Archives for March 2014

Funny how Robert Palmer’s name comes up three times in a week, and then Howard Hanson’s twice. That Americana school sucks me back into their vortex occasionally.

Two weeks from tonight I’m giving a talk on William Duckworth at Bucknell University, where he spent his teaching career. So for the first time I’m listening to the six hours of interviews I did with him while he was dying, which I had avoided doing for fear I would get too emotional. In going straight from East Carolina University to the University of Illinois in the mid-’60s, Bill went from the heart of neoromantic Americana to post-Cage conceptualism, and skipped over the 12-tone movement entirely. He related a story his teacher Martin Mailman had told him about studying with Hanson.

Apparently when a student would bring Hanson a 12-tone score, Hanson would place it on the piano and look over it carefully, play a chord on the piano, and ask, “Is this the chord you want right here?” The student would say, “Yes it is.” “Are you sure you want this chord?” “Yes.” “Well, then why didn’t you write that chord, because this is the one you wrote!”, and he’d play a different one. The point being that he didn’t think 12-tone composers could hear the music they were writing.

 

Drew Massey’s John Kirkpatrick book has far more information than I’d ever seen before on Carl Ruggles’s opera The Sunken Bell, including score excerpts. Ruggles worked on it from 1912 on and off until 1927, never completed it, but was such a convincingly blustery self-promoter that he actually got the Met interested, even though he had yet to complete a major piece of music. He finally destroyed the score in 1940, though Kirkpatrick “spirited away the sketches that were housed in the shed of Ruggles’s home in Arlington, fearing that Ruggles would throw those out as well.” (p. 104) For once in the history of music, I am thankful to a composer for having destroyed one of his scores. The Sunken Bell  looks awful. It’s got a German-Romantic fairy-opera plot in turgidly archaic English with lines like, “Hey, dost thou not hear?”, surrounded by half-diminished seventh chords and nervous one-note-rhythm mottos. It looks like the most ill-conceived opera, and the most absurd composer-subject combination, outside of Theodor Adorno’s projected and also mercifully incomplete 12-tone opera on Tom Sawyer, Der Schatz des Indianer-Joe. Would have been better had they traded librettos – at least it couldn’t have been worse.

And there’s a question. Ruggles was a well-known crotchety old anti-Semite and serial liar, but we all shrug and smile over him because we love Sun-Treader. Meanwhile his friend Ives liked to revise his music and had a poor memory for dates, and people act like he’s a major fraud. Why the double standard?

 

Just in time, Peter Burkholder recommended to me (announced to the entire Ives Society, actually) Drew Massey’s new book John Kirkpatrick, American Music, and the Printed Page. It’s a detailed, sometimes very technical look at Kirkpatrick’s aggressive influence as editor on the composers he adopted, including most famously Ives and Ruggles, but also Roy Harris, Ross Lee Finney, Hunter Johnson, and – ! – my old friend Robert Palmer. I can hardly say how much I admire Massey’s willingness to tackle a subject that seems to have so little profile and sex appeal on the surface, but does so much to elucidate what’s gone on behind the scenes in American music. The most telling sentence comes near the beginning: “Although many praised his commitment to American music, in the course of my research I have also heard Kirkpatrick called ‘quite a piece of work,’ a man ‘swallowed by the leviathan of [his] own conceit,’ and someone who deserved ‘a punch in the mouth.'” Most helpful for me, Massey teases out the painful process by which Kirkpatrick gradually weaseled out of helping Ives prepare a second edition of the Concord Sonata – and then spent the rest of his life making his own private editions of it with bar lines and meters and many of the sevenths and ninths “normalized” into octaves. A mesmerizing final chapter relates how the evolving editorial policies of the Charles Ives Society formed and reformed in relation and reaction to Elliott Carter’s and Maynard Solomon’s charges against Ives – and while Massey was mentored by Burkholder, who served many years as the Society’s president, and thus has an inside scoop, he does not merely act as Burkholder’s mouthpiece. One might even hope that having this historical account out in the open might cathartically bring that whole sorry issue to a close. I’ve already added a thousand words to my Concord book based on what Massey’s taught me.

