Good Grief

Like we’ve said all along, music is terribly difficult to write about. If we copied and pasted Elvis Costello’s fun quip—“Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”—every time a review had communicative difficulties, we’d find ourselves in that perpetually skeptical no-man’s land, shielding ourselves from the possibility that we can effectively describe the music we love. This is why we tend to nitpick over grammar and descriptors; often, we’ve nothing to overtly criticize. Moreover, I’d like to think that we are optimists, happily acknowledging the best of music criticism. It may not seem like it, granted. But our hearty thanks is omission—that’s the reward for writing well.

It saddens us that we’re constantly confronted with reviews that miss the mark (nay, miss the side of the barn), which is why poking some fun in the authors’ direction can add to the discussion about how we can effectively talk about, let alone criticize, music. Thus, every so often, “dancing about architecture” is the perfect quote to describe the awful mess in front of us.

Standing out as a haunting reminder of the historical importance of the early 20th century, the performance of Hungarian composer Bela Bartok's String Quartet No. 2 is unquestionably the highlight of the concert.

Though it might be sign of canonic progress--that Bartok is the highlight of the concert whilst performed alongside Haydn and Schumann--a retranslation is in order: "Bartok’s String Quartet was the highlight, because it stood out as a reminder that the early 20th century was important."

I’m no historian, per se, but isn’t it the case that all historical periods were important? Like I said, I’m no historian and I could be wrong.

A further distillation of the sentiment might read like this: "The Bartok String Quartet reminded me of the early 20th century; that’s why I liked it." Coupled with the knowledge that it was written in 1917, this statement says nothing. Nothing at all.

Bartok's String Quartet No. 2 was written in 1917, not long before he emigrated to America, and is clearly the composer's musical reaction to the First World War.

This is why I would like to require our critics to cite their sources (I know it’s not going to happen, space-wise, but still.). I simply don’t know where this tidbit comes from. It might be perfectly true--that the String Quartet is a reaction to the war--but after scanning several journal articles, the only connection that I could find is one of chronological coincidence. So, “clearly” is clearly dubious.

By the way, I once had a class on presidential campaigns with an encyclopedic professor who hated, absolutely hated certain adverbs. He would not hesitate to fail us for using “clearly,” “obviously,” or “surely.” I see why.

The work explores the depth of Bartok's mourning over the death and destruction of the war.

Surely (con sarcasmo), but how so?

Uncomfortable and lengthy dissonances...

Are you fucking kidding me?

Uncomfortable and lengthy dissonances thread through the melodies even as the scalar passages drive the work ever-forward like an unrelenting march toward the inevitable end.

Another retranslation: "Marching toward the end, with dissonant, scalar passages, exemplifies Bartok’s deep exploration of mourning over death and destruction."

...I’ll let that one soak in.

...

Mmmm, wanting.

The last movement is unmistakable in its grief; the unapologetic dissonances and scant melodies are certain to resonate with modern audiences reflecting on the current state of war around the world.

Summa: dissonance + scant melody = unmistakable grief.













Fig. 1 Aaarrghh!

Often compared to Beethoven's famous string quartets and considered equally as important to the canon, Bartok's six quartets invoke many folk melodies.

New books about the Beethoven Quartets this year? 10,028. New books about the Bartok Quartets? 3. (My source is clearly accurate.)

His works often infuse the Hungarian folk songs he studied in great depth as an ethnomusicologist...

If by “studied in great depth” you mean “collected and appropriated,” then...sure.

...with the movement toward atonality common to the time.

And if by “atonality” you mean “other triadic hierarchies,” then...fine.

Although, like any good composer, Bartok repeats his melodies throughout the works...

Does this need a retranslation? (pauses for fifteen seconds) If retranslations lead to absurdity, then absolutely! “The hallmark of a good composer is whether or not he/she repeats melodies.” That was fun, eh?

...he mimics the tradition of folk music passed from one musician to the next, by presenting the themes or melodies in slightly altered ways each time they return.

Jesus. This is indubitably becoming a retranslation party. Check this out: “Although Bartok repeats his melodies, Bartok repeats his melodies but not literally.”

