January 31, 2005
A fine new work for woodwind quintet
Some of the more interesting things in music can happen in modest places.
And so it was that a small audience Sunday afternoon at an art gallery on the Florida Atlantic University campus heard the world premiere of a strong new work for woodwind quintet by Arthur Weisberg.
 The Florida Woodwind Quintet: (from left) David Peel, horn; Elissa Lakofsky, flute; Robert Weiner, oboe; Arthur Weisberg, bassoon; Paul Green, clarinet. (Photo by Greg Stepanich) |
Weisberg, the group's bassoonist, is a former Harid Conservatory instructor and Boca Raton resident who now teaches bassoon at Indiana University. A much-celebrated conductor of contemporary music, Weisberg also is a composer, and his idiom as evidenced by this quintet is freely tonal but anchored in traditional harmonic practices.
Fives for Five takes its name from the size of the ensemble and the compositional conceit of the work, which is replete with five-note motifs and quintuple meters. Weisberg has a clear grasp of architecture that was clear right from the beginning of the piece: Each player weighed in with a five-note gesture that led into a polyphony of intersecting lines that increased in complexity until the listener could find his aural feet with a much slower five-note motif hammered out by horn and bassoon.
This useful bit of construction helped orient the movement as well as its auditors. It foreshadowed the few moments of unison playing of five-beat measures, as well as a five-part sequential chord at one of the climaxes, in which the players rattled off triplets in sequence as they threw up a tower of powerful sound.
Oboist Robert Weiner began the second, slower movement in tender fashion with a plaintive, barely moving five-note melody that again was taken up by each of the instruments, before hornist David Peel inaugurated a faster section with a martial-flavored theme. The third movement was centered around a quintuplet that hinted at Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, though used in a very different way.
This was music of great difficulty and admirable transparency at the same time. The language was stark and modern without being forbidding, and Weisberg's ideas were clearly laid out, easy to follow, and full of narrative interest. It was a piece that would bear repeated hearings, and it received what sounded to me on just the one hearing to be an exceptional performance.
Two French works opened the two halves of Sunday's concert. The Weisberg quintet was preceded by the Trois Pièces Brèves of Jacques Ibert, written in 1930.
This utterly genial, charming work was distinguished by glittering playing throughout the ensemble. In particular, flutist Elissa Lakofsky and clarinetist Paul Green united for a beautiful duet in the second piece, and Green dashed off the sweeping main theme of the third piece with gusto.
Ibert was a marvelous writer for woodwinds, and his colorful style was scrupulously advocated here, while his considerable technical trials were surmounted with aplomb.
A much more conservative French work, the Suite for Woodwind Quintet (Op. 57) of Charles Lefebvre, offered other pleasures in addition to its rarity. Lefebvre (1843-1917) was a Paris Conservatoire professor with four operas and numerous other vocal and instrumental works to his credit. This quintet, probably written sometime in the mid-1880s, is heavily influenced by Mendelssohn, whom Lefebvre admired.
This three-movement suite showed Lefebvre to be the proud possessor of a large supply of good tunes, and a fine craftsman in the traditional mold. The Florida Woodwinds demonstrated impressive togetherness throughout, particularly in the second movement (Allegretto scherzando), where the tightest of ensemble trills led to a trio section that was carefully contrasted with the main material.
The Lefebvre was followed by the final work on the program, the Op. 88, No. 2 quintet (in E-flat) of Anton Reicha, published in 1817. Reicha was a contemporary and friend of Beethoven whose two dozen woodwind quintets are fundaments of that literature, both for their instrumental display and their considerable melodic beauties.
Each member of the Florida got a workout in the Reicha quintet, from Peel's fancy horn footwork in the first movement to all the players in the second movement, in which a delicate waltz-like main tune is succeeded by a river of scales. Oboist Weiner presented the primary theme of the third movement with grace and strength, and the "riding" rhythms of the finale bubbled along in joyful fashion.
Blemishes in Sunday's concert were minor, the most noticeable being that the quintet tended to play loud when some softer approaches might have served the music better, and the very final chord of the concert had a wayward note that added an unintentional moment of humor.
But overall, this was very fine music-making indeed, and doubly so for the fresh, high-quality repertoire programmed by the group. A chamber music concert in which a small number of people can demonstrate great skill and show how much good music is out there that we don't often get to hear; well, that's a concertgoing experience to be cherished.