And, Americanist aficionado that I am, I gain a lot from Massey’s accounts of composers who seemed up-and-coming in the 1940s but have left little trace now. Kirkpatrick and Palmer bonded partly over their bisexuality (some of Kirkpatrick’s ideas about music were conditioned by mid-century theories linking homosexuality and immaturity), and Palmer had a rough time at Eastman because the composer-director Howard Hanson went on a crusade to cleanse the faculty there of suspected homosexuals. Well, you probably weren’t going to listen to much more of Hanson’s music anyway. And there’s enough attention paid to Palmer’s music for me to firm up my sense of why I have such a soft spot for it, like this excerpt from his Second Piano Prelude in the charming meter of 17/16:

This looks like an early piece of mine that I forgot to write. Notice the G-Ab clash in the first (actually third) measure. We need a lot more books like this, books that don’t content themselves with the public record but go backstage and unravel what ropes were being pulled by whom to make the stage machinery work. I hope Massey will expand on his research and continue shining spotlights into the dim back rooms of American music. (I shouldn’t say that, I never continue with anything. After my Cage book I was done with Cage, and after my Ives book I’ll be done with Ives. Books are how I get the music I’m wowed by out of my system.)

 

Here are the last three measures of the Concord Sonata‘s Emerson movement, as published in the score he sent out in 1921, which is now in public domain, and which – ill advisedly, in my view – has just been reprinted by Dover:

And here are those last three measures in the second edition of 1947:

There are several changes here – the addition of the C-D cluster, the reiteration of the final treble dyad, the replacement of fermatas with what seems a more judicious ritard – but the one that interests me most is the replacement of the final D# with F# in the bass line. By setting up an F#-A dyad in the listener’s ear, it renders the final F (which, of course, is the close of an intentional Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony motive) a touch more surprising. The A, D#, and F could be heard as belonging to the same harmony, but the A, F#, and F cannot – in addition to which, in conjunction with the tenor melody, the final D# came precariously close to rooting the tonality in Eb (D#), lessening the delicious ambiguity, and making the final F sound like a second scale degree rather than a new, unexpected tonic. It’s a small change, but a poetic one and perfectly right. In addition, the F-E-C# at the end (with the added harmonics) expresses a 1-3 pitch motive (minor second-minor third) that is important earlier in the movement, being first heard starting from the left hand’s second note. This pitch set is now found in the closing bass pitches F#-A-F as well.

If it matters to anyone, the change from D# to F# is not included in the Four Transcriptions from Emerson, which, based on Emerson, was completed and copied in 1926, which suggests that Ives must have made the change after that date.

Aside from the better-known big dissonant parts added to Emerson, there are dozens of such improvements that Ives made to the 1920 score in the 1947, things that hadn’t been quite right yet, that were surprising and original but not yet magical. I’m detailing many of them in my book. Thus I think it’s rather a shame that Dover has issued a cheap reprint of the 1920 score, which is deficient in many, many respects. Its reappearance in the popular Dover series will convince many buyers that they are getting the real Concord Sonata – and though not everyone agrees with me, I believe it does this great work a disservice.

(Of course, I am sufficiently inured to the internet to know that since I expressed a preference, I’ll now get plenty of comments saying they like the 1920 version better, just as when I produced a clean recording of a Harold Budd piece, there was no end of people saying they preferred the one with the baby crying in the background. If I blogged that I preferred my wife’s cooking to roadkill, the defenders of roadkill would form a line. Such comments will be taken seriously if the writer can explain his reasoning in as much logical detail as I have above.)

 

I ain’t kiddin’. My son Bernard is reviewed in the Times today for playing guitar in a re-orchestrated version of Gorecki’s Third Symphony. At the bottom of the article (to save you reading it), Steve Smith says that the soloist “Megan Stetson… sang with luminosity and poise, the trenchant ache of her lines no less tear-inducing for being backed by Bernard Gann’s fuzzy black-metal guitar tremors and Greg Fox’s double-pedaled kick-drum thunder.” Greg, a Bard grad, plays with Bernard in Guardian Alien and used to play with him in Liturgy.

