far, my ostensibly effeminate audience would agree. But if I were to take this absolute truth to its obvious conclusion - that anyone who says otherwise is wrong (and is either ignorant and bad himself) - my audience would squirm and backpedal and qualify. No one would suppose that aesthetic tastes (especially musical tastes) are so clear-cut as moral judgments. But just because the path to adherence to an aesthetic standard is hard to follow does not mean that the path does not exist or should be abandoned.
This sort of reasoning is also foolish in its blind hypocrisy. Fish can't walk, donkeys can't fly, and men can't stop presupposing a conception of what is good, true, and beautiful. These cultural impositions on our children are always present, and never more than today. In the pedagogical act of refusing to draw a judgment on a waterfall or a Beethoven symphony for the sake of not imposing cultural, aesthetic standards, a teacher imposes the cultural, aesthetic standard that there are no cultural aesthetic standards. This is what he teaches, unwittingly or not, to his students with his ambivalence.
Musical education, like all education, always presupposes a conception of value. A student of Derrida or Nietzsche (as most modern educators are) would probably tell you there is no intrinsic value in art or music, which is, if nothing else is, a value judgment on the art or music. But a Medieval education presupposes that mimesis of the Trinity is always intrinsically good, true, and beautiful, which is why counterpoint, symmetry, and the antiphon demand a certain emotional response.
The Abolition of Man
"Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. ...Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful. In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one 'who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.'" (The Abolition of Man, by C. S. Lewis, from "Men Without Chests", Collier Books, pp. 26-27.)
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
The Musically Gifted
Evgeny Kissin, 38-year-old concert pianist, debuted with the Ulyanovsk Symphony Orchestra at the age of 10. At 13, he gained international recognition for playing and recording both Chopin’s piano concertos with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra. He was, reputedly, able to hum a Bach tune along with his sister, who was then playing it on the piano, at the age of 11 months. So much for Wikipedia.
On YouTube, you can look up an interview with Kissin, who relates the instance of receiving a good review from a critic when he was 17, but with this barb at the end of the article - “In general, one gets an impression that, up till now, everything has been easy for Kissin in piano playing - sometimes even too easy. Both pluses and minuses of his art come from that fact. Now we only hear in his playing what comes from his great natural gift. This is, of course, wonderful, but in future, something definitely has to change. What? When? In which way? Everything will depend on that.”
Has everything been easy for Kissin in piano playing? When he was 17, he performed Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Herbert von Karajan. And this critic expects us to believe it was easy?
As a pianist (one, I might add, who is stunned by Kissin’s playing), I can confidently say that that is rot. My reader may say I’m being arrogant - supposing that my limited piano experience is vaguely the same as this child prodigy. But I still say it’s nonsense - Evgeny Kissin’s “great natural gift” consists of an environment saturated in great music, hours upon hours of disciplined practice at a young age, and memorization skills that were whittled when children eat memorization out of the can with a spoon. To suppose that it has been easy for Kissin, who ostensibly bears an inherent talent, is lazy of the critic and insulting to Kissin. He had to work to get where he was - to credit it to a “great natural gift”, like something he can’t control, represents a pathetic understanding the great pianists of our age.
Again, my reader may think I have turned into a soft-and-squishy liberal politician who can’t stand to see people not on an equal footing. I just can’t stand to be inherently unequal to Evgeny Kissin, so I’m stripping him of his natural talent. The same with Mozart. The same with Bach. Well, no, not exactly.
I’m taking my cues from Bach himself. According to Christoph Wolff, his most recent and well-respected biographer, Bach reputedly said, at the end of his life, that he had worked hard and achieved great things, and that anybody who worked as hard as he had could do the same things. This is coming from the man who is rumored to have improvised, upon request, a 6-part fugue for the prince of Germany. Can you do that? Could you do that if you worked hard?
Well, no, I don’t think you could in all likelihood. But Bach is speaking from a specific culture, and we can’t just throw his words out as the modest and humble words of a “gifted” man. Bach is speaking from a culture that, as Glenn Gould once related, considered family entertainment sitting around the fire and composing a “quodlibet” - a contrapuntal combination of two or more folk tunes into one coherent song. Imagine living in a culture where the standard for a 10-year-old’s entertainment was competing with his Dad at writing counterpoint. Now, would a Bach (or a Mozart) coming out of that culture be such an anomaly? And, yet, we wonder why there aren’t any Bachs or Mozarts today.