January 30, 2005
Our next guest, Ashley Montagu
I've been thinking two things above all after learning of the death of Johnny Carson:
First, watching his show was something of a passage into adulthood.
And second, does anyone remember Ashley Montagu?
Carson's death earlier this month at 79 brought forth the familiar clips, historical accounts of the early days of late-night television, and the tributes from commentators of every kind, some of them quite good. Jay Leno's essay in place of a monologue during his show was moving without being maudlin, and columnist Leonard Pitts made the sharp observation that the death of Carson made Pitts think that in some way, the old mainstream American culture had died along with the comic.
Craig Ferguson, newly ensconced behind a desk at CBS' late-night show, also delivered a fine reminiscence of how seeing Carson for the first time as a visitor from his home in Scotland helped explain the United States, a big, overwhelming country with which he had started to fall in love.
For me, one of the better things about Carson was that, as a teenager, once you started to tap into the undercurrent of sex and adult emotion on display in his show, you could begin to think of yourself, however tentatively, as a grown-up.
But the best thing about him outside of his cool, quick wit, was that amid a lot of mediocre comedians and actors doing plugs, he also liked to book people who could really talk.
One of those people was the English-born anthropologist and writer Ashley Montagu, who would have been 100 this year, and almost made it: He was 94 when he died in Princeton, N.J., in 1999. Montagu (a pen name; he was born in London as Israel Ehrenberg) was a public intellectual, a professorial type who brought the weight of real science to the most vexing conundra of the day, including gender, race and the potential annhiliation of civilization.
I admired Montagu a great deal, so much so that I gave serious thought to becoming an anthropologist. For Christmas in 1976 I asked for a copy of his then-new book, The Nature of Human Aggression, and when I resumed an interrupted college education in the early 1980s, I took courses in physical anthropology as part of my history curriculum.
But in recent years I've heard virtually nothing of Montagu, possibly because I don't keep up with events in anthropology or sociobiology, though more likely it's because public intellectuals tend to fade from view faster than other cultural celebrities. They're high-octane commentators, but commentators just the same, and while they might bring more cerebral heft to the proceedings, their subject is the Zeitgeist, and she never wears the same clothes for long.
Doing an Amazon search, I found that few of Montagu's more than 60 books are still in print, though the county library systems of Palm Beach and Broward still have sizable collections of his work. I also discovered that a biography of Montagu called Love Forms the Bones is due out in June from Susan Sperling.
I spent an afternoon reacquainting myself with a few volumes of Montagu, and while some of it necessarily has dated, the reason for his one-time popularity is clear. He's an excellent writer, and one of those scientists with the enviable ability of being able to explain complicated things clearly.
Another aspect of his art is its highly optimistic core. The Nature of Human Aggression, which came out while the Cold War was still hot, is a refutation of the idea that humans are natural-born killers. Montagu is on the nurture, not nature, side of the argument, and contends that while genetic factors are not to be gainsaid, it it a human being's environment that ultimately decides his or her specific behavior. The opposing views of human behavior, he writes (no doubt with an inward smile), constitute more than "a faddy question to be gummed into obscurity on television talk shows.":
The subject is neither a dry-as-dust science or a popularity contest. The two views define not only two ways of looking at human beings — important enough in itself — but also two ways of being human. And that has implications for us as individuals, as societies and as survivors.
Montagu took controversial stands at important times. The first edition of his book Man's Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race, came out in 1942, and it bears remembering that the world was currently fighting a war against a regime that had built its appalling policies in part on junk anthropology. Montagu contends — decades and decades before the mapping of the human genome — that all humans are, biologically, essentially identical, and that the idea of race is essentially a psychological construct, and a murderous one at that (the fifth edition, which came out in 1974, is dedicated to the memory of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, the martyrs of Freedom Summer).
He underlined this point in 1957, in an introduction to a section on race in his Anthropology and Human Nature:
The facts (about race) are today clear, at least clear enough for us to be able to say that they have no relevance whatsoever insofar as the rights of man are concerned. The ethical principle of equality does not depend upon the biological findings of scientists, but upon the simple judgment that every human being has a right to the development of his potentialities by virtue of the fact that he is human. This is the long and short of the whole story.