I’m on spring break, and finishing up the obligatory chapter for my Concord Sonata book in which I compare the 1920 and 1947 editions. The research is drawing me into an argument that I had hoped to avoid altogether (and I hate to even call it an argument, because only one side makes sense): namely, whether Ives later added dissonances to his music in order to make it look as though he had written highly dissonant music earlier than the other famous modernist composers, as charged by Elliott Carter and later Maynard Solomon. To me, this is a totally bogus charge and I consider it time to move past it. I still intend to make this the first Ives book in 25 years in which the name Maynard Solomon does not appear. What’s muddied the waters, and made it impossible for me to abstain, is that pianist John Kirkpatrick made a parallel statement in justification of his refusing to help Ives prepare the 1947 edition, and of his preference for the 1920 version. Since I’m eager to let this dumb argument die down, I actually feel like airing more of my thoughts on the matter here, and fewer of them in the book.

What Kirkpatrick said is milder than Carter’s charge. He thought that Ives added dissonances not in order to claim priority, but to thumb his nose, to keep “pride of place” with other composers of the 1920s who were writing dissonant music. His specific complaint is that Ives went through the Concord adding accidentals to turn octaves into “denatured octaves” (major 7ths, minor 9ths), ruining the work’s lyricism. But I’ve gone through both Concords with a fine-tooth comb, and I can’t find more than a dozen instances where he did this. I literally can’t see what Kirkpatrick was talking about, and I suspect he was reacting to Ives’s occasionally truculent personality, and possibly even taking Carter’s charge for more than it was worth, rather than looking at the notes.

You will tell me, if you’re in the know, that Geoffrey Block’s article “Remembrance of Dissonances Past,” in Lambert’s Ives Studies, disposes of this matter with regard to the Concord, and to a certain extent it does. Block compares the sketches for the Emerson Concerto (which are such a jumble I quickly get tired just trying to pore over them) with the Four Transcriptions from Emerson, which we know were completed and well-copied by 1926. Some of the added dissonance (or, one should say, texture) came from the concerto, which no one doubts was sketched out between 1907 and 1913, as Gayle Sherwood Magee’s studies of the ms. paper have convinced everyone. Therefore, we can prove that Ives’s most radical changes in Emerson were made by 1926, and that many of them (not quite all, apparently, and who cares?) stemmed from music he had written more than a decade earlier. But Ives made changes on every page of the sonata, and Block hardly mentions Alcotts and Thoreau, and doesn’t deal with Hawthorne in any detail.

And if you go through the entire sonata without an axe to grind, it’s very apparent that Ives’s number-one concern, in all movements, was to thicken the texture, make the sonata more dramatic and virtuosic, and to make more powerful passages whose counterpoint was a little too thin to be effective. There are a handful of “denatured octaves” and quite a few added 7ths and 9ths, but vastly more octaves added to lines in the bass and treble, and also internal 5ths added to octaves in the bass and 3rds added to octaves in the treble. The pianistic virtuosity is  noticeably upgraded, but the dissonance level could hardly be raised from what it already was in many places. The point, to me, is that the 1920 version, for whatever reason, was left a little timid and at times non-pianistic. It was Ives’s first mature and experimental work to be published, it was a quixotic venture in self-publishing, and it came out with a lot of flaws, which Ives very reasonably worked to correct in his second edition. More power to him.

The main points as I see them are these:

1. Every composer who ever lived has possessed the legal, moral, and de facto right to revise his or her own music, for whatever reason, Ives included. Ives himself said that every time he looked at the Concord, he wanted to change something. I’m like Ives insofar as I rarely prepare an old score for a new performance without tinkering with it. I just added several measures to a piece I wrote in 1987; am I therefore mendacious? If, in that revision, I chanced to do something no one had done before, will the history books take me to task for not having done it earlier? Can I have revised my music without an ulterior motive beyond making it better?

2. Carter’s insistence that Ives had some self-serving ulterior motive for the kinds of changes he made was ungenerous, arbitrary, and without evidence. (Carter had a definite bug up his ass about Ives. A close friend of mine who met with Carter only a few years ago tells me he went into an unprovoked tirade about how lousy Ives’s songs were.) If one could find a single place in Ives’s writings or recorded utterances in which he had claimed to be the first to do anything, then one might have to partly concede Carter’s point. But all Ives ever said was that he had not been influenced by Schoenberg, Stravinsky, or Hindemith. Critics had confidently accused him of such influence, and since Ives hadn’t heard the music they referred to, he, very naturally, indignantly denied the possibility.

