Archives for April 2014

This morning I dreamed, honest to god, that an editor was coaxing me to write an online music theory text. So I started mapping out, on paper, a starting point and an endpoint, and a tree diagram of ways to get from one to the other. At the point where you study triads, both classical and jazz terminology would be given. Then, to go to seventh chords, if you click on classical it will take you to a page on the five standard classical seventh chords, or if on jazz, to a page with the seven or eight or nine (depending on who I’ve been taking advice from) jazz seventh chords. The jazz links eventually ended up in modal improv, and the classical links in set theory. The pop/folk route had a shorter trajectory. But it was a complete multicultural approach  to theory through which one could ultimately learn pop, jazz, and classical theory.

Not that I ever want to write any such thing. I have no (waking) interest in packaging information that’s already common knowledge, and I think writing theory texts is deadly for a composer’s reputation (think Piston and Kennan). I much prefer telling people things that no one already knows. But I certainly wish I had a resource like the one I dreamed.

 

God knows I think Charles Ives is god – or rather, Charlie knows I worship him – and I bristle like hell when he’s called an amateur, but I have to admit his rhythmic notation makes me tear what’s left of my hair at moments. Below are mm. 84-86 as taken from the second movement of the Piano Sonata No. 1, and below that the corrected rhythmic notation as I feel sure he intended it:

In the original, the first half of the first measure has only seven 32nds duration in the right hand, and the second half of the second measure has twelve 32nds instead of eight. Now, poor Lou Harrison edited this from the manuscript, and perhaps the mistake is his addition. But Ives does seem to get befuddled when he starts using 32nd-notes and 64th-notes, and I’m not convinced that his conception of a double-dotted note matches what most of us think it is. I’ve made my alterations based on how the rhythmic motive plays out in the rest of the passage, and on how the two hands are laid out relative to each other. The point is to show how Ives used ragtime rhythms and motives to create static textures of phrases going out of phase with each other.

I’m analyzing the First Sonata to have something to use as a contrast to the Concord, and that chapter is threatening to become an entire second book. I have to guiltily admit, too – I think I slightly prefer the First Sonata to the far more celebrated Second. Jeremy Denk tells me that the First is harder to play. And there are many places in it where I recoil from what’s on the page and think Ives clearly meant something else. We’ve never had a clear, fully professionally engraved score of either work, nor are likely to in the forseeable future.

 

 

Every couple of weeks I get a query from a stranger asking me to explain some mathematical aspect of microtonality, and I am so fanatical on the subject that I tend to answer them quickly and at generous length. But for just as many people, I seem to be a go-to guy on the issue of whether we should maintain A as 440 cps or raise or lower it to 432, 442, or whatever. I suppose it says a lot about how immersed in microtonality I am, and how vague the concept is to the general population, that I am astonished that people think these issues are interrelated. I could not possibly care less what standard frequency we tune to. I abstractly understand that for opera singers and custodians of historical instruments it’s kind of a big deal, but since there are no compositional decisions riding on the issue, I wouldn’t even try to form an opinion. Harry Partch’s instruments are tuned to a G at 392 cps, and La Monte Young’s sine-tone installations to 60 cps, and those are the only facts relating to absolute pitch that I keep in my head. I’ll admit that 440 is convenient for theory classes, since one can build a harmonic series on 110, 220, 330, 440, 550, and so on, and students tend to get it quickly; 432 would be 108, 216, 324, and not as obvious. Otherwise, it baffles me, and sometimes starts to annoy me, that people imagine I would give a damn.

On Saturdays we sometimes drive back from breakfast just as the NPR opera is starting up. Today’s was Strauss’s Arabella. The male and female commentators were discussing it, and the man mentioned something about the emotionalism of the music being especially appropriate because “this is an opera that really deals with issues of human emotion.” No kidding? As opposed to all of those operas that don’t deal with human emotion? What a curious departure from the norm. A moment later the woman pointed out that Strauss and von Hofmannsthal had written six operas together, “and the amazing thing about them is that they all have two soprano roles. And this one has three!” If I weren’t already heavily invested in classical music, this kind of fatuous twaddle would drive me to steer well clear of it. It reminds me of a hallowed old bit of dialogue from the British TV comedy Fawlty Towers:

Colonel: Fawlty, did you know that the female gibbon gestates for seven months?