Gone is the notion of music as paideia. Music teaches. It educates. It trains. It disciplines. It cultivates. This was the opinion of Plato and Boethius, who both commented on what a sly weapon music was for propagandists. Music is a matter of education - if our children grow up in a culture of Lutheran hymns, quodlibets, Bach chorale preludes, and village performances of coffee cantatas, then what we could call “talented” musicians should pop up everywhere. And they do in Bach’s Europe. A few years after Bach died, Mozart was playing, blindfolded, for the Pope.
People think of “natural talents” in two ways - a gift from God to the child, as if his musical talent were some facet of his soul, sort of like a charismatic’s gift of tongues or prophecy, or perhaps a genetic disposition resulting from a sort of natural selection. The idea here is that many people start with piano lessons, but only the ones who have the right DNA and the parents with the most developed ear and limber fingers really have the chops. And they’re the ones that end up being on stage wowing us with their “talents”.
But, briefly, I’d like to remind those Christians out there who think I’m giving the glory to Kissin’s works rather than God’s grace, that the word the Old Testament uses for “artistic talent” is the same word it uses for “wisdom”. It’s something that God gives but that simultaneously a man acquires. That modern Christians see a tension between God’s grace and man’s works is not an excuse to rush after this idea of “natural gifts” but a clear indication that they need to read Thomas Aquinas, or, even better, John Calvin.
What about Jay Greenberg, the child with no musical parents, who attended Juilliard at 10 years old, composed an internationally broadcasted, fully orchestrated overture for the 9-11 terrorist attacks when he was the same age, and reputedly hears the music in his head - sometimes even several different pieces simultaneously - and writes it down just as he hears it? Surely this is a person with natural gifts and talents from God.
A very simple test can be done that reduces such claims either to absurdity or to a better grasp of reality. Imagine Jay Greenberg, if you would, born into a family of medieval aristocrats in the 14th century. Would he compose music that sounded like Rachmaninoff or Schoenberg or Beethoven or Bach, as he composes today? Or would it sound like Perotinus, Machaut, Dufay, and Josquin? His music bears the distinctive mark of environmentally induced music - the music he hears in his head does not come from some distant, detached spiritual psyche, granted to him by God upon birth. Yet this is seemingly the attitude that we take towards Greenberg.
To paraphrase Glenn Gould again, he also lamented the loss of equality between audience and performer. The performer is now lifted up as a talented genius, but Gould insists that this is the downfall of Classical music. He says,
“I think that what happened in the 18th century, when performers stopped being composers, was the great disaster for music. And I think that to look at it today as an irrevocable move and to say that this is not any longer correctable, that we cannot in fact get back to that glorious time when performers had a composer’s insight into music and when an audience consisted largely of people who performed and composed themselves - that we cannot get back to that is simply to say that music is finished. There are people around who would tell you that music in our purely occidental sense is indeed finished. I don’t share that gloom, I must say, but there’s good cause for it.”
On YouTube, you can look up an interview with Kissin, who relates the instance of receiving a good review from a critic when he was 17, but with this barb at the end of the article - “In general, one gets an impression that, up till now, everything has been easy for Kissin in piano playing - sometimes even too easy. Both pluses and minuses of his art come from that fact. Now we only hear in his playing what comes from his great natural gift. This is, of course, wonderful, but in future, something definitely has to change. What? When? In which way? Everything will depend on that.”
Has everything been easy for Kissin in piano playing? When he was 17, he performed Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Herbert von Karajan. And this critic expects us to believe it was easy?
As a pianist (one, I might add, who is stunned by Kissin’s playing), I can confidently say that that is rot. My reader may say I’m being arrogant - supposing that my limited piano experience is vaguely the same as this child prodigy. But I still say it’s nonsense - Evgeny Kissin’s “great natural gift” consists of an environment saturated in great music, hours upon hours of disciplined practice at a young age, and memorization skills that were whittled when children eat memorization out of the can with a spoon. To suppose that it has been easy for Kissin, who ostensibly bears an inherent talent, is lazy of the critic and insulting to Kissin. He had to work to get where he was - to credit it to a “great natural gift”, like something he can’t control, represents a pathetic understanding the great pianists of our age.
