FALSE RELATIONS

March 3rd 2012

at least 33 reasons why Andras Schiff is the greatest pianist I have ever encountered

Andras Schiff at Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, 29th February 2012

J.S. Bach 3-Part Inventions BWV787-801

Bartok: Piano Sonata (1926)

Beethoven: 33 Variations on a Waltz (Diabelli Variations) Op. 120

Encores: Bagatelle in b minor Op. 126/4 (Beethoven) & “Allegro Barbaro” (Bartok)

Let us start at the end by saying that this was the most profound musical experience of my life so far. It was without doubt the most intellectually stimulating, entertaining, funny, moving and generous piano recital I’ve ever encountered.

This was a concert about endings and beginnings and the varied trajectories one might find between them.

This was a concert with more than one false ending, more than a handful of new beginnings: this was the most profoundly musical concert I have ever attended, in that the arrangement of pieces, the style of performance, the durations of pauses, the whole “presentational” aspect of the concert worked in an entirely musical way.

Just as Beethoven takes what must be one of the most comically banal themes in the history of music and transmutes it into a pinnacle of the piano repertoire, this concert took a collection of great masterpieces and made them work as a whole (without in any way diminishing their differences) to create a meta-musical narrative that served to intensify the qualities of the individual composer’s works.

For the first time in my life I was moved to tears by a piano recital and stood up spontaneously before anyone else once that magical final chord vanished into silence. For the first time in a very long time I yelled “Bravo” at the top of my voice (but I really wanted to yell “Da Capo!!”). For the first time in my life I laughed out loud (thankfully with the rest of the audience) at a piano recital. For the first time in what seems like a very long time a concert of some extremely complex music lasting more than 2 hours in total felt as if it were over way too soon and as the final sections of the Diabelli Variations approached I was filled with the most extraordinary sadness that soon it would be at an end.

He could have returned to the beginning and begun the work all over again.

So as I sit here at the house of a dear friend looking out over the San Francisco skyline towards the bay I now have by my side a copy of the Urtext edition of the Diabelli Variations signed by Andras Schiff. The fact that I have this still makes me beam with pleasure!

I am not normally one to go all “fan-boy” on a classical pianist but I felt compelled to attempt to meet a pianist I admire without reservation. I wanted to tell him exactly what I thought. I didn’t want to say the usual platitudes pianists of his calibre must hear all the time (eg. “that was marvelous, beautiful, lovely, etc etc etc” - what do things like that mean anyway?).

No, as those who know me could probably expect, I told him that despite having many recordings of the Diabelli Variations (for several months it has been the piece I listen to the most as I wanted to be well prepared to notice precisely what it was that he would bring to the work) that were musical relations in his performance I had never heard before so I asked him to sign one of those places.

As I write this I realise that it is in effect a sort of false relation. In Var. VI at bar 17 in the left hand a rising scale from a trilled low G (with a “Nachschlag” including an F-sharp) to the D a 5th above then begins again from the low G, outlining a dominant triad, but the line lands on an F-natural just after the right hand has begun a canonic imitation of that line 2 octaves higher and precisely 1 bar later. With material of this simplicity the counterpoint is not especially erudite but by emphasising the slightest harmonic alterations the passage made very powerful sense in terms of the trajectory of the work as a whole.

So I asked him to sign that very place, because at that point I knew that this was going to be one of those performances where something magical was happening.

After a very long concert I waited outside in the drizzle of a cold night hoping to see him as he left the Zellerbach Hall. I was the only one waiting and there he was, in his customary dark hat and overcoat.

I approached with some trepidation and said “Excuse me Mr Schiff I just have to tell you that was the most perfect most profound concert experience of my life.” He seemed pleased that someone admired his playing and loved music enough to go to all that effort. I said I worked at Marbecks Classical and sell a lot of his CDs, often tell customers that the recording of the Six Partitas on ECM is for me the greatest piano recital CD ever made and told him in addition that after the deaths of my parents his recordings of the Goldberg Variations and the Partitas in particular helped me get through those particularly difficult times.