Fawlty: Seven months! Well, well.

In sitcoms we know this is a joke, but in the classical music world it passes for cultural commentary. I don’t know whether listening to Mozart can make you smart, but it is frequently clear that listening to a lifetime of silly classical-music mythology can turn a person into a babbling moron.

I’m terribly sorry to read in the Times that saxophonist and composer Fred Ho died, at only 56: I knew he had been fighting cancer for years. He gave me a splendidly colorful interview in 1997 that’s reprinted in Music Downtown, beginning, “Fred Wei-han Ho knows how to cut your carotid artery with his hands….” What he learned at Harvard, he said, was that “privilege doesn’t equate with talent, ability, intelligence, or hard work. Privilege is simply privilege.” Fred could be a difficult guy, and no matter how much I tried to support him, I couldn’t quit representing the white power structure in his eyes. Once I published an interview with black violinist Leroy Jenkins in advance of Jenkins’s opera The Mother of Three Sons. I ran into Fred at Leroy’s performance, and volunteered an apology that I was going to have to miss an upcoming concert of his that I had hoped to hear. He shook his head and muttered, “New music is a white man’s game.” Another time I wrote an enthusiastic review of a concert of Fred’s, but took him lightly to task for some rhetoric that I thought was over the top. Almost two years went by, and the next time he saw me he handed me a multi-paged typed rebuttal – as we were backstage at the Kitchen and I was poised to walk onstage to give the New York premiere of Custer and Sitting Bull. Once his back was turned, I did him the profound favor of throwing it away, because I knew if I had let him upset me before that performance I would have never forgiven him. But Fred was a phenomenal performer and a very original composer, with a take on protest music that came from way outside the feckless bourgeois platitudes of academic political music . He died way too soon. (As sometimes happens, it may be easier to give his music its due now that he’s gone.)

 

One of my student composers was talking today about wanting to write a really simple unpitched percussion piece. I told him about Mary Ellen Childs’s piece Click, for three people playing merely claves in incredibly detailed choreography, which was one of the wildest and most enjoyable performances I ever reviewed for the Village Voice. We looked, and naturally it’s on Vimeo. It’s a total classic, a postminimalist paradigm, up there with Piano Phase and Music in Fifths.

Tomorrow afternoon Bard’s student percussion group, coached by the Sō Percussion quartet (UPDATE: thanks to Paul Epstein for the diacritical marking), is performing my Snake Dance No. 2, along with works by Daniel Bjarnason, Martin Bresnick, Steve Reich, and John Cage. It’s in Sosnoff Theater at the Fisher Center at 3. I wanted to post more in advance, but Arts Journal seems to have had a new bot attack the last few days.

On April 11, I think, pianist Nicolas Horvath is presenting one of his Glassworlds marathons at the Palais de Tokyo Museum in Paris: many hours of piano music by Glass and inspired by Glass, my Going to Bed included. He’s got more of these scheduled than I’m able to decently keep track of.

 

It finally occurs to me that it would be a public service to make known the quiet “harmonic” thirds (denoting “angels” joining in in the distance) that John Kirkpatrick adds to accompany the passage quoting the hymn “Martyn” in his 1968 recording of the Hawthorne movement of the Concord Sonata, about four or five minutes in. The idea from Hawthorne’s story “The Celestial Rail-Road” (a parody based on Pilgrim’s Progress)  is that the travelers on the train to the Heavenly City are hearing the hymn of the pilgrims who are going there on foot; it’s Ives’s musically-motivated idea that the angels join in. Below is the example from my book, which includes the extra notes Kirkpatrick plays, notated a little differently than in Kirkpatrick’s own personal version of the Concord, but following the rhythms that Ives himself wrote in the corresponding passage of the Fourth Symphony, second movement. The asterisks note chords in the 1920 edition that Ives would change for the 1947: all of them improvements. Pencil the top staff’s dyads into your own score and play them from now on! Let’s make this the new (optional) performance practice!