This means that everyone ever, in the history of melody and melodious historicism, which includes those dissonant fuckers, mimics the traditions of folk music. Brilliant.

And, in case you were wondering, “those slightly altered ways” is just a fancy musicological phrase meaning “ornamented.” Ugh.

But go on, dear author, what does melodic variation do?

This gives Bartok's music a sense of evolution; each presentation of the thematic material represents an individual life within the enormous scope of time.


















Fig. 2 Gratuitous Calvin and Hobbes
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Music, Words, Meaning, Titles, Critics, and Other Fascinating Things,

Allan Kozinn has a really interesting piece up about titles of pieces by composers. I don't have, really, any problems with it; however, I do have some comments. Also, some pictures that are fun to look at. As usual.

During an interview segment of a Making Music concert at Zankel Hall last week the composer George Crumb was asked whether the titles of the first and last movements of his “Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale)” — “Vocalise (... for the Beginning of Time)” and “Sea-Nocturne (... for the End of Time)” — were meant to be as ominous as they sounded.

Are whale sounds really ominous? I think the larger question would be the connection of the pieces as a cycle, or something. Although the End of Time I suppose is somewhat off-putting.

“They’re just poetic titles,” Mr. Crumb

said, brushing off the question. “Sometimes people take composers’ titles too seriously."

The titles don't mean anything? Words...don't mean anything? Does the music mean anything? Oh, dear. Paging Mr Derrida...

And whose fault is that?

Um, the composer's?

When listeners encounter these titles in their program books or on CD covers, it’s only natural that they conclude that the title is meant to tell them something about the nature of the work. But logical as that assumption is, it is often confounded these days.

Let's see where this goes. There are many things at work, here. (Is there a metaphor in music criticism?)

A few weeks before the Crumb program, inapt titles were thick on the ground

On the ground?

at a Da Capo Chamber Players concert. A shimmering but increasingly vehement work by Chen Yi seemed far too forceful to be called “Happy Rain on a Spring Night.”

Too vehement to be happy, I guess.

And “Cloud Forest” seemed far too misty a title for Conor Brown’s zesty, off-kilter work, with its strands of American and Turkish folk music.

More zesty than misty, therefore: inapt title (on the ground).

At a recent concert by the Cassatt Quartet, Joan Tower offered some insight into how little a title can tell us about what a work actually means to a composer. She said that her first quartet was a struggle, and that she originally thought of calling it “Nightmare.” But thinking the title was too negative, she changed it to “Night Fields” and wrote a program note describing “a cold windy night in a wheat field lit up by a bright full moon, with waves of fast moving colors rolling over the fields” to explain the fanciful new title. But the harmonically prickly writing at the work’s heart suggested that she had been right the first time.

See, this is where I agree with Mr Kozinn. The "meaning" of the music, or even the images or emotions it is intended to evoke, is affected by the title. This Tower

quote makes the whole notion of her title seem disingenuous. And therefore ultimately irrelevant to the "meaning" of the music (sorry for the scare quotes).

Perhaps the notion of giving a work a title makes composers feel awkward. Through much of classical music’s history, the titles of secular instrumental works were usually just formal descriptions (symphony, quartet, concerto), and when titles were affixed (“Moonlight,” for example) they were usually a publisher’s idea. Publishers understood that titles, and the imagery they evoked, could help move copies; composers were in it for the art.

This is true. Many popular classical/romantic works that are well-known by their nicknames were not nicknamed (is that a word?) by the composer.

Even so, Baroque composers sometimes used titles to tell listeners what their works were about, and in the case of Vivaldi’s “Four Seasons,” four descriptive sonnets were translated into music phrase by phrase.

True again; however it should be noted that in the Baroque (especially in Germany and Italy) musical composition was closely tied in with theories of classical (Roman, not Beethoven) rhetoric, and the connection between words and music was regarded very differently than today, or even the Romantic period. (Crap. I should be more consistent with my capitalization. Oh, well.)

Early in the 19th century composers with wild imaginations, like Robert Schumann, weren’t shy about using titles that informed listeners about outlandish subtexts — battles between art-hating Philistines and artistic Davids for example — which the music’s impulses fully supported. By the late 19th century titles were plentiful. The vast majority of Liszt’s piano works have descriptive names (the B minor Sonata is an obvious exception), and few would dispute that the music of each section of Mussorgsky’s

“Pictures at an Exhibition” lives up to its title, in some cases more vividly than the Victor Hartmann sketch that inspired it.