Again, my reader may think I have turned into a soft-and-squishy liberal politician who can’t stand to see people not on an equal footing. I just can’t stand to be inherently unequal to Evgeny Kissin, so I’m stripping him of his natural talent. The same with Mozart. The same with Bach. Well, no, not exactly.
I’m taking my cues from Bach himself. According to Christoph Wolff, his most recent and well-respected biographer, Bach reputedly said, at the end of his life, that he had worked hard and achieved great things, and that anybody who worked as hard as he had could do the same things. This is coming from the man who is rumored to have improvised, upon request, a 6-part fugue for the prince of Germany. Can you do that? Could you do that if you worked hard?
Well, no, I don’t think you could in all likelihood. But Bach is speaking from a specific culture, and we can’t just throw his words out as the modest and humble words of a “gifted” man. Bach is speaking from a culture that, as Glenn Gould once related, considered family entertainment sitting around the fire and composing a “quodlibet” - a contrapuntal combination of two or more folk tunes into one coherent song. Imagine living in a culture where the standard for a 10-year-old’s entertainment was competing with his Dad at writing counterpoint. Now, would a Bach (or a Mozart) coming out of that culture be such an anomaly? And, yet, we wonder why there aren’t any Bachs or Mozarts today.
Gone is the notion of music as paideia. Music teaches. It educates. It trains. It disciplines. It cultivates. This was the opinion of Plato and Boethius, who both commented on what a sly weapon music was for propagandists. Music is a matter of education - if our children grow up in a culture of Lutheran hymns, quodlibets, Bach chorale preludes, and village performances of coffee cantatas, then what we could call “talented” musicians should pop up everywhere. And they do in Bach’s Europe. A few years after Bach died, Mozart was playing, blindfolded, for the Pope.
People think of “natural talents” in two ways - a gift from God to the child, as if his musical talent were some facet of his soul, sort of like a charismatic’s gift of tongues or prophecy, or perhaps a genetic disposition resulting from a sort of natural selection. The idea here is that many people start with piano lessons, but only the ones who have the right DNA and the parents with the most developed ear and limber fingers really have the chops. And they’re the ones that end up being on stage wowing us with their “talents”.
But, briefly, I’d like to remind those Christians out there who think I’m giving the glory to Kissin’s works rather than God’s grace, that the word the Old Testament uses for “artistic talent” is the same word it uses for “wisdom”. It’s something that God gives but that simultaneously a man acquires. That modern Christians see a tension between God’s grace and man’s works is not an excuse to rush after this idea of “natural gifts” but a clear indication that they need to read Thomas Aquinas, or, even better, John Calvin.
What about Jay Greenberg, the child with no musical parents, who attended Juilliard at 10 years old, composed an internationally broadcasted, fully orchestrated overture for the 9-11 terrorist attacks when he was the same age, and reputedly hears the music in his head - sometimes even several different pieces simultaneously - and writes it down just as he hears it? Surely this is a person with natural gifts and talents from God.
A very simple test can be done that reduces such claims either to absurdity or to a better grasp of reality. Imagine Jay Greenberg, if you would, born into a family of medieval aristocrats in the 14th century. Would he compose music that sounded like Rachmaninoff or Schoenberg or Beethoven or Bach, as he composes today? Or would it sound like Perotinus, Machaut, Dufay, and Josquin? His music bears the distinctive mark of environmentally induced music - the music he hears in his head does not come from some distant, detached spiritual psyche, granted to him by God upon birth. Yet this is seemingly the attitude that we take towards Greenberg.
To paraphrase Glenn Gould again, he also lamented the loss of equality between audience and performer. The performer is now lifted up as a talented genius, but Gould insists that this is the downfall of Classical music. He says,
“I think that what happened in the 18th century, when performers stopped being composers, was the great disaster for music. And I think that to look at it today as an irrevocable move and to say that this is not any longer correctable, that we cannot in fact get back to that glorious time when performers had a composer’s insight into music and when an audience consisted largely of people who performed and composed themselves - that we cannot get back to that is simply to say that music is finished. There are people around who would tell you that music in our purely occidental sense is indeed finished. I don’t share that gloom, I must say, but there’s good cause for it.”