He seemed humbled and genuinely happy, he bowed towards me and seemed almost embarrassed by my unrestrained adoration.

In the next post I want to go through the performance of the Diabellis in particular, in as much detail as I can.

Posted at 11:14am.

December 18th 2011

Franz Kafka - “Report to an Academy”

Posted at 11:34am.

“

All too often men are betrayed by the word freedom. And as freedom is counted among the most sublime feelings, so the corresponding disillusionment can be also sublime.

”

December 13th 2011

4’33” - John Cage (1952)

25 notes

I have to admit I have approached this post with some trepidation: it is the first of a series of reflections on what I consider to be “great” works of music.

I have had this in my drafts folder for some time now, not knowing where to start the series, whether to write them in chronological order, whether to write them just in a random, more or less subjective or personal order.

There are after all some works I might find easier to write about than others (not that this means they are “better” or more “beloved” than others): but for reasons which will I hope become more clear I have decided to start this series of reflections with a work that determines no sounds, only a period of listening.

So why begin here? Why commence a series of reflections on music with a work that for some does not even come under the category of “music” at all?

By commencing with this notorious work I want to foreground the place of listening.

Placing an emphasis on listening, as a consciously undertaken and at the same time deeply irrational activity puts the onus of “understanding” back where it belongs: with the listener.

How many times have we heard “audiences will not …” or “audiences don’t like …” as if the audience’s response to a piece of music were solely the responsibility of the composer.

I’m sure some composers believe they “know” what “the audience” … “wants”.

I pity them.

I want from music what I can never have wanted because I want something that only that so far unheard piece can provide, even if that is only the promise of something to come.

A little anecdote to illustrate this. Not long ago a customer came into my store while I was playing a new CD of work by a contemporary NZ composer and said “So this is music”, meaning, “So this counts as music these days”.

Now the music I was playing did not evince Xenakis-like levels of dissonance, nor was it overly complex texturally. It was I would say mildly modernist but this customer, like more than a few, thought what he would describe as “music” ended somewhere around the time of Stanford’s first premieres.

I replied, “of course it is music, whether or not you like it is entirely up to you but being written, played and heard it is at the very least music”.

Of course I, like many others, have been guilty of the sin of thinking that what I like is really “music” whereas things I may not like are somehow less “musical”. I do believe that different kinds of music call for different types of reflection and still can’t come up with a meaningful concept of what we might call “musical value” that would encompass Kylie Minogue and Brian Ferneyhough.

Most definitions, especially philosophical ones, of what “music” might be usually centre on the production or reproduction of musical works: I think what makes something musical is the act of listening.

Are birdsongs music? Before the immersion in the works of Olivier Messiaen that started in my late teens I wouldn’t have said so but now I have little choice but to listen to them as if they were, indeed, “music”.

It is listening that can make something into music.

Take for example the period of practice before an orchestral concert where all the musicians practice the parts they seem to find difficult (there is no real name for this practice that is common with Australasian orchestras but apparently rare overseas): one can indeed listen to this barrage of chaotically overlaid fragments of the work one is about to see and hear performed as if it were in fact a musical work, it often shares an overall tonal coloration with the work where all those lines are properly coordinated, it often has a randomly generated “form” of sorts, etc etc.

It is a fun thing to do before a concert and I heartily recommend it: part of listening to music, especially contemporary music, means finding a way through something that might present itself to your ears in quite a new form, it means finding a sufficient sense of order or coherence in what seems at first chaotic.

I consider myself extremely fortunate that through the accidents of birth and privilege (eg. no piano lessons for me) I went through music history backwards, on my own, guided by books and given pointers by some particularly open-minded art teachers. I discovered musical history starting from the 1960’s avant garde of Cage, Stockhausen, Boulez and others: this meant that a degree of struggle to “comprehend” or “understand” has become for me part of the nature of a worthwhile musical work and a work that presents itself (arrogantly I believe) as “accessible” or “simple” would always ring somehow a little false.