3. If Carter, as he said, was miffed because Ives was being accorded priority, then his anger was rightly directed at those who were doing the according, and not at Ives. As it has happened, musicologists have done a pretty damn good job of figuring out who did what when, and I don’t see any early 20th-century composer getting any credit he didn’t deserve.

4. Those many scholars who have looked at the issue have found that, while Ives’s dating was erratic, every piece was written within five years, and more often two years, of when he said it was, sometimes after and occasionally before. This level of imprecision is hardly unusual. I’ve gone through John Cage’s writings and works, and his dates are notoriously unreliable. For instance, when was the prepared piano invented, 1938 or 1940? The evidence suggests the latter date, but there is a hand-written score of Bacchanale, the first prepared-piano piece, with the date 1938 inscribed neatly at the top. Well, then, let’s charge Cage with mendacity! Cage says he studied with Suzuki in “the late ’40s,” but Suzuki’s first return to the U.S. since 1911 was in 1951, when he started teaching at Columbia. Well, what a liar that John Cage was! But the Cage people just shrug and correct the record, knowing that writing music is a composer’s job and writing history a musicologist’s. Cage often admitted he was terrible with dates. Personally, I’ve always scrupulously dated my scores upon completing them, and since they’re all laid out on the worklist at my web site, I see the dates often and rarely make such errors, but ask me about some event in my life not related to an official calendar, and I’m as likely as anyone to misplace it by a few years. Unlike Ives’s, my pieces usually got played soon after I wrote them, and my manuscripts have not spent decades getting stacked in a barn.

5. Amadeo Roldan wrote the first pieces for percussion ensemble. That bought him a footnote in a few history books. Any worthwhile composer cares far more about the quality of his music than about whether he was the first to try some technical device. That Carter could concoct such a charge, I’ve always thought, says infinitely more about him than it does about Ives. That Solomon fell for it tells me everything I need to know about his grasp of composer psychology. That two such men working in tandem and alone could besmirch the reputation of a composer widely known for his generosity, self-effacement, humility, and spirituality is a tragedy of music history.

6. What does it matter? Was an Ives piece fabulous if he finished it in 1915, but only so-so if he really worked on it until 1919? What happened in the world in those four years that would have made the Concord easier to write? We possess a datable Ives note from 1913 mentioning having played the Concord for a friend the year before. Can anything in the manuscripts contradict that? There are piano pieces that Leo Ornstein performed in the 19-teens, confirmed by printed programs, that he didn’t write down until the 1930s. Occasionally a student will play me a piece of his, and I’ll ask to see the score, only to be told, “Oh, I haven’t written it down yet.” According to Lou Harrison, Ives had virtual total recall for every note in his music. He was certainly capable, as many people have been,  of composing a piece without writing it down. Not all of history shows up on manuscript paper fifty years later.

It’s easy to see why I don’t want to put all of this in the book. That I have had the chance to spend years studying the manuscripts of the Ives piano sonatas has been one of the great joys of my life, and it’s a crying shame that the world of Ives scholarship has been poisoned by these imputations of motivation for which there could never be definitive proof on either side – since, lacking a textual confession, the private motivations of a man dead for six decades can never be absolutely known. The original charge remains far better circulated than the myriad scholarly refutations of it now buried in JSTOR, and so we all continue to tiptoe around it. I had intended, in my book, to treat the matter as settled, but I find that I cannot do so and engage adequately with the current literature.

Here is the conclusion of what I say in the book about the Concord‘s two editions:

“It is worth restating, I think, that the sum of all of these changes does not at all add up to a picture of an ambitious modernist trying to ‘jack up’ dissonance in order to keep current in the avant-garde, but something else entirely different: an amateur, so to speak, someone who had spent decades alone with his scores and was not used to scrutiny by objective eyes, trying to professionalize the appearance of his score and make it more pianistic, more dramatic, more effective and defensible. It may well have been that in 1921 when he sent those scores out, Ives expected to receive little attention, and let himself be satisfied with notational and textural solutions that didn’t bother him when he was playing the piece alone in his study. The 1920 score is something of a homemade job, and looks like it in places (for instance, I direct your attention to the sketchy-looking top staves of page 33). But in the 1920s and especially after 1939, with the ears of the world suddenly turned toward him in amazement, the Concord score had to be held to a new standard. There may be Ives lovers uncomfortable with the idea that such a genius could produce, in 1920, a score brilliant but still so riddled with imperfections as the 1920 Concord seems to me now. But I far prefer it to Kirkpatrick’s picture of an arrogant careerist who, having produced a wonderful sonata, let himself get carried away and introduced flaws into it in order to show off his modernisms. And I think the reception history of the two scores, with every pianist’s perennial reliance on the 1947 edition, abundantly proves that Ives, by and large, made exactly the right move. The Concord, had it been limited to its 1920 incarnation, would not be what it is today.”