Monday, May 25, 2009
Liturgical Schizophrenia
Drum muß uns sein verdienstlich Leiden recht bitter und doch süße sein.
So his meritorious Passion must for us be truly bitter and yet sweet.
Where I live, the weather almost always gets drizzly around Good Friday. But the clouds aren't darkening like they are in winter. Usually, Daylight savings has already hit and the sun's angle makes the overcast seem brighter than usual. I can't help but thinking that's appropriate. Rainy weather is sad, but at the beginning of spring, it's bright.
As one wise guy once said, I don't think Bach's music needs justification by the weather. But I still think rainy weather fits it perfectly. J. S. Bach's music for the season of Lent serves its description of "Bright Sadness" so perfectly. And so, every year, my family sits around the couch with blankets and sleeve notes and reads along with the German of the Bach's St. Matthew Passion and glances at the English translation alongside. For whatever reason, it never fails to be a rewarding experience, but something concrete jumped out at me this year.
As usual, a lot of things collided all in a flash in my mind, things that I could momentarily connect, but there's no guarantee that I can do it now, like I'm trying to. That memory of M. C. DenHoed asking him why I sent him a piece of opera, when I had sent him Geduld from the St. Matthew Passion. I was utterly taken aback. Opera and Bach had never even occurred in my mind as overlap. Also, my Latin teacher, correcting a student's translation of "Merry Christmas" - the student had put something like "Happy Birth of Christ", and the teacher wisely pointed out that it wasn't the birth of Christ, it was the feast of the birth of Christ. And this quote of Paul McCreesh, whose recording we listened to this year - "All Bach's music, fast or slow, has an almost visceral connection with the dance. Why should we require the first chorus to be slow and solemn, when it is above all else celebratory? There's an almost ecstatic desire to share in the retelling of the Passion story."
There's tension in any feast like Christmas or Easter or Good Friday. But especially with Good Friday. We're Christians. We're immersed in the Bible and so we know what will happen. Even if we weren't Christians we would still know what happens. The tomb is empty. Prophecy is fulfilled. Things are really glorious. But on Good Friday, we're asked to remember the crucifixion. Our Good Friday services are somber and sad. This really bothers some evangelicals because they can't stand the tension. They think that the faith is all about the Resurrection (rightly), so why bother with the sad stuff? But this only shows that they are remembering Good Friday and its events. Not celebrating them.
Celebrating a Church holiday involves two things. Remembering it as a historical fact through the text that we're given - this is almost like the literal or grammatico-hitsorical level of hermeneutics. We just read the Gospels and refresh our minds as to the events and spend a day on this one and a day on that one. If we had this alone, we wouldn't feel the tension because we would know to just turn the page and read about the empty tomb. The second level of celebration is an allegorical, typological, sacramental and eschatological level. Mary Magdalene, Peter, Judas, and even Jesus are you. Allegorically, insofar as they embody abstract things like humility, restoration, treachery, and perfection. But, even better, you are a type of them. You're Mary Magdalene, a converted disciple who was demon-possessed. You're Peter, constantly showing signs of frailty but becoming loyal once again. You're even Judas sometimes and constantly attaining Jesus. Jesus, especially, is the character you become sacramentally through Baptism and the Lord's Supper and eschatologically, as we become the spotless bride of Christ and become one flesh with Him. Aways down the road.
And this is where that tension comes from. You're simultaneously in the story and out of it. You're a character in the book and you're reading the book. You're Frodo on Mount Doom once again, still as excited as ever - or more so - but this is the eighth time you've read Lord of the Rings. That's what a true celebration of a feast feels like. That's why, as the text to St. Matthew Passion puts it, his meritorious Passion must for us be truly bitter and yet sweet.
In approaching Bach's Passion, it's important to think of yourself as a congregant in the Lutheran Church of the early 18th century. The piece begins with a chorus, flung between two choirs, the first of which says,
Come, you daughters, help me lament. Behold!
The second choir immediately responds,
Whom?
Answered,
The Bridegroom. Behold Him!
How?
Like a lamb.