Yeah, programmaticism (is that a word?) became very pervasive in the 19th century; it is an interesting exercise to play pieces with programs for people twice: Once before and once after they know the title, and observe their reactions to the "meaning" of the work.

The French Impressionists, though harmonic revolutionaries, retained the notion that a title should tell listeners something about what’s going on in the piece. You can’t hear “Le Gibet” (“The Gallows”), the central movement of Ravel’s

“Gaspard de la Nuit,” without conjuring the bleak image of a hanged man, slowly swinging as the sun sets and a bell tolls, and Debussy

was a master of evocative work names.

Would we understand that "La Mer" was about the sea without the aid of the title? That is, I think, the essence of the problem.

To an extent composers began thinking differently about titles in the mid-20th century, when some modernist composers swept them away as remnants of the emotional and painterly excesses of Romanticism.

Yes.

For a time names became either mathematical or self-consciously blank: “Octagon,”

Octandre?

“Synchronism,” “Groups”

Gruppen?

or “Polymorphia".

Translations unnecessary, but point taken.

But every now and then composers cottoned on to what 19th-century publishers knew: that titles sell. In 1960 the Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki wrote an intense, thoroughly abstract work for 52 strings, which he unsentimentally called “8’37.” ” It wasn’t until he had heard the work performed that he came up with the title by which it is known today, “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima.”

Ah, again, herein lies the rub. Clearly a timing and an ode give the listener different ideas about what the piece they're about to hear...means.

When Mr. Penderecki

told me this, over lunch about a decade ago, I was stunned. I had always heard the work, with its searing, dissonant string clusters, as a cry of anguish, a composer’s contemplation of the devastation unleashed by the atomic bomb. But when I asked Mr. Penderecki how the title came to him, he first said, “I don’t know,” and then looked down at his paella.

Good anecdote. Paging Mr Derrida, again.

“I was surrounded by propaganda against the American bomb,” he said after a moment’s silence. “Living at that time, you know. I did it. And because of the dedication to Hiroshima, certainly, people found this interesting. Because I have other pieces for strings that are not so well known.”

Did the music "mean" something before he wrote it than after he changes its name?

That the title was an opportunistic afterthought, not an indication of Mr. Penderecki’s feelings while writing the work, apparently doesn’t matter.

It doesn't?

Two summers ago, when John Harbison’s “Abu Ghraib” had its premiere at Tanglewood, Mr. Harbison presided over a panel discussion about political works and cited the Penderecki as a predecessor. When I caught up with him during the intermission and told him about my conversation with Mr. Penderecki, Mr. Harbison said he had heard that too. Yet he still regarded “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” as Exhibit A in a discussion of politically inspired works.

That is illogical, Mr Harbison.

Younger composers are often more whimsical with their titles. Michael Torke seemingly mined a Crayola box for the titles of his most famous works and forestalled critical argument: Who is to say that “Ecstatic Orange” doesn’t sound like that?

Me. I do.

Caleb Burhans keeps a list of lines from films, television shows and advertisements, as well as random overheard phrases that catch his ear, pinned to the wall over his composing desk and has drawn titles like “Iceman Stole the Sun” and “You Could Hear It Touch the Viking” from it.

I actually like the Dada/Postmodern aspect of pointless piece names; it fingers the very issue of musical meaning being hashed out here.

Then there’s my favorite: David Lang’s “Eating Living Monkeys,” a title that the music, thankfully, does not live up to.

How could it?

But as amusing or provocative as titles can be, they inevitably create expectations. And those expectations enlist the listener as a participant in the performance. It’s hard not to do some mental gymnastics to square the titles with the music.

In theory a title ups the stakes by proposing an image that the composer must match with fresh, surprising music that avoids any clichés the title may suggest. So applying a title frivolously is cheating. If composers are going to bother with titles at all, they might as well be as serious about them as Schumann and Ravel were.

Interesting issue. Good piece, and food for thought.