Now, having that off my chest, perhaps I can finish my chapter.

 

I guess I’ve long been the biggest Roy Harris fan left. In my youth I would occasionally run across a vinyl record of music by one of Roy Harris’s students, who wrote in a similar style, named Robert Palmer; I remember his cantata Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight, but no longer have a recording. Recently, in my research into Ives, Blitzstein, and other composers, I’m starting to run into Palmer’s name again, partly because John Kirkpatrick championed his piano music and would occasionally mention him to Ives. So I went to see what remains of his music out in the world; I already had his Third Piano Sonata and some choral music, and I found a delicious Clarinet Quintet and Piano Quartet, as well as a Second Piano Sonata with a Harrisian first movement in 5/8. Palmer’s piano music tends to be rather jumpy in the asymmetric, repeated-note way so characteristic of mid-century Americana, but his chamber music drapes long lines over nostalgic harmonies bittersweetly tinged with bitonality – qualities I adore and aim for in my own music, though I’m coming from minimalism and he came from neoclassic sonata form.

I am astonished to learn that Palmer died only in 2010 – Grove doesn’t even list his end date yet – and next year will be his centenary. He lived to be 95. I wish now I had run across his name again a decade ago, for he would have been a wonderful person to interview, not only because he seemed near the center of American musical life during the WWII era but because I am hungry for more of his own music. Grove lists his most important teacher, more than Copland or Harris, as Quincy Porter, another figure whose chamber music I carry a brief for. Palmer got a teaching job in Kansas in the 1940s and soon after went to Cornell. One supposes he faded from the composition world, as “conservatives” did, due to the uprising of serialism in the ’60s, but he lived long enough to see the Americana school to which he belonged partly restored to favor, yet without seeming to have re-emerged with it. (And, insult to injury, the ubiquity of an eponymous pop star makes his music difficult to look for.) You know how saddened I am to see wonderful music go missing, and to see the producers of it go unappreciated. Presumably there are Palmer students and friends out there, and it would be nice to see his music reappear and get its due.

 

Via Facebook, microtonal composer-guitarist David Beardsley posts this wonderful photograph by William Gedney, circa 1966, of composer (and, much later, my teacher) Ben Johnston for his 88th birthday today:

Still near the beginning of his microtonal period, around the time of his Quintet for Groups, Sonata for Microtonal Piano, and Third Quartet, he’s probably juggling 80 different pitches in his head.

 

All right, it looks like, once again, the fate of postclassical music rests in my hands. So gather for the official announcement:

The 2014 John Cage Award ($50,000) from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts has been given to Phill Niblock.

Phill Niblock (b. 1933) started as a conceptualist filmmaker and, untrained as a composer, began making musical scores for his films based on charts of pitch frequencies in cycles per second. In so doing he pioneered the use of small pitch complexes and very slow glissandos (pitch slides) often moving gradually between extreme consonance and extreme dissonance. For example, A Trombone Piece (1977) employs only the following frequencies, appearing in all combinations: 55, 57, 59, and 61 in one octave, 110, 113, 116, 119, and 121 in the next, and 220, 224, 228, and 232 in the highest octave. Rich in acoustic phenomena and almost imperceptibly slow metamorphoses, Niblock’s music sometimes involves the use of live performers moving around the audience and playing along with loudly amplified prerecorded drones. In recent years he has written, in similarly austere terms, for multiple orchestras, with great effect. Ever since his early recording Nothing to Look At, Just a Record, his titles have tended to be drily descriptive, but he has been a major influence on Downtown composers, such as Band of Susans, David First, Lois Vierk, and Glenn Branca, since the 1960s. Pieces available on commercial recording include Five More String Quartets, Held Tones, Hurdy Hurry (especially recommended), A Y U aka “As Yet Untitled,” Yam Almost May, A Third Trombone, Four Full Flutes, Disseminate Ostrava, and many others. (Read my 1999 Village Voice article on Niblock, “Master of the Slow Surprise.” No recordings are given here only because the acoustic phenomena in Niblock’s music aren’t captured adequately in the mp3 format.)

