Pianist Stabbed in the Bach

Every day at the Detritus we get to observe what happens to a review when the critic is confronted with the unfamiliar, i.e. new music. Since new music doesn’t come with a pre-established descriptive vocabulary, critics are left to their own devices, often exposing tiny inadequacies, more so than usual. Arnold Schoenberg’s music becomes “thorny.” Xenakis’ music becomes “caucophonous.” And in another case, John Corigliano’s music becomes the sum of the program notes. Or John Adams’ music is either more or less similar to Nixon in China. This is understandable, to a degree, and often hard to fault.

But what happens when the critic is charged with reviewing something terribly unfamiliar in a familiar context? Or more precisely, what happens when the familiar piece of music is interpreted in an unfamiliar way?

Let’s take a look at how Vivien Schweitzer handled a different interpretation of the “Goldberg” Variations.

A Pianist Offers Bold Ideas About a Standard by Bach

Since I feel like being lazy, here’s the background to the performance in Schweitzer’s words, which also happens to be 40% of the total number of words in the review:

According to Johann Nikolaus Forkel, who wrote the first biography of Bach, that composer’s “Goldberg” Variations were commissioned by the Russian diplomat Count Hermann Carl von Keyserlingk. An insomniac, the count reportedly wanted Bach to write a musical sedative that Johann Gottlieb Goldberg (a talented young harpsichordist who lived with Keyserlingk) could play to soothe his restless nights.

The legend has been discredited, and Bach’s monumental work is so gripping in any case that it would doubtless have fueled the count’s insomnia.

Objection, your honor! Hearsay.

But there was unfortunately something soporific about the pianist Beth Levin’s performance at the Bechstein Piano Center on Friday. The concert, held in an intimate space at the back of the showroom, was a benefit for the Children’s Orchestra Society, a training organization founded in 1962 by H. T. Ma (the father of the cellist Yo-Yo Ma). It presents children and teenagers in orchestral and chamber concerts with their peers and established artists.

Got it? The piece was once thought to be a sedative, but that’s not the case. And Beth Levin’s interpretation was tediously boring or monotonous as to cause sleep. Clever tie-in. Whoop-dee-doo.

But this is where Vivien gets into the nitty gritty. And so do I.

-

The “Goldberg” Variations (like much of Bach’s music) offer pianists a chance to make a personal statement...

Like Major League Baseball and Visa: “Express your fanhood through your credit card!” Or Random Phone Company: “Express yourself with a new ring-tone for only $5.99!” Yuck.

The “Goldberg” Variations (like much of Bach’s music) offer pianists a chance to make a personal statement and can withstand a wide variety of interpretations.

What exactly is the width of the variety of interpretations that a piece of music can withstand? But more importantly, what is it withstanding?

It seemed to be more about her than about Bach...

See, two things I don’t subscribe to are 1) the New York Times—I just get the Sunday paper for the crossword puzzle—and 2) the notion that black dots on a page, written at a time when improvisation flourished, are owned more by a composer than a performer, or vice versa. I prefer to think of those black dots more as the composer’s architectural blueprint and the performer the craftsman—one is no more important than the other—the final result being a collaboration. Maybe I’m a Communist.

...and her idiosyncratic decisions sounded jarring and unnatural.

Another thing I don’t subscribe to is the notion that “jarring” and “unnatural” (whatever that means) are inherently bad things.

Harshly attacked accents, as in Variation No. 3...

By definition (I’m guessing here, so I leave it to you to look it up) notes that are accented are more harshly attacked than notes that are unaccented. So, “harshly attacked accents” is redundant.

Harshly attacked accents, as in Variation No. 3, gave the listener musical whiplash...

Remember a long time ago when Schweitzer said that the performance was soporific? Yeah. Me too. You know, I usually sleep through whiplash. How about you?

Besides, I think “musical whiplash” is synonymous with “something that takes you in a different direction.” We can’t have any of that in our music!

...and slow tempos and exaggerated phrasing rendered many variations awkwardly stilted.

Since “exaggerated phrasing” means nothing to me, Vivien, I’ll ask this: what is the slowest tempo that the Goldberg’s can withstand and still be natural? Keep in mind that Bach didn’t indicate the tempos for the variations. Ready?........Go!

Variations Nos. 4 and 29, for example, were so ponderous and stretched out, particularly in the opening measures, that the music sounded distorted.

Ugh.