Then, if you were that congregant sitting in the pew, you would hear floating above the complex polyphony a familiar hymn, O Lamm Gottes unschuldig (O guiltless Lamb of God). This is an amazing moment, because you realize that Bach isn't just making these melodies spontaneously. He's made them exactly so that they would fit inside the hymn.
This language should connote something. If it doesn't, you should be worried. Bridegrooms and daughters is definitely the language of Song of Solomon and the language doesn't disappear throughout any of the piece. Certain arias are almost reminiscent of St. John of the Cross.
I will give my heart to Thee; Sink Thyself in it, my Salvation.
This language, the words of a lover, trips up a lot of modern listeners, primarily because they suffer under the delusion that Bach's music is highly personal. John Taverner remarked that Bach's music “is so concerned with the personal Christ, not the cosmic Christ.” Taverner, however, misses the Lutheranism of the day. In this schizophrenia we've set up, it's easy to see how the woman who sings the aria with Solomonic imagery is you plural. As a congregant, you are participating, along with the rest of the congregation, in a communal act of worship, which is embodied in this soprano singing. We are the Bride of Christ corporately, not individually. What Bach is not doing is setting up an erotic relationship between himself and Christ. We are corporately singing a love song to Christ.
And, you can't mention St. Matthew Passion without mentioning possibly the most famous piece from it (and from a lot of other Bach works). Again and again, the tune to "O Sacred Head, Now Wounded" comes up in the piece. But this song was originally a love song. A folk tune. Bach changed that. Is that coincidental?
This corporate nature of the characters within the Passion story is nowhere more potent than in the Passover narrative. Using the exact text of the German Bible, Bach puts the Scripture in a free-flowing recitative.
JESUS
Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.
Verily I say unto you, that one of you shall betray me.
EVANGELISTA
And they were exceeding sorrowful, and began everyone of them to say unto him,
CHORUS
Lord, is it I?
And, then, immediately, in a familiar hymn tune to the Lutheran congregant,
CHORALE
It is I. I should atone,
My hand and feet
Bound, in hell.
The scourges and the fetters,
And all that Thou didst endure,
That has my soul earned.
It is I. I should atone,
My hand and feet
Bound, in hell.
The scourges and the fetters,
And all that Thou didst endure,
That has my soul earned.
When listening to this, it feels a bit like Inigo must have felt when Fezzik put his head in the bowl of cold water and then in the bowl of hot water. Or when your teacher just explained something really amazing that you're having trouble keeping in your head. Things feel like they could pop at any moment. But that's the feeling of this dual reality in the liturgical setting - the feeling of being a character in the book and reading the book. It's like Aeschylus or Sophocles' chorus, but considerably more frightening, considering we believe these things are true. This hymn - It is I - that the Lutheran congregation might have even sung with the choirs and organ - would immediately press the corporate and communal reality of the Gospel into their faces.
This strange tension comes out in more grotesque ways as well. One aria is sung by Judas, just after the chief priests have told him to get lost with his 32 that he wants to give back to them. He sings,
Give me back my Jesus!
See, the money, the wages of murder,
The lost son throws at you,
Down at your feet.
See, the money, the wages of murder,
The lost son throws at you,
Down at your feet.
The "lost son" reminds one of Jesus' parable of the prodigal son, and, in keeping with the logic of previous arias, we have to assume that Bach wants us to be Judas in the story too. That's rather uncomfortable. But it isn't necessarily untrue. There's the same convincting sting that comes, like the Chorale "It is I." Strangely, however, the aria sung by Judas is perhaps the most exuberant in the entire Passion.
What bothers most people about the St. Matthew Passion is its ending. The final text from the Gospel used is "So they went, and made the sepulchre sure, sealing the stone, and setting a watch." And watch is exactly what a Lutheran congregant goes home to do. The final chorus is a solemn and dissonant piece that still retains the dance-like quality of the very first chorus. There's an undeniable sense of let-down and anti-climax. You've stopped it before the eagles have come to pick up Frodo and Sam. And you're waiting until Sunday morning to watch the rest.