The 2014 Robert Rauschenberg Award ($30,000) from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts has been given to Elodie Lauten.

Elodie Lauten (b. 1950), the daughter of jazz drummer Errol Parker, came from her native Paris to New York in 1972 where she sang female lead for a band called Flaming Youth and fell in with the circle around poet Allen Ginsburg. She studied with La Monte Young and improvised many of her early keyboard works, composing within what she called “universal correspondence systems”, in which correlations were drawn among Indian Vedic cosmologies, hexagrams of the Chinese I Ching, astrological signs, scales, keys, and rhythmic patterns. Much of her music is cloudy, meditative, and static in its textures, though she also has a more neoclassic mode marked by melodic lyricism grounded in ostinatos; either way a haunting mysticism is rarely absent. Starting with The Death of Don Juan (1987), a ground-breaking work in which she would set a pattern for Downtown opera by performing vocally and on a harp-like instrument of her own invention over electronic backgrounds, she drifted toward opera and oratorio, and many of her recent works are quite large, including Waking in New York (based on poems chosen for her to set by Ginsburg); Orfreo (an opera based on the suicided conceptual artist Ray Johnson); and Deus ex Machina, a 100-minute cycle for Baroque-instrument ensemble and singers. (Read my 2001 Village Voice article on Lauten, “East Village Buddha.”) Listen to movement 1 of Lauten’s Variations on the Orange Cycle; “Jumping the Gun on the Sun” from Waking in New York; and “The Exotic World of Speed and Beauty” from Deus ex Machina.

Pardon the lateness of this announcement, which became official two months ago and has gone almost unnoticed. Not since Meredith Monk’s 1995 MacArthur Award has any music award announcement made the world seem like such a benign place.

A keynote address I delivered in 2012 for the Nancarrow festival in London is going into Music Theory Online, the web journal of the Society for Music Theory. The above link [updated 3.25.14] was put up for my proof-reading convenience, and I don’t know how long it will remain before being whisked behind some paywall or something [it won’t be]. But it explicitly states that I own the copyright, so for now knock yourselves out. Readers of my Nancarrow book will not find anything particularly new here, though I do talk more, I think, about Nancarrow’s place in American music in general than I have elsewhere. But the prize is at the end: an mp3 of Nancarrow’s piano roll RR, one of his most elaborate finished works that isn’t one of the canonical (and I don’t mean canonic, I wish my students could grasp the difference) player piano studies.

As research for next fall’s Beethoven class, I just finished reading Barry Cooper’s Beethoven. Excellent book: crisp, intelligently revisionist, scrupulously factual, devoid of any retro sentimentality. I highly recommend it. I’m going to take exception to examples in it of the way we talk about classical music, and I don’t want to give the impression that I’m criticizing Cooper, or even disagreeing with him. He does something we all do, and it’s not necessarily a wrong thing to do, but I think we should think about the ramifications.

In his thumbnail analyses of myriad Beethoven works, even the most humble, Cooper is constantly drawing out interesting key relationships. For instance, the Op. 77 Fantasia, not a very characteristic work for Beethoven, nor in my opinion a very compelling one, opens in G minor and ends in B major, a surprisingly distant key – but Cooper notes that in the progression of tonalities (g, Bb, d, b, B), each tonic triad shares a pivot note with its predecessor (p. 202). Even when dealing with separate works, he finds key correspondences among the three Razumovsky quartets, and notes that the third of them begins with the melodic notes E and F, which are the keys of nos. 1 and 2 (p. 174). Nothing wrong with that, I do it myself. We all know to use that disturbing C# at the beginning of the Eroica as a pointer to the long passage in Db later in the movement, as a kind of structural resolution.