Once you have listened enough to the self-consciously avant garde and “difficult” music of the post-war “Darmstadt” generation and their ancestors, and found things to love and cherish in that experience it becomes impossible to believe that anyone, either composers or administrators, can really “know” what “the audience” might “like”: I adored Elliot Carter’s Double Concerto from the very first time I heard it and the same goes for Kontakte by Stockhausen or Le Marteau Sans Maitre by Boulez.

I also immediately loved the work under discussion here: I often think of it as the purest work of music because in it music is reduced to nothing and everything comes back to listening, to the sounds of nature, to the random patchwork of noises that punctuate a performance and the challenge is laid at the feet of the listening subject: make music out of this.

Everyone knows the story of the first performances of this work: a pianist comes out on stage in the context of an otherwise “normal” recital, sits at the keyboard with a stopwatch, carefully closes the lid that normally covers the keyboard, and proceeds to not make any normally produced musical sounds.

Writers on music usually behave as if there were this defined and understood thing called “listening” or “the audience”: it seems to me, on the contrary, that each and every one of us listens in a necessarily individual, unique and unrepeatable way to any work of music.

I used to believe that in general there was something like a broadly shared common taste. One only has to work in a record store for a couple of months to realise the infinite variety of ways of listening (which to me logically implies an almost infinite number of ways to avoid listening).

There is, therefore and perhaps first of all, no “audience”: only “audiences”, at least as many as there are people listening and who is to say that we as listeners are only ever singular?

What if we were to consider, seriously, something hardly any writers on music ever acknowledge: are we only ever the one person, the one unique subject when it comes to music?

Posted at 10:10pm and tagged with: Cage, listening, 101 great works,.

November 4th 2011

9 notes

Helmut Lachenmann - “Über die Chancen der Schönheit im heutigen Komponieren” (On the Prospects of Beauty in Contemporary Composition)

Posted at 10:10am and tagged with: Lachenmann, beauty, listening,.

“

We still love and seek beauty, each in our own way. But it is precisely our love of the unbroken which betrays our desperate longing for an intact world when we are faced by one that is deeply disrupted, both externally and internally. Today’s composer cannot satisfy this longing by appeasing it with some sort of shimmering aesthetic fata morgana. Only when we intervene in our habitual processes of perception, only then will listening as a perceptual process call attention to itself, to its malleability – only then will the act of listening and, with it, the listener himself be moved.

”

October 3rd 2011

In praise of Yevgeni Koroliov

I almost feel like saying the Yevgeni Koroliov Euroarts DVD performance of the Goldberg Variations is the most convincing interpretation of this masterpiece I have encountered since the Andras Schiff live recording from 2001 on ECM.

I adore the “Goldbergs” - I collect recordings of them and have several favourites for various sections (even recordings I do not admire overall have some things to recommend them, even a “bad” performance can be instructive).

Koroliov, performing at the Gewandhaus hall in Leipzig in 2008, provides a convincing and yet completely new take on how to play this work: it is unlike any other I have encountered, certainly on occasion a little like Gould or Tureck at their (for me unfortunately rare) best, Gulda, Schiff and Richter.

Some of it has a quality Koroliov shares with Schiff, that of variety of articulation and touch coupled with a singing tone and a sense of playfulness and wit. I think they share as well a certain emotional reserve, a recognition of the formal, symmetrical nature of the framework which necessarily structures the possible ways of embellishing the polyphony.

They are quite individual interpretations but which I find totally convincing: Koroliov has made me sit there without watching and just listen as I read the score, to see more clearly the decisions being made, especially in terms of phrasing and articulation on a note by note basis: I call this “microphrasing”.