 

I have been able to locate, on the internet, 33 35 38 [see update below] commercially available recordings of the Concord Sonata (well, actually only 32 37, since one of those is Jim Tenney’s recording, which one can hear on Other Minds, but which isn’t for sale). Of those 33 38, I possess 19 24, and two one more (the John Jensen and the Roberto Szidon, which latter I think I used to have on vinyl but can’t find) are on their way in the mail. I am going to disappoint readers of my book, and probably of this blog as well, by refusing to name my favorite. There are several reasons for this. One is that that’s a music critic’s job, and I’m no longer a critic; I’m interested in the sonata, as sketched and printed, not in its various instantiations. Another is that I just don’t plan to get familiar enough with all of them to be able to recognize in a blindfold test which is which. And the most important is that I’m not a good enough pianist to register a really well-informed comparison opinion in a book as scholarly as I mean this one to be. In matters of touch, tone color, inner voices, and so on, I’m just not that impressed with the authority of my own opinion. If it’s some consolation, I’m currently tremendously wowed by Marc-André Hamelin’s second recording of 2004. And John Kirkpatrick’s classic second recording of 1968 is so firmly embedded in my ears that I tend to compare all the others to it.

But I am interested in the statistics and performance tradition, and I think it’s worth knowing which pianists used which available variants. The most important feature is whether the optional flute is used at the end of Thoreau. I consider it not optional at all, really, but crucial. For one thing, there’s an early, pre-1914 manuscript of a passage for flute and piano using an early version of the “Human Faith” theme – when it had not yet acquired the E-E-E-C Beethoven’s Fifth motive – which I think strongly suggests that that theme was originally conceived for Thoreau (Henry David Thoreau loved to play the flute while boating on Walden Pond), and that it was, in fact, the generating idea of the entire sonata. Also, Ives equivocated on what the piano should play when the flute is absent, and in all versions left the melody at this point distressingly incomplete. Thus I have come to find the versions without flute distinctly unsatisfying.

More problematic is the questionable appearance of the brief viola solo called for at the end of Emerson. It seems to be a holdover from the Emerson Concerto from which the Emerson movement eventually evolved, and while I have seen some emphatic comments that the viola definitely wasn’t intended to be played by an extra soloist, I can make a reluctant case from the manuscripts that Ives did indeed call for it. In live performance I think it would be more distracting than it’s worth, but on recording it can have a certain charm. I certainly have no objection to omitting it.

Even more controversial are the extra dissonant thirds played in high register during the quotation of the hymn “Martyn” when it appears in Hawthorne in the key of F#. Ives toyed with these thirds in an early sketch (f3956):

Next to and in explanation of these thirds you can scarcely make out at the top, in Ives’s scrawly handwriting, “angels join in distance,” which is a programmatic reference to Hawthorne’s short story “The Celestial Rail-Road” – it took me many trips to Yale’s Sterling Library to decipher what he wrote on the original sketch, and I later found it confirmed in a Kirkpatrick transcription. Ives later included some of these thirds in his piano piece based on Hawthorne The Celestial Railroad, and developed them even further in the analogous passage in the second movement of the Fourth Symphony. But he didn’t include them in the 1920 score, and, after a quarter-century’s deliberation (very sadly, in my opinion), opted not to use them in the 1947 score either. Yet Kirkpatrick, who didn’t include them in his 1945 recording, added them to his 1968 recording, whence many fans like myself became irrevocably accustomed to them, and found them perfectly evocative and, even more, entirely Ivesian. A certain performance tradition has grown up around them, and out of my 19 24 recordings, eight nine of the pianists include them.

