Archives for October 2008

Bleak Inheritance

I wrote an article on William Schuman for Symphony magazine, which I’ll give you the details on presently. I couldn’t really spare the time, but chances to write about Schuman are rare, and I love his music too much to have resisted. I gather that being a huge Schuman fan puts me in somewhat of a minority (what else is new?). There is a prejudice abroad that Schuman’s composing career was only propped up by his powerful position as President of first Juilliard and then Lincoln Center. Don’t you believe it.

I met Schuman once. He had some piece played in Chicago in 1986, and I reviewed him by phone for the Chicago Reader, then introduced myself at the performance. I wish I had had the chutzpah to insist on getting to know him. I told him that at home, beneath my bed, was a box of compositions I wrote in high school, most of them attempts to plagiarize the bleak opening atmosphere of his Eighth Symphony. In perfect crusty-old-sea-captain character he growled, “Surely you can do better than that!” Here’s the passage in question, a reiterating series of succulently grim major-minor triads leading to a long, angularly wandering horn solo:

I know it’s fuzzy, but try to look at those two harps and the piano, with tubular bells playing both thirds of the triad and a grace-note in the glockenspiel. Delicious. There are few passages in the orchestral literature I love so dearly. It’s desolate, haunted, almost motionless, yet palpably not despairing; there’s a latent energy to the rhythm and even the subtly shifting voice-leading that somehow forecasts the sardonic fireworks that will come in the third movement. It’s as Americanly tragic (sorry, “tragically American” just won’t do) as The Grapes of Wrath – a novel that coming events may compel us all to reread. I love Schuman’s Third, Fifth, Sixth, and Seventh Symphonies too, and his New England Triptych, and I played his less impressive piano piece Voyage which had a little impact on my piano writing, but the Eighth is the one I kept trying to duplicate.

My guilty secret is that before I discovered Cage at 15, I had already lost my creative vriginity to the Harris Third, the Schuman Eighth, and the Bernstein Second (gang-banged, as it were). My high school composing style slithered around among Schuman, Harris, Ruggles, Copland, Bernstein, and – more consciously but a little more distantly as well – Ives. Had I not then fallen in with the Cage crowd, I suppose I’d be writing symphonies today. And I still suspect that my personal take on minimalism, heard through glacially moving microtones, minor-triad obsessions, and even my fetish for the 11/9 interval (347 cents) that’s halfway between major and minor, was conditioned by the spellbinding effect Schuman’s gloomy chords had on me at a tender age.

I’ll put up a first-movement mp3Â hereÂ temporarily, but hopefully everyone already knows this piece.

A Clementi Afterthought

One more word about Clementi, and as example a piece I bring into many classes. I was always a collector of canons, even before I discovered Nancarrow, and Clementi was something of a fanatic about them. (Sometimes to his detriment; the otherwise magisterial Op. 40 No. 1 Sonata is a little marred by its canonic scherzo, which doesn’t bear enough weight for the rest of the piece.) There are eight canons in his massive, almost-five-hour piano opus Gradus ad Parnassum, and two of them are inversion canons. It seems to me that an effective inversion canon, in a tonal idiom, is one of the hardest things you can write, and this one, the more effective of Clementi’s two, I find remarkably charming for the genre:

You can hear the canonÂ hereÂ in a recording by DaniÃ¨le Laval. Of course in E major he has to reflect the lower voice around F#, because the major scale (as a glance at the keyboard will show, noting D’s position among the white keys) is symmetrical around the second scale degree. Debussy tweaked fun at Gradus ad Parnassum in his Children’s Corner, and Charles Rosen blasts the collection as a marathon of mechanical soullessness. He’s almost 100 percent wrong. They’re all teaching pieces on some level, but included are dozens of lovely, memorable vignettes, variously diverging toward early Romantic harmony and warm neo-Baroque counterpoint.Â

I’ve always gotten a kick out of keeping a secondary musicological specialty besides contemporary American music, sort of as a hobby and to keep new music in perspective. My period used to be medieval, which I studied in grad school with Theodore Karp, one of the leading figures in the field. But the last time I taught medieval, the textbook (by Jeremy Yudkin, the only enjoyably readable medieval music text) contradicted half of what I said, and I realized that that field changes too fast for me to keep track of – pieces are now attributed to different composers than was true when I was in grad school, and even the technical terminology has changed. So several years ago I switched to Classical Era as a secondary specialty, though I only do the instrumental music; most 18th-century opera bores me to tears. I enjoy taking students through the Haydn symphonies because they’re so incredibly varied and numerous, though it’s a rare student who shares my enthusiasm for Haydn. And I try to show them that the period was a lot funkier than it gets credit for, by playing Albrechtsberger’s concertos for jew’s harp, Michele Corrette’s Combat Naval with its forearm clusters on the harpsichord, and music in odd meters like this fugue in 5/8 by Beethoven’s childhood friend Antonin Reicha:

But I bring up Clementi’s inversion canon even in composition lessons as an example of grace achieved under intense compositional restrictions.