The performance lacked an overall cohesion and architecture, partly because the vital sense of a dance pulse was lost.

Ugh. Dance rhythm, not “dance pulse.” Very different things.

Vivacious, sparkling variations like No. 5 sounded lackluster.

Geez. Don’t hold back, Vivien.

Had the livelier numbers been more energetic, Ms. Levin might have made her point better when playing the slower variations.

Ugh.

But there was sometimes a strange sameness in a work that should be full of contrast, veering from merry wit to profundity.

Ugh. The work should be...

-

So how did Vivien handle the unfamiliar familiar? By comparing and contrasting it with the billions of previous recordings and performances of the Goldbergs she already knew and loved. Awesome, because that’s how we do it. That's how we make judgments. That is, if it leads to a better understanding of what is being compared and contrasted.

Granted, Beth’s interpretation might have been boring. I wasn’t there. But...

Unlike reviews of new music, the Goldbergs are accompanied by a mountain of pre-established descriptive vocabulary, as well as performed or recorded models with which to compare. It’s no surprise, then, that Vivien was already influenced (Heck, I would be, too). But, here’s the difference, as I see it. It seems that Vivien used previous models to demonstrate why she found the performance stilted, rather than attempting to use previous models to understand why Beth Levin made the performance choices she made. Vivien, instead, entered the concert hall with her ideal model already formulated and any deviation, any different or unfamiliar interpretation, outside a narrow range of varied possibilities, was doomed before it began. Hence, we get statements like:

• “idiosyncratic decisions sounded jarring and unnatural” To whom? Vivien.
• “slow tempos and exaggerated phrasing rendered many variations awkwardly stilted” To whom? Vivien.
• “Variations Nos. 4 and 29 [...] were so ponderous and stretched out [...] that the music sounded distorted.” To whom? Vivien.
• “The performance lacked an overall cohesion and architecture, partly because the vital sense of a dance pulse was lost.” Vital to whom? Vivien.
• “But there was sometimes a strange sameness in a work that should be full of contrast” It should be what to whom? Full of contrast to Vivien.

There was no attempt to understand, let alone appreciate, Beth’s interpretation. And before y’all chime in, I understand that Vivien is entitled to an opinion. It’s just that her opinion was made up before the concert began. And that's not cool.

-

It often sounded as if Ms. Levin, who took some repeats and read from the score, were playing Beethoven, Schumann or Prokofiev.

Ugh. Is that a jab at Beth for taking repeats and reading from a score? Because that has nothing to do with anything, ever. On the bright side, good news for Schenkerites: all good music does sound the same!

Bach’s spirit rarely shone through.

Ugh. I challenge anyone to write an essay that expresses your interpretation of Bach’s spirit and how it shines through things, without waxing too poetic. Oh, and make sure it can withstand a variety of interpretations, within reason, of course.
-

Help Wanted: Only Schenker Students Need Apply

This is how “classical” music gets its reputation: through subtle sublimation couched in amusing puff pieces like this one.

Classical music helps soothe stressed dogs

Fantastic! Why don’t we put our kids in front of the TV so we can go out and catch some dinner at a nice $30 per person restaurant, where we’ll figure out how to anaesthetize the dog?

Subtitle:

Bay Area researcher-pianist team produces book, CD for dogs.

If only they had thumbs. And the dogs an ability to read. Drum kit: pah-dum, tss!

With dog treats spilling out of her black canvas bag, Maria Skorobogatov proceeded through one of the Peninsula Humane Society’s kennels as classical music played from overhead speakers.

The occupants barked their hellos and stood on their hind legs to be noticed.

Is it just me, or is the personification of animals tiring?

But the animal behaviorist walked passed the chatty ones Tuesday and rewarded those who remained quiet and still.

“Hello sweetheart,” Skorobogatov said softly to one well-behaved dog.

Throughout her brief visit, music played.

“We want to see if it’s having any type of effect,” Skorobogatov said of the music. “We use sounds and visual aids to keep them mentally and physically stimulated. It also helps them relax and that gets them adopted.”

I don’t have a problem with this. We’ve seen before that classical music dissuades panhandlers from panhandling, crack dealers from dealing crack, and prostitutes from Dirty Sanchez-ing. Whatever does the job, right?

(Also, whew. I don’t have to spell that name again!)

So why bring this up?

The music played that morning originated on the other side of San Mateo County with Half Moon Bay resident Lisa Spector. The Julliard School graduate

Because we all know the only legitimate musicians are cultivated at Julliard.

and concert pianist collaborated with Joshua Leeds, a sound researcher in Marin, to study the impact of classical music has on dogs.