Because of this attention paid to microphrasing time and again I was taken aback by some of the decisions, mixtures of staccato and legato phrasing, giving the playing, even at its most fleet and rapid, a strongly singing, vocal quality, the lines “breathe” and articulate as if they were flights of coloratura in a vocal work like a cantata.

It is tremendously rhetorical playing, expressive but still highly controlled and delivered with effortless virtuosity (the toccatas, for example, are played faster and at the same time more eloquently than any others I have found in other performances).

Although the recording as a whole is fairly long, around 88 minutes, and some movements are extremely slow if one is used to faster recordings (the 25th variation for example lasts for more than 10 minutes), this extreme is balanced by a tendency to play movements with rapid figuration extremely fast.

Just as pianism this is highly impressive but it is of course more than that: similarly Koroliov’s reading of the piece is more than tempo extremes, if it were not at the same time alert to the multitude of possible moods and atmospheres of each of the variations.

I note the constant reworking of the texture of the performance, its changing and unpredictable use of phrasing, using various shades of legato, staccato and marcato, accentuation and dynamics that are constantly varied from formal unit to formal unit).

There is an extremely articulated, “microphrasing” of the lines, extending beyond embellishment of the polyphonic lines to a sort of constant manipulation of the individual sounds that embody those lines and therefore constitute the textures heard by the listener.

I have not stopped watching it for two days now.

The “Aria” in particular is amazing: so moving and troubled under its outwardly tranquil appearance. It is singing, capricious and extremely precise and eloquent. It is playing with (in all senses) Empfindsamkeit. The da capo reappearance of the Aria at the end, now shorn of the repeats is beautifully judged, troubled but with a quiet strength as well, beautifully sustained and with singing tone.

It also features the most stunningly varied articulation I have encountered for a long time, from a pianist and some of the most interesting new interpretations of certain variations.

The journey Koroliov takes you on with this performance is of extraordinary range: from the most giddily playful invention to the depths of despair and anxiety, the emotional and musical journeys are intertwined profoundly in this performance.

Posted at 1:30am.

September 11th 2011

2 notes

Friedrich Nietzsche - Twilight of the Idols (Maxims and Missiles, No. 33)

In the last sentence Nietzsche makes a typically ironic reference to a common misunderstanding of some lines from a poem by Ernst Moritz Arndt, “Des Deutschen Vaterland”.

Arndt provides an answer to the question “Where is the fatherland?” as follows: “As far as the German tongue resounds / And sings songs to God in heaven (So weit die deutsche Zunge klingt / Und Gott im himmel lieder singt)”. For Arndt (as for a long lineage of German thinkers) the fatherland is not bound by any geographic border but remains a purely spiritual domain, a territory of language, song and devotion to God.

By this time Nietzsche was virulently opposed to nationalism in general and German nationalism in particular, delighting in lambasting “the Germans” whom he often characterised as stupid, or worse. Nietzsche implies “the German” mistakenly imagines “God in heaven sings songs” when he hears these words taken out of context.

Ironically enough the 3rd sentence of this missive is nearly always quoted entirely out of context (I have done so many times myself): but in philosophy, as in music, context is more than everything.

Posted at 7:06pm and tagged with: Nietzsche, nationalism,.

“

What trifles constitute happiness! The sound of a bagpipe. - Without music life would have been a mistake. The German imagines even God himself as a songster.

”

September 11th 2011

“Understanding”

21 notes

“We do not understand music - it understands us. This is as true for the musician as for the layman. When we think ourselves closest to it, it speaks to us and waits sad-eyed for us to answer.”

This comment is made in an unpublished notebook by Theodor Adorno from the late 1930s in exile from Germany. The notebook contains the fragments of his never completed book on Beethoven which was to have been called Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music. Neither Beethoven nor his work is named in this fragment and Adorno seems to be writing about music in general but this has always struck me as one of the most profound insights into the power of music that I have ever come across.