Linked Out the Wazoo

Somebody urged me to join Classical Lounge, so I did, and lots of people there wanted to add me to their friends list, and I always pushed the “accept” button. And I started getting notices that people wanted to befriend me on Plaxo Pulse, so I’d go over there and thread my way through the web site, and then the similar LinkedIn requests started pouring in. And I got invited to join NetNewMusic, as did apparently my entire circle of acquaintances, because most of my e-mail time over the next couple of weeks was spent acceding to requests to link to people there. Many of the requests come from slight acquaintances I admire and certainly don’t want to insult by refusing, others come from complete strangers. But in either case, I haven’t figured out what the point is.Â

If someone wants to get in touch with me, I already felt like the easiest-to-reach person in the blogosphere, with multiple web addresses and message sites. (Sensitive people think they get blocked by my spam filter, but it’s never true.) Given that I’m an introvert with a high need for privacy and prone to the occasional peevish mood, I’m still fairly sociable, and I certainly don’t want to give anyone the impression that I’m too high and mighty to join their little internet club. But I can’t imagine a situation in which someone wanted to get information to me who wouldn’t find it easiest to just add my e-mail address to a list. Maybe if I were young and on the lookout for career opportunities, some would come my way through this route, but my plate, insofar as casual acquaintances would seem to be able to fill it, is pretty full. I’ve found that I don’t like getting caught up in web forums, because my ideas are pretty unorthodox, and classical musicians often get offended by my views (like, I don’t know, my perception that most classical musicians are kind of stupid). And it takes about all my spare time to deal with mail to my own blog, where at least people already know what they’re getting into. If I want to talk to microtonalists I go to their Yahoo list, and I check in on New Music Box, and I look at people’s web sites when too tired to do anything else. I might also mention that I keep pretty busy.

I don’t take to new technologies very well, and maybe there’s something going on here that I just haven’t figured out – or maybe the people who run these sites are themselves just testing the waters. Is there something to these music e-friend groups that I should be paying attention to?

Classical Reflections

The monothematic sonata (in which the main theme reappears as the second theme, and sometimes representing other functions as well) is reflexively associated with Haydn, but it could just as well be identified with Muzio Clementi. Except that Clementi approaches the idea with more nuance than Haydn. Often Clementi bases all his themes on the same motive, or else the second theme is a variation of the first, and perhaps the closing theme the inversion of the first. For instance, in the Op. 37 No. 2 Sonata in G, the opening theme:

is varied to become the second theme (and later inverted to become the closing theme):

It imparts to Clementi’s sonatas a lovely brand of introversion you don’t find in Mozart or Beethoven, a sense of the theme-hero being inflected according to its changing role in the sonata structure, and the whole movement being narrowly focused. I point this out to demonstrate how this particular sonata exhibits one of the cleverest strategies in leading to the recapitulation I’ve ever found. The development ends up on the dominant of A minor, and a modified form of the main theme emerges, moving ambiguously between e minor and G major, and finally reaching a dominant on G just in time for the second theme:

That means that, thematically, the piece arrives at the recapitulation thirteen measures before it reaches it tonally (i.e., a return to the tonic key), and uses the recapitulation of the main theme as its transitional element modulating back into the tonic. It’s an elegant structural pun, the theme serving to embody, hint at, and retransition to the recap all at once. Very smooth, very clever. Clementi clearly spent a lot of time thinking about the potential subtleties in sonata form and how to play around with them. There are many similar examples in his music (and Op. 37 No. 2 pales next to the six magnificent sonatas of his Op. 40 and Op. 50). And when you compare this level of structural thought and compositional rhetoric to the kind of awkward, slapdash transition that Mozart could jerry-rig in a now-famous sonata even as late as K. 545:

it’s clear that some of the excess idolatry we lavish on Mozart could aptly be retooled as honest admiration for Clementi, and for Jan Ladislav Dussek as well. Not that Clementi ever wrote anything that could match Mozart’s late piano concerti and operas (though he did provide Mozart with a theme for the Magic Flute overture), but it’s kind of silly and sad, given our far more complete view of the 19th century (except for the remarkable Franz Berwald) that we impart such a cartoonish, one-dimensional view of the classical era, just Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven with Gluck occasionally thrown in. Beethoven grew up with Clementi’s sonatas and borrowed from them, and I sometimes wonder what Ludwig thought of poor Clementi, a well-respected composer 19 years his senior, reduced to becoming Beethoven’s publisher and representative of his piano retailer. In my Evolution of the Sonata class, I try to correct the balance.

In Westminster Abbey a few years ago, I ran across Clementi’s grave by accident. (The English adopted him as they did Handel.) It was a thrill to run into someone whose music has given me so much pleasure.

« Previous Page