But you still come away happy, on one level. And this is why it is not simply a nice thing for us to be joyful and sad at the same time. It's a must. His meritorious Passion must for us be truly bitter and yet sweet. It's sad, obviously, because you are still a character in Christ's Passion, eating with him, putting him on trial, executing him, and burying him. But it's joyful because you know what happens. And, again, this tension is not an optional thing in a liturgical setting. This post is not primarily descriptive. I'm prescribing something, not describing something. This schizophrenia is the Gospel. It must be truly bitter and yet sweet.
(Originally posted on Pontification Ad Nauseam.)
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
Pärt's Science
Thomas More's quote spoke of music becoming increasingly able to stir the emotions it was trying to produce in the listener. It's fascinating that Paul Hillier can sight in Pärt's tintinnabuli style three subdivisions of increasing response "to the words in ever greater detail, with a subtlety and variation unimaginable in the earlier works".
His divisions are, characteristic of a musical analyst, unhelpful and impossibly abstruse. "...the earliest, like drawing with just pencil and paper (the works of the later 1970s to early 1980s); the second, transferring this knowledge to the medium of fresco (mid-1980s to early 1990s); the third (mid-1990s to the present), now painting in oils...". But I suppose I can't blame him - there's only so much that sleeve notes can handle.
I might question the primacy of More's original goal - that the utopia for music is its increasing ability to stir specific emotions - but I think we can begin to see that general trend in a scientific approach to music. Pärt, in the 1970s, "began to study Gregorian chant (not to copy it, but to imitate the timeless quality of its ebb and flow); he also studied medieval and renaissance polyphony, and became fascinated, too, by the sound of church bells." This is music that is not so much concentrated on the Romantic ideal of "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" in Wordsworth's words, but music understood as a science - a part of the Quadrivium that included arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Perhaps this is why, as Pärt's music develops as an "aesthetic" (according to Hillier), it becomes like More's utopia, "responding to the words in ever greater details".
His divisions are, characteristic of a musical analyst, unhelpful and impossibly abstruse. "...the earliest, like drawing with just pencil and paper (the works of the later 1970s to early 1980s); the second, transferring this knowledge to the medium of fresco (mid-1980s to early 1990s); the third (mid-1990s to the present), now painting in oils...". But I suppose I can't blame him - there's only so much that sleeve notes can handle.
I might question the primacy of More's original goal - that the utopia for music is its increasing ability to stir specific emotions - but I think we can begin to see that general trend in a scientific approach to music. Pärt, in the 1970s, "began to study Gregorian chant (not to copy it, but to imitate the timeless quality of its ebb and flow); he also studied medieval and renaissance polyphony, and became fascinated, too, by the sound of church bells." This is music that is not so much concentrated on the Romantic ideal of "spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" in Wordsworth's words, but music understood as a science - a part of the Quadrivium that included arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Perhaps this is why, as Pärt's music develops as an "aesthetic" (according to Hillier), it becomes like More's utopia, "responding to the words in ever greater details".
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Mood Modality
I was looking through Bach's Orgelbüchlen for a chorale prelude to play on Eastertide. I was surprised by how almost every single chorale for the season and its resultant prelude was in a minor key. And then I was surprised at my surprise. This is a way in which Classical music since Bach has seriously damaged our conception of what modes can express. We naturally assume that if it's a happy occasion we need a major key and if it's a sad occasion we need a minor key. Lost is the notion of an exuberant, zippy, joyful, lusty, minor-keyed piece.
When asked by Stephen Pettitt why he took such a fast tempo on St. Matthew Passion's Kommt, ihr Töchter, Paul McCreesh replied, "All Bach's music, fast or slow, has an almost visceral connection with the dance. Why should we require the first chorus to be slow and solemn, when it is above all else celebratory? There's an almost ecstatic desire to share in the retelling of the Passion story."
This is another area where we need to war against the idea that the solemn and the joyous are mutually exclusive. All parts of the Christian life are required to be both, especially the liturgy.
When asked by Stephen Pettitt why he took such a fast tempo on St. Matthew Passion's Kommt, ihr Töchter, Paul McCreesh replied, "All Bach's music, fast or slow, has an almost visceral connection with the dance. Why should we require the first chorus to be slow and solemn, when it is above all else celebratory? There's an almost ecstatic desire to share in the retelling of the Passion story."
This is another area where we need to war against the idea that the solemn and the joyous are mutually exclusive. All parts of the Christian life are required to be both, especially the liturgy.
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