Typically it is not subject to verification (how could it be?) but it brings to light something I want to dwell on for a while: why should music be “understandable” even if this were possible? Do composers always “understand” their works?

In fact I would push further and say that the condition sine qua non of truly great music is that it has this effect: the effect of speaking to us in a language we do not understand at first and which challenges us to find ways to “answer” its demands, respond to its questions, even if we do not understand how.

Questions are nearly always more interesting than answers and great music is more on the side of the question than the answer.

As a side-note I have just been reading chapter 64 of Richard Taruskin’s huge Oxford History of Western Music where he approvingly cites Britten’s remark perhaps provoked by his experience of a self-consciously avant-garde music composed by a younger generation: “it is insulting to address anyone in a language which they do not understand”.

Well thank you Miss Manners. We are constantly being addressed in languages we do not “understand”. Fancy being addressed by strangers speaking other languages? How unspeakably awful the streets of Hong Kong, London or even Auckland must be?

From Britten’s point of view I guess my primary source of pleasure comes from being insulted!

I often find conscientiously “accessible” music … well the only word for it is “insulting” because it has censored, redacted, compromised itself in order to be consumed without resistance: I want to be moved, shaken, surprised to the point of being terrorised by music and I prefer composers to not think about whether I or anyone will “like” something.

“Liking” something is OK for Facebook but not enough for art: for me at least part of the pleasure granted by aesthetic experience is that love (in the sense of openness and surprise) can come before understanding and even “liking” and great art exceeds even “taste”.

This raises an interesting question: if music were perfectly ”understandable” and hence “understood”, if every last particle of sound, every timbre, everything from the large scale levels of formal trajectory down to the smallest levels of fluctuation were perfectly explainable, consumed without resistance, translatable into (… into what exactly? … meaning? pleasure? social cohesion?) then what would music be? Wouldn’t it just be another thing in the world amongst other things?

Isn’t part of the power of music its resistance to being dissolved in comprehension, cognition or meaning?

There is no more depressing experience than knowing what note will be next even if one has never heard the piece before (yes I’m looking at you Locatelli).

Now with something like a musical work in the “classical” or “literate” tradition there is not even a stable referent of the work itself.

What is a musical work when it can be instantiated variously by the score, multiple editions of the “same” score, multiple performances (some more permanent, accurate or repeatable than others) and multiple listeners, each of whom creates their own heard and imagined versions of the “same” work?

What then does “understanding” mean when it is a matter of the aesthetic experience we call “music”? (I’d love to hear some possible answers to this question from anyone reading this!)

How many times have I listened to the late piano sonatas of Beethoven since discovering them, performed by Maurizio Pollini and recorded on cassette, at the Chester Hill Municipal Library a long time ago, possibly almost 30 years ago? Have I listened to them one hundred, one thousand times?

I don’t know and in a sense it doesn’t matter: they are still immeasurably greater than anything else I can imagine.

I “know” every note of these very complex works only in the sense that they are familiar, I have gotten used to them, I can hear them in my head, in my imagination, whenever I recall their opening gestures.

I can hear performances of these works (most of them are, by the way, dreadful) and recognise where a pianist makes errors or deviates more acceptably from the score just as I might notice the ageing of a dear friend or a change in hair colour but does that mean I really “know” them? I “know” them “by heart” in a way, in the same way there are certain poems I know “by heart”. But what does that mean, to “know” a piece of music “by heart”?

They are still strange, still seem distant from me no matter how well I may have memorised them: this is what makes them great and this applies I believe to any great aesthetic experience we might have.

Does a pianist capable of playing the three late sonatas Opp. 109 to 111 from memory in concert ever really feel confident they are “known” or even “knowable”?

I somehow doubt it.

Does this line of questioning do anything other than demonstrate how feeble our language is when it comes to music?

The greatness of great music is perhaps precisely that it evokes the unrepresentable in the failure to represent itself, always holding something back from the scene even where it is ostensibly promised: in some cases, perhaps in most of them, precisely what is promised and simultaneously withheld is something like “understanding”.