Because dogs need classical gas, too.

Two years of research and clinical demonstrations

“Demonstrations,” in case you’re taking note, is the scientific equivalent of Brian, from Monty Python’s The Life of Brian, asking, “Why don’t women go to stonings?” With a staunch reply, his mother answers, “Because it’s written that way.” I would prefer our scientists, even if they’re testing the effects of classical music on dogs, to perform experiments. Go control groups!

[the research] produced a book, “Though a Dog’s Ear: Using Sound to Improve the Health & Behavior of your Canine Companion,” written by Leeds and Susan Wagner, a board-certified veterinary neurologist.

Spector is the pianist on a 45-minute CD that Leeds produced to go with the book.

At this point, I’m thinking hippie bull, parental transference, guilt and gross puppy love—the wrong, wrong kind of puppy love. But what is your point, Empiricus? Be patient, my young apprentice.

It’s been Spector’s experience that when she tickled the ivories,

I hope we can all agree that clichés are fun, in the wrong, wrong kind of way.

dogs she took care of would move closer to her and fall asleep.

Take note that dogs fall asleep.

No more doggy angst—just peace and quiet.

Are we anaesthetizing or euthanizing Old Yeller?

“What calms people, calms dogs,” Spector said as her dog Sanchez slept at her feet.

This shit not only calms them down, it makes them fall asleep.

On the CD, she plays music of Bach, Chopin and Rachmaninoff, among other composers.

Rachmaninoff I get. But here we get to another point to be noted. She plays music. Sure, we could go in semantic circles all day and night if we tried to define music, but, BUT keep that in mind.

[...] she simplified the compositions and slowed the tempos to between 40 and 60 beats per minute to create simpler sounds.

Hear that Schenkerites? “Simplified.” Get your reduction goggles on. Be ready.

Still I would like to point out a couple more things.

Our sound researcher, Joshua Leeds asserts that

“There’s too much noise and too much input,” he said. “Our dogs are indicators of the stressed environment we live in.”

Emphasis mine.

Four different CDs were cut and tested on 150 dogs in homes and shelters. The one that had an overwhelming response was the simplified classical music performed on piano.

Seventy percent of dogs in kennels showed a reduction in stress, while 85 percent in households were calmed.

He goes on:

“We live in (a) world that is pretty over-the-top with all kinds of environmental stressors,” Leeds said. “We have to be conscious with what we are surrounding ourselves with.”

In other words, dogs are subjected to stressful environments, like us; dogs are calmed by classical music, like us.

Sweet. Now we’re primed for the $30 meat and potatoes.

-

What we’ve seen above and here is that “classical” music can used as a tool to achieve certain tasks. Above, classical music is used to calm dogs. In the later, Beethoven et al were piped over loudspeakers at convenient stores to dissuade undesirables from loitering. What both “experiments” have in common is that music can be used as a depressant and deterrent, demonstrating that music, specifically “classical,” has extra-enjoyment properties, stuffs that reach beyond the Detritus’s normal range of analytic critique. That is, “classical” music is not just for enjoyment or to provoke serious and deep thought—it has other properties, too. Musical therapy is one that comes to mind.

I whole-heartedly accept this. What I find irritating, and more on point to the Detritus’s goal, however, is hidden between the lines.

First, this experiment, or as so aptly described above as a “demonstration,” plays with parallel narratives—one, of the problems concerning dogs, the other about us and our problems. Because Joshua Leeds closely connects environmental stress between dogs and humans, the implication is that “classical” music may have the same anaesthetizing properties between species, whereas rock and pop music does not. This made painfully clear by Sanchez falling asleep at the faintest hint of “classical” music. What can we conclude? That “classical” music can be a powerful depressant for us, too. As if “classical” music didn’t already suffer from the stigma of potentially boring people, here’s a pseudo-scientific “demonstration” informing Average Joe that it is, in fact, boring.

Do you want to know exactly how boring? Near the top of the page of the article, there’s a couple of mp3 links of excerpts from the CD. They’re on the right-hand side. Go ahead, give ‘em a listen.

WAKE UP! YOU STILL THERE? Good.

Now go listen to the originals. Here’s Beethoven Op. 13, Second Movement. And here is Bach’s Prelude in C Major, BWV 1096.