But the unacknowledged implication is that these seemingly coincidental correspondences, many of which no listener would ever notice (and in fact, Beethoven doesn’t even use those available pivot notes when modulating in the Fantasia) are subtle evidence of Beethoven’s mastery. The argument in the back of the classical-music mind seems to run something like this:

1. We all know that Beethoven was a great composer.

2. Great composers presumably know profound secrets of how to make music great.

3. One can find aurally unnoticeable long-range correspondences in Beethoven’s music.

4. Those correspondences must be Beethoven’s secrets, and therefore evidence of his greatness.

5. Ergo, Beethoven, even in his lesser works, was a great composer.

There’s nothing necessarily untrue about any of this, except that the argument begins with, as premise, the conclusion it sets out to prove. To make my point, I could do this very thing with the music of any number of recent composers. I could go through Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes, find an Eb and F# in one, then find it in another, and, with little more than an implied raised eyebrow pointed at the reader, silently plant the idea in the reader’s mind that that’s why Duckworth is a great composer. All that’s missing to complete the circle is the tacit premise accepted by the reader that Duckworth was a great composer. For that matter, consistently changing tonalities via pivot note is something I’ve sometimes done myself, most ambitiously in my chamber opera Cinderella’s Bad Magic – and without any idea that Beethoven had ever done such a thing.

Ergo, if Beethoven’s use of pivot tones to control a series of distant modulations is evidence of his greatness as a composer, my independent use of that identical technique must of necessity be evidence of my greatness as a composer as well. If you are inclined to accept that argument, then I’ll thank you to read no further. But it might be more accurate to say that, in a piece that wanders far from its opening tonality, having some kind of control over the tonal shifts is a stabilizing technique, and that Beethoven and I happened to chance on the same one – and it doesn’t prove “greatness” for either of us. For all we know, many, many pieces by second- and third-rate composers may well use the same device. Either Beethoven or I might have decided on a different one without our respective pieces suffering (or improving) for the change.

It is part of the classical-music mind that certain composers – Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms – are assumed great from the beginning, and so everything found in their music must be evidence of that greatness. I once read some celebrated musician’s explanation that “the reason” Beethoven’s quartets are so great – the reason – was that he uses the entire range of each instrument. That sent a chill up my spine. Does my quartet music, I thought, use the entire range of each instrument? On the other hand, all I have to do in my next quartet is use the entire range of each instrument, and then it will be great! Right? But by knowing in advance that the composer is great, and assuming that every device we find will constitute evidence for that greatness, we musicologically heap more and more greatness over the decades on Mozart, Beethoven, & Co., and make it more and more impossible for current and future composers ever to live up to that exalted standard. Myriad other composers, in whom we could doubtless find similar devices, are denied that rank merely because they lack the initial presumption of greatness.

We poor composers are all, on some level, in competition with Beethoven, and it doesn’t help that so many music writers are willing to pile their thumbs on his side of the scale. His large-scale structural techniques, his harmonic correspondences, are of course of interest, as are those of many, many other composers. They are not automatically the reason for his greatness, which is more likely to reside in the surface elements that millions of listeners have responded to. I enjoyed the Eroica long before I learned about the C# (which I never thought was that shocking) and the ensuing passage in Db; if that passage was in D-natural, would I love it less? Every composer needs some kind of conceptual scaffolding to build a large piece upon, and composers have an interest in learning what kinds of scaffolding have worked for other composers. That doesn’t mean that the scaffolding makes the piece. Dull pieces have been written on sound theoretical principles, and fantastic ones on pure, whimsical inspiration.

Part of the problem, I think, is that critics and musicologists (Richard Taruskin being the outstanding exception) rarely know enough about composing and theory to distinguish a brilliant structure from a standard one, and either of those from an underlying design that the composer relied on conceptually but never expected to be perceived. What feeds into it is the rather maudlin adoration that classical-music types love to pour onto a few long-dead heros, against which more recent music will always be at a disadvantage. I could write this way about recent composers, too, but I wouldn’t have the reader’s ingrained sentimentality to back me up; to the classical music world, every article praising a recent composer is fundamentally a defense. We could level the playing field somewhat by not overinterpreting the evidence in only a few selected, invariably ancient cases. And maybe just by retiring the concept great.

 

Esa-Pekka Salonen has significantly influenced the field of composition? As a conductor, I presume they mean? Or perhaps someone more au courant than myself can offer a list of Salonen-influenced composers? Or a characterization of how a Salonen-influenced piece can be recognized? Nothing against the guy, but I thought he fairly recently quit conducting to devote himself to composing, and already he’s a major influence?