So how does music “understand” us then? And who is “us”?

Can we listen in that space between the promise and the withholding of that which is promised?

Posted at 12:40pm and tagged with: Adorno, Beethoven, Britten, Taruskin, two column, Pollini,.

September 11th 2011

Welcome

3 notes

Welcome to a blog I have set up to publish some writings on musical matters (little essays on favourite pieces, reviews of recordings and performances, the odd philosophical reflection and the occasional “manifesto”) even though I am most definitely not a musicologist.

I once wanted to be a musicologist, when I was in high school, but drifted sideways into philosophy and art history. In fact the problem that I have with musicology or music theory as a discipline is precisely that sometimes it foregoes love, interpretation or reflection in favour of “expertise”, “explanation” and “understanding”.

Musicology seems divided at the moment between pure musical analysis and a social history of music: I find both approaches inadequate articulations of just what it is we love in music.

I was trained in philosophy and art history and have a particular interest in aesthetics (Kant, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Adorno, Lyotard, Deleuze, Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida will therefore pop up in these posts with distressing frequency for some) and an obsessive overwhelmingly irrational love of music.

I am, hopefully in a good sense, a complete amateur, driven only by the love of music and never claim to have “expertise” or “knowledge”: these writings are merely reflections occasioned by some 30 ongoing years of listening, thinking and feeling my way through the works I want to present here.  I’m fairly sure that musicologists would probably find my readings of the works I want to present here facile and possibly a throwback to the kinds of “reflection” on art promulgated by the romantic generation: I never want to present them as answers or explanations, rather they are lines of questioning, speculation and opinion.

If I ever thought I “understood” everything that goes on in the late Beethoven quartets for example (does anyone ever claim to “understand” them?) I would be almost disappointed as part of their effect on me is precisely their sublime indifference to my necessarily limited powers of understanding. This goes to the nth degree for the kinds of complexity being explored by a lot of the composers presented in this series of blog entries.

Great music sometimes shows us that our love and admiration for a musical work often cannot be explained and most often we love a work before we ever could claim to have a cognitive relation to it: we are like that with people, often we love someone without ever feeling like we “know” them. We don’t even always “know” ourselves - why should a work of art be any different?

As someone with an almost erotic relation to dissonance I thought for quite some time that were there ever a book or some such thing I could write it would have to be called something like “False Relations”.

In music a “false relation” is a kind of “error” of the harmony produced when individual voices in a polyphonic complex clash momentarily because the composer has not adjusted the sounding pitches of the polyphony to fit the prevailing mode or tonality. It is a kind of maladjustment of the individual melodic lines to the domination of harmony: a preference for the individual line against the euphony otherwise imposed, in short, a way in which the line breaks free, for a moment, from the harmony to which it is otherwise responsible.

Strange that “false relations” in music have the effect of intense expressiveness on account of their dissonance: in effect the theory of the “false relation” locates expression in the momentary fracture of harmony in music (which is supposed to be an exemplification of that very harmony).

Some of the great masterpieces of renaissance polyphony such as Spem in Alium by Thomas Tallis are replete with such contradictions simply because the polyphonic “web” made by up to 40 simultaneous lines, each moving more or less independently, cannot be controlled at every point by an overarching harmonic structure.

It would be interesting to find out precisely why such an expressive device (which one finds still in music up to the romantic period) is called “false”: is it because it is a kind of “falsification” of harmony at that point, a revenge of the particular against the universality imposed by harmony?

If “expressiveness” in music is the revelation of some sort of truth (that’s certainly how it feels at an affective level) how is it that one of the primary devices for this is described as “contradictory” and “false”?

When one has a taste for dissonance it is sometimes harmony itself, the whole fantasy of euphonious streams coordinated from within and above that can come to be felt as a lie, as the epitome of the false relation.

Posted at 12:34pm and tagged with: two column,.