Developing those potentialities was a continual concern for Montagu, who explicity linked nurture and intellectual growth. "Out of the learning of love grows the love of learning," he wrote in Growing Young (1981), which used the idea of neoteny, or the retention of juvenile traits into adulthood, to argue that humans are not designed to turn into rigid adults, but are meant to remain open and flexible as children throughout their lives.
Montagu was in his mid-70s when he wrote the book, and while much of it reminds me of the Leo Buscaglia-Iron John school of thought, there are passages such as this one, in which Montagu argues for the importance of dancing:
Meanwhile, whatever age one may be, one should dance, and dance frequently, for there are few activities so wholly and deeply gratifying ...The experience of dancing constitutes something more than a body in motion. There is a release and replenishment of psychic energy that leaves one with an oceanic feeling of freedom from which all constraint has fallen away ... One is infused with a lyrical joy.
Shake that thing, Ashley!
I haven't done enough research to determine whether Montagu is held in any sort of critical odor or repute; perhaps Sperling's book is a way of reintroducing him to the general public. I do know that I found enough in my brief review of his books selected at random to find food for a dozen avenues of conversation, and that shows to me that there's some durability in his work. (He also wrote an early study of Joseph Merrick, the "Elephant Man," and caused a stir in 1953 with his The Natural Superiority of Women.)
It also shows that you really can have guests who take on the big topics on talk shows, and not chase away an audience. There isn't much of that on today's TV gabfests, though David Letterman conducted decent interviews of major political newsmakers in the weeks before the national election, and Craig Ferguson is making time for guests like opera superstar Renee Fleming.
You have to believe, though, as Carson and Montagu undoubtedly did, that the audience is there. All it needs is to be spoken to.
January 23, 2005
Reading science: Corvids, anatids, and me
If you do a lot of reading, as I do, of humanities texts, there comes a point when you need a reorientation of your brain proclivities. It's like a particularly invigorating form of exercise, a mountain bike ride in the country after eons of roughing it in a desk chair.
Melville's Ishmael said he knew it was time to hit the high seas when he found himself bringing up the rear of every passing funeral. I don't have any trigger moments like that, at least not that I'm consciously aware of, but there comes a moment when even the finance journalism I work with daily doesn't quite do the mind-cleaning trick, and I find myself hunting for something else.
  (Photos by Greg Stepanich)  Hear the ducks |
For me, that something else is science. I don't have a deep background in science, though I did enjoy a human physiology course and concomitant studies in primatology at the University of Illinois. I've subscribed on and off to Scientific American (www.sciam.com) for years, too, and I've got a couple dozen volumes of science books at the house, mostly on biology topics.
So you can't call me particularly well-read in science, but you can call me an occasional enthusiast.
Having animals in the house is an encouragement of this enthusiasm, as pet owners know well. Trying to figure out the thought processes of our cat Pumpkin is always interesting, even if the conclusions are sometimes alarming, i.e., that she isn't exactly at the head of her furry feline class.
Our pet white Pekin duck, who literally weathered Hurricanes Frances and Jeanne outdoors with avian aplomb, makes Pumpkin look like a blazing genius in comparison. And the same goes for the flock of geese and ducks I feed each morning on my walk through the neighborhood before work. They do see me coming, and raise the food alarm, and pad rapidly and webbily over to me from the banks of the pond where they sit like feathered house plants much of the day.
Still, it's hard to have a real conversation with them.
Spoken, as I well know, like a true anthropomorphic snob. Critter smarts can't be assessed like they are for humans. Writer Bob Tarte, whose funny, charming book about his many pets, Enslaved by Ducks (enslavedbyducks.com), talks about looking into the eyes of his animals and feeling the presence of what he called "packets of alien intelligence."
And he's right. Animals have their own universe, their own rules. Schopenhauer, who was something of an early animal-rights activist, said animals were the embodiment of the present tense, and this is a beautiful way of looking at our fellow creatures. They just are what they are, without apology.
But now comes a report in the Dec. 10 edition of Science (www.sciencemag.org) by two researchers at the University of Cambridge in England that suggests members of the crow family (crows, jays, ravens, magpies, jackdaws) "are not only superior in intelligence to birds of other avian species (perhaps with the exception of some parrots), but also rival many nonhuman primates."