And so, along with a few other less obvious variants, these are the three touchstones around which my choices among the recordings revolve. Of the recordings I own, the statistics come down as follows, listing what is included in each:

Pierre-Laurent Aimard: flute, viola, angels

Easley Blackwood: flute, no viola, no angels

Donna Coleman: flute, no viola, angels

Jeremy Denk: flute, no viola, no angels

Nina Deutsch: no flute, no viola, angels

Peter Geisselbrecht: no flute, no viola, no angels

Bojan Gorišek: flute, viola, no angels

Marc-André Hamelin 1988: no flute, no viola, no angels (but liner notes by myself)

Marc-André Hamelin 2004: flute, no viola, no angels

Herbert Henck: flute, viola, no angels

John Jensen: flute, viola, no angels

Gilbert Kalish: flute, viola, angels

John Kirkpatrick 1945: no flute, no viola, no angels

John Kirkpatrick 1968: no flute, no viola, angels

Aloys Kontarsky: flute, viola, no angels

Alexei Lubimov: flute, viola, angels

Steven Mayer: no flute, no viola, angels

Alan Mandel: flute, viola, no angels

Giorgio Marozzi: flute, viola, no angels

Yvar Mikhashoff: flute, no viola, angels

George Papastavrou: flute, no viola, no angels

Robert Shannon: no flute, no viola, no angels

James Tenney: flute, no viola, no angels

Nicholas Zumbro: flute, no viola, angels

(I’ll add the Jensen and Szidon when they arrive.) So 18 out of the 24 include the flute, and of those, nine also have the viola. Interestingly, the European pianists have been the most literal, insisting on the extra instruments and omitting the angels; perhaps they’ve had less trouble affording the extra performers. My own, admittedly subjective, ideal recording would contain the flute and angels but no viola, though I don’t object strongly to the viola. The only one three that matches my ideal in that sense is are the Donna Coleman, Nicholas Zumbro, and Yvar Mikhashoff. But another statistic to be taken into account is the timing of the movements, and especially Emerson, which varies widely in duration, ranging from 12 minutes to 19. At 50:19, Coleman’s is the second-slowest recording I own, next to Marozzi at 54:35, and there is a recording I don’t have just got, by Bojan Gorisek, that weighs in at a hefty 62:14, with a Thoreau of more than 21 minutes, eight minutes longer than any other recording – I’m almost afraid to hear it it’s kind of mesmerizingly hypnotic, with quarter-note = 15 during the A-C-G ostinato sections. Curiously, the shortest two recordings are both by Kirkpatrick, except for Kontarsky’s furiously rushed (at 35:58, though mostly very effective) reading. (As you would imagine, Kirkpatrick’s collector’s-item 1945 vinyl recording also uses more of the 1920 score than any of the others.) Denk’s recent and widely celebrated recording is a very literal reading of the 1947 score, as though he’d never listened to another recording, and I particularly love the way he recorded the flute, almost in the background as if it is emerging from the listener’s subconscious. The recordings I don’t have are by Werner Bärtschi, Louise Bessette, Jay Gottlieb, Ciro Longobardi, Philip Mead, Roberto Ramadori, Manfred Reinelt, Per Salo, Richard Trythall, and Daan Vanderwalle. I may buy a few more if I can, but plan to go to no extreme lengths to obtain them. A review here made me curious to hear the Longobardi, but Italian Amazon will not deliver it to my address.

Based on Ives’s oft-made comments about Emerson never having felt completed, some scholars, such as Stephen Drury (in his introduction to the Dover score) and Sondra Rae Clark (in her 1972 dissertation “The Evolving Concord”), have expressed a belief that the Concord is open-ended, and that no version is definitive. I agree to a point, with the exception that I think Ives also made it clear that he preferred the 1947 score to the 1920 in every way, and that the variants in the earlier edition are never equal, let alone better. I do think that the pianist who takes on the Concord needs to look through the manuscripts and especially the 17 scores from the 1920 edition into which Ives penciled variants and further ideas. I’m all for variations in performances of the Concord, and to each pianist his or her own personal edition. But I also often find clear musical reasons why one version is stronger than another. The authentic versions of the Concord are varied, definitely, and delightfully so, but – in terms of notes played – not infinite.

UPDATE: Oh, and if you do know of a recording I haven’t mentioned here, I would be grateful if you’d bring it to my attention.

UPDATE: Just found mention of old recordings by Rene Eckhardt, Ronald Lumsden, and Tom Plaunt.

 

It doesn’t matter how long you’ve been out of the newspaper business, you never become immune to headline envy. Arnold Whittall’s review, in The Musical Times, of the Ashgate Research Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music is titled: “It’s Gonna Reign.”