Even for those of you who haven’t had 30 grueling years of Kostka and Payne (blecht), you’ll be able to recognize that the pieces on the doggie CD are... well... very simplified, or reduced, compared to the originals. Rhythm has been eliminated for the most part. What’s left is merely the harmony, like a class exercise—not so much musical but technically proficient.

Granted, these class exercises are of the highest quality (I’d give ‘em an A+)—that’s why they’re Bach and Beethoven—but, nevertheless, they are reductions of the masterpieces, not the pieces themselves. This is where I find another problem. At what point of reduction (yeah I’m asking you, you Schenkerites) can we still attach the names Bach and Beethoven to these increasingly nondescript chorales? I know I’m inching very close to the question of intellectual property, but that’s not where I’m going.

What I am saying is that the doggie pianist still attaches Beethoven and Bach’s names to these rather non-musical reductions (insert discussion about what is or isn’t musical here). By doing so, and at the same time trying to anaesthetize dogs, which is given some measure of credibility by a scientist’s research (?), Beethoven and Bach, specifically, are taking one on the chin. They are boring. Two masters whose names are entrenched in the collective consciousness are boring!

On the brighter side, if you’ve kept your harmony exercises and Schenkerian reductions, I know a field ripe for exploitation.

For someone who read this article with little or no interest in classical music but loved dogs, what might he or she come away with? Beethoven and Bach are boring? Classical music is boring? So boring you can put dogs to sleep with it? So boring it can be researched and studied? If I listened to classical music, I can relieve my stress through boredom?

It comes as no surprise that the San Francisco/Bay Area classical music radio station 102.1 KDFC, every weekday at 2PM and 7PM, air a program titled the “Island of Sanity.” It’s their

signature midday getaway—three pieces of calm, comfortable, KDFC classical.

It’s designed to mitigate your stressful workday. Like I said above, I don’t have a problem with using classical music as a tool for something else, like stress relief. I take issue with our media outlets who refuse to engage their audiences with lively discussion or adventurous and stimulating programming.

What really kills me is that every day an article is written about how shitty modern music is—it’s academic, it’s elitist, it’s emotionless, etc.—and how “tonal” music is much better. In fact, I bet tonal composers receive four to five times the number of qualifying adjectives than those under Schoenberg’s evil, serialist, tonal-center-hating regime, even though they can, and have been, elitist and academic. But when poorly conceived doggie CDs are written about in a major newspaper, ones that equate classical music, in general, with stress-relief through boredom, I have an even greater bone to pick. It blindly condemns all classical music, tonal, modern, what have you, to an existence solely as a background for meditation. I ain’t cool with that.

Compound the crappy articles about music and dogs with rabid connoisseurship and hefty prices at the symphony, and I might as well quit this music thing altogether!

Is anyone out there who has a problem with all of this dreck? Is there anything to be done about it? Does the free market really have the final say? Am I insane? Is my dog insane?

(Tired of ranting. Commits suicide, again.)
-

Music Theorist of the...Week?

Today's Music Theorist of the...Week? is Heinrich Schenker.

(1868-1935)

Schenker developed a reductive form of linear analysis of tonal music that aims to show the structural basis of tonality.

Think of it as a line graph that shows the organization of a painting. Or, if you prefer, think of it as a plot synopsis of a play or movie that shows the important structural events.

The basic idea is that the background of tonal "masterworks" are all structured about simple voice-leading principles. An hour-long Beethoven symphony, to Schenker, has the same principles of design as a Schubert song. This both makes sense and is confusing.

Many of Schenker's students fled Europe in face of Nazi invasions. They all landed in New York or New England, and got jobs all over the place, and thusly his ideas have been disseminated throughout the American music theory landscape. (No one in Europe studies Schenker.)

His ideas are profound and important. I have been forced to study them on more than one occasion. When you do, you make lots of graphs that look like this:

This is very confusing to the uninitiated. Sorry!

His theories are cool. And esoteric, which is also cool. He is also problematic in many ways. He refused to acknowledge music that was before Bach and after Brahms as "music". He was a bigot. He had many hard-to-deal-with ideas.

In the end, his structural ideas about tonal music are compelling. The graphs are fun to make, and to look at! And hard to understand. Here is a picture of Mr. Schenker that is not fun to look at.


You should not listen to his music! However, if you are interested in nerdy, esoteric music theory, you should check out his theory and graphs. They are totally fun to look at.

(All of the graphs get bigger if you click on them!)
-