Nathan J. Emery and Nicola S. Clayton go on to say that a corvid brain is much larger than you would expect for small birds, and is "relatively the same size as the chimpanzee brain." Further, the forebrain, where plenty of thinking in mammal brains takes place, is much larger in corvids than it is in other birds.
Emery and Clayton argue that corvids actually reason about their worlds, like apes do. They build standardized tools, hide food for later and fake out potential pilferers with phony food caches, and most importantly, apply what they've learned to other situations. "The ability to solve transfer problems by abstracting general rules is what distinguishes rule learners from rote learners," like pigeons, the scientists write.
Gulp. So Alfred Hitchcock was on to something.
Now we know why the blue jays in our backyard always seem to be the advance guard for a winged food raid. It's because you want the strategists to size up the situation before bringing everyone else in. "All clear! Cue the cardinals!"
Emery and Clayton suggest that corvids and apes developed complex cognition, despite the wide differences in their species, in response to similar social and ecological pressures. This reminds me of something I read a while back about Charles Darwin and his theory of evolution. Darwin, the writer said, wasn't quite aware of just how powerful his theory was, and that evolution was an extraordinary process that worked both faster and more broadly than he realized.
Not only is intelligence a quality with many definitions, but intelligence that resembles something we primatoids would recognize appears to be present in the creatures of the air. If that doesn't get your mammalian cortex humming with other ideas, I don't know what will.
So bless the beasts and the children — and don't assume they live in separate houses.
Back to the music: One guilty pleasure of writing reviews for a newspaper that's part of a larger news service is that you can use various search engines to see whether other papers have picked up your stuff. It's appallingly self-centered, but it's an itch I love to scratch.
Besides, it's introduced me to some good classical-music Websites I didn't know about:
Sequenza21 (www.sequenza21.com): A terrific New York-based site, run by Jerry Bowles, who posts daily bloggish news entries. Lists of resources, links to composer/performer blogs.
La scène musicale (www.scena.org): Montreal-based site run by La Scène Musicale/The Musical Scene, available in French and English. News links, reviews, a Canadian classical music calendar and a weekly column by British music gadfly Norman Lebrecht.
Netnewmusic (www.netnewmusic.net): Jeff Harrington runs this portal focused on contemporary classical and avant-garde music. Links to composer/performer sites devoted to living artists, concert announcements and notes, commentary, and a link to beepSNORT (www.beepSNORT.org), an electronic music site.
Andante (www.andante.com): This "everything classical" site features an online magazine, a boutique for CD purchases, and Andante Radio, an all-classical online station for site members.
In other news: The Associated Press reports that Elvis Costello is writing an opera for the Danish Royal Theatre based on Hans Christian Andersen's unrequited love for Jenny Lind, the Swedish Nightingale, who was among the most popular sopranos in history (Walt Whitman was a big fan, too).
As I've said before, there might be something more to this Elvis does classical thing than at first meets the eye and ear.
January 16, 2005
In which I change the almanac
Victory.
Total, glorious, unassailable victory.
It is for this that I have labored in the muddy fields, it is for this triumph that I first drew breath, it is for this splendid summation that I stand atop the towering mountain, it is I that am the acme, the alpha and omega, the zenith. Supplicants may address cards and letters to The Man, 1 Parnassus Avenue.
Yes, I have fought upon St. Crispin's Day and writ my name in the annals of Ares, for it is I, and I alone, who, armed with nothing more than the banner of Geekania, hath done a thing that shall make me immortal:
I have changed the almanac.
There it is, on page 292 of the 2005 edition of The World Almanac and Book of Facts, under the section titled Entertainment Personalities of the Past: Hammerstein, Oscar, 1847-1919; Hammerstein, Oscar II, 1895-1960.
After so long grief, such nativity!
Let me explain.
I don't know when the World Almanac folks began running a list of the birth and death dates of deceased entertainers, but it's precisely the sort of thing for which you pick up an almanac. A couple years ago, I consulted the 2003 edition (since it was right near me in the living room and I didn't feel like getting up and looking elsewhere) to determine when it was that Oscar Hammerstein, writing partner of composer Richard Rodgers, had died. I knew it was right after The Sound of Music, but I wasn't sure when. Turning to the list of past entertainers, under the names beginning with H, I looked for the lyricist, and here is what it said:
Hammerstein, Oscar, 1847-1919.
Not that one, I thought immediately. That's Oscar I, who was Oscar II's grandfather, and a legendary theatrical figure in his own right. But Oscar I is best-known to historians now, while Oscar II's work is still quite alive among us, 45 years after his death.
And in my agony I beseeched the silent page, but it spake not.
No sign of Oscar II.
The entry, technically speaking, isn't wrong. Oscar Hammerstein I, a cigar-maker turned impresario who opened the Manhattan Opera House in 1906, was in the entertainment business. But you've got to believe that the average almanac user isn't looking up "Hammerstein" unless he or she wants to find the guy who wrote My Favorite Things.
So I wrote to the World Almanac people at their e-mail address and pointed this out. I got back a form reply, thanking me for my note.
A year passed.
The 2004 edition came out, and I greedily snatched one, heading straight for the list. On page 249, it said:
Hammerstein, Oscar, 1847-1919.
Again, Grandpa, but no mention of Grandson.
And so I wrote again, and this time the almanac people said they'd change the entry for the 2005 edition. And by heaven, they have, bless them.
Of course, it's quite possible that someone else has pointed this out, and that I am merely one of several people to petition for redress of this almanac entry. Either way, I'm happy to think that some seeker of knowledge won't be entirely confused when he or she looks up Oscar Hammerstein.
And maybe, his or her curiosity will lead to some understanding of who Oscar I was. John Dizikes, in his Opera in America: A Cultural History (1993), devotes a chapter ("Oscar and Goliath") to this extraordinary theatrical entrepreneur who took on what he saw as the snobbery of the Metropolitan Opera in the now-remarkable belief that opera was good for people.
A German immigrant with conservatory training in violin and composition who'd left Berlin at age 15 to make his way to New York, where he prospered in the cigar business, Hammerstein mounted some of the most exciting productions of his day: Mary Garden in Pélleas et Mélisande and Salome; Nellie Melba and Luisa Tetrazzini in different stagings of La Traviata; Mariette Mazarin in Elektra. This was at the same time that Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini were conducting at the Metropolitan with singers such as Enrico Caruso and Geraldine Farrar .
A truly splendid time for American opera, in other words.
Dizikes calls Oscar Hammerstein I "the greatest impresario in the history of opera in America," and gives a excellent overview of his working habits and his standing in the popular culture of his time:
He became a well-known American "character," accorded the popular tribute of being known simply as "Oscar." He was a subject for caricature: his top hat, worn indoors and out, his Prince Albert coat. Much of his appeal was as an arch-individualist, who did things by himself without counselors, patrons, a board of directors. Personally neat, he worked in a chaos of old papers, music scores, unanswered bills. His impresario's symbol was the plain kitchen chair he sat on backstage for every performance of every opera he presented, a cigar clamped between his teeth, watching, listening.
Fine writing there. It brings old Oscar alive again.
Oscar I's son Arthur was a Broadway producer; his son William managed the Victoria Theatre. William's son Oscar II, named for his grandfather, was the lyricist and librettist who helped move the American musical away from the sketch-comedy format of the 1920s and 1930s to something with a real story line; something more like opera, in other words (indeed, Dizikes calls musicals "American popular opera").
I suppose I can look at the almanac revision as a way of rounding out an important part of American theater history. Looking up Oscar II, I learned a lot more about Oscar I, and now I've got a better idea of the rich legacy our country has in these art forms.
And that's surely worth an extra line of type in a reference book.
January 14, 2005
Mozart and Prokofiev at the piano store
For about two years, the Steinway Piano Gallery in Boca Raton (www.steinwaybocaraton.com) has been hosting a series of concerts in a side showroom at the store for fans of piano music.
 Tao Lin (left) and Yang Shen |
Shen is a strong, passionate player with technique to burn. This made for some impressive keyboard fireworks, particularly in the Prokofiev, one of the most athletic of 20th-century piano concertos. She negotiated a tiring series of huge left-hand leaps in the breathless last pages of the finale with aplomb and vigor, and was more than a match for the movement's relenteless energy level.
Things were just as good in the first movement, with the first sixteenth notes in the solo part climbing out of the depths to race into the main theme with plenty of muscle. Shen was in good command of the movement's considerable difficulties throughout, and for the second movement's theme and variations, Shen brought out Prokofiev's quirky moods with sharp-edged contrast.
Shen also struck me as something of a cool player, and I didn't hear a great deal of dynamic range in Sunday's performances. The palette might tilt towards the loud in the Prokofiev, but the Mozart is a different story, and it would have been good to hear some real variety on the soft end of Shen's tonal range.
That said, it was a classic, elegant Mozart, with much fleet finger work to recommend it. Shen's statement of the celebrated second movement's main melody was limpid and mature, and less severe than the way Lin had played the theme moments before.
Shen's encore for the enthusiastic audience was the C-sharp minor Etude, Op. 10, No. 4, of Chopin. Here, too, the emphasis was on Shen's large technique, and in this solo performance you could hear a little more about what this pianist is about.
And again, there was a kind of mid-range dynamic approach to the piece, which gave Shen fewer choices and less opportunity for drama other than the intrinsic one afforded by its cascades of scales. The staccato right hand chords were precise and short, as written, but a slight artist's tenuto here and there could have added some attractive personality to a Chopin exercise that otherwise was impressively played indeed.
Shen is still growing as a pianist and musician, and she probably could build a strong career for herself with a broader array of colors to add to her thorough command of most of the other details of piano playing. An exciting performer, in any case, who has a firm foundation already in place for her to build on.
January 9, 2005
Jem gets Bach in the saddle
Every so often I like to stop by the bookstore and head to the magazine section for a cultural booster shot. I just look around at all the titles and buy five or six things that immediately strike my fancy; my buy-o-meter is on Impulse and cranked to the max.
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It's always on such expeditions that I find something surprising that leads me in unexpected directions.
Which brings me, in a moment, to the subject of Johann Sebastian Bach.
I finally succumbed the other day to a longstanding wish to grab a copy of Paste magazine and see what's up in the alternative music scene. This 13th issue of the bimonthly magazine (December 2004/January 2005) comes not only with a CD of music but a 4-hour DVD featuring short films, trailers and music videos.
I think this is a great idea, and I applaud the good folks of Paste (www.pastemagazine.com) for doing it. If I've read the promo material correctly, after this issue, you can still get a DVD and CD with each issue, but only if you subscribe (newsstand buyers just get the CD).
On the DVD are 21 music videos, some of them quite imaginative (Rilo Kiley's It's a Hit and Adem's These Are Your Friends strike me as the most creative). Musically, things are hit or miss, but it was the fourth video that really got my attention.
It's a song called They, and it's from the debut album (Finally Woken) by Jem, a Welsh woman born in Cardiff 30 years ago as Jemma Griffiths. It's an attractive, moody little pop tune, and unlike most of the other songs on the DVD, it's not about relationships or personal problems. It's about power, and it asks listeners why most of us put up with the implied injustice of the world and defer to the ostensibly omnipotent, ubiquitous "they."
A refreshing sentiment, the more so for being political in a time when so many artists avoid these questions.
The video's nice, too. It shows Jem, who's petite, dark-haired and nice-looking in an American-casual sort of way, walking through through a neighborhood park in Los Angeles (I'm guessing by the palm trees, the fact that she lives there now, and the mariachi band that suddenly shows up at the end) where a playground is fenced off and marked No Trespassing. Our heroine climbs the fence, and helps open the playground to a gaggle of happy, waiting children.
Not fancy, but effective and memorable, and appropriate for the song.
Many pop critics have pointed to the similarity of Jem's voice to that of Dido. Comparing the two based on what little I know of Dido, I'd say Jem's voice is similar, though darker and a little weightier.
But it's the music of the song itself that I'm thinking about most, and that's because it's partly by Bach.
They is clearly based on the 12th prelude of Book 2 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, which was written sometime in the late 1730s or early 1740s. Jem probably sampled a poppy version of it from somewhere, which is kind of what Bach used to do himself when he based elaborate works on pre-existing tunes.
Assuming the song was crafted on a sample, these are the parts of the song that are closest to the original: Both are in the same key (F minor); the basic three-note pulse of the chorus (I'm sorry/So sorry/I'm sorry/It's like this) apes the prelude, with a slight variation; the opening bars of both the song and the prelude are essentially identical; and there's a bit of background vocalise (that might be the sample) that mimics the first passage of deedle-deedle figuration familiar in Bach.
Sampling is an honorable way to make new music, and since this prelude is quite familiar to legions of pianists around the world, you could even see it as a sort of hommage to Papa Bach. On her Website (www.jem-music.net), Jem lists a wide variety of favorite records, including one by Jacques Loussier, a French pianist who has been jazzing the classics, including Bach, for decades. So that may have been the inspiration.
It's certainly not the first time the music of Bach has been used for pop purposes, and there have been other classical writers (Chopin, Borodin, Rachmaninoff) whose melodies have proven irresistible to later tunesmiths. (Nor is it the only Bach on the Paste DVD. One of the short films, a weird but interesting little movie called Chocolate Girls, quotes a bit of the C minor prelude from Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, again in vocalise style, on the soundtrack.)
I don't that it means all that much, either; a nice tune is a nice tune, and generation after generation responds, whether it's the original or something as lamentable as Song of Joy, a pop hit in the 1970s in which a singer named Miguel Rios sang new lyrics to the main theme of the last movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.
It's just interesting to reflect on Jem's song and good old J.S., who originally compiled The Well-Tempered Clavier for two reasons: To show that it was possible under a new system of tuning to write practical music in every possible key of the chromatic scale, and to help him get the job he wanted as cantor of the St. Thomas School in Leipzig. Christoph Wolff, in his 2000 biography of the composer (Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician), says that The Well-Tempered Clavier helped demonstrate Bach's street cred as a scholar, which was critical for landing the prestigious Leipzig post, a job he won, and which he kept until his death in 1750.
To get some flavor of that, here's how Bach prefaced the original edition of Book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier back in 1722:
The Well-Tempered Clavier, or preludes and fugues through all the tones and semitones, both as regards the tertia major or Ut Re Mi and as concerns the tertia minor or Re Mi Fa. For the use and profit of the musical youth desirous of learning as well as for the pastime of those already skilled in this study.
A textbook, in other words.
By the time Bach added Book 2, musical styles had begun to change across Europe. The complications of the Baroque were giving way to the simpler lines of the Classical, and indeed, the prelude that inspired They looks forward to Haydn and Mozart rather than back to Buxtehude.
The late pianist and writer Samuel Lipman, in a wonderful essay on Bach published in 1989, quite rightly called Bach's music "a literature that contains within itself, as a drop of water contains the ocean, all of our music."
He wasn't thinking of young Welsh trip-hop chanteuses. But he was right.
January 3, 2005
New quartet shows promise
Chamber music has always been about intimacy, even when the thoughts it expresses are those of the heaven-stormers such as Beethoven.
And so it was hard to imagine how a string quartet might do battle with the sounds of a busy street outside: Booming car basses, motorcycles, laughter and all the other things you might expect on Delray Beach's East Atlantic Avenue on a beautiful, warm January afternoon.
But the new Delray String Quartet, giving its second concert ever in the open-door music room of the historic Colony Hotel downtown, brought enough commitment to its program of Beethoven, Tchaikovsky and Johann Strauss père et fils to make its generous audience shut those noises out for an hour or so.
 The Delray String Quartet, from left: Laszlo Pap, second violin; Susan Moyer, cello; Debra Spring, viola; Mei Mei Luo, first violin. (Photo by Greg Stepanich) |
So this is a modern band, by that standard, and therefore it should be interesting to hear what its members do with some more contemporary music, such as the Barber Op. 11 they have planned for February, and the Shostakovich First Quartet they are programming for March. In any case, the Delrays offered strong readings Sunday night of some canonical masterworks, and all told, this is a group well worth seeing again.
Much of the spotlight Sunday afternoon was on Mei Mei Luo, the first violinist, who had a commanding role in the First String Quartet (F major, Op, 18, No. 1) of Beethoven. Luo is a fiery player, unafraid to dig in and aim for the grand gesture. She had some tuning problems throughout the first movement, though these cleared up as the music progressed. She also is a nimble-fingered instrumentalist, which paid off handsomely for the somber, operatic beauties of the second movement.
She was less successful with the opening of the finale, which wasn't as clean as it should have been, and that made the beginning of that movement somewhat unsteady. There were some ensemble problems also at the start of the third movement, and it wasn't until after the first 20 bars that the Delrays were able to find their footing.
Despite these blemishes, I enjoyed this reading of the Beethoven because the Delray quartet was in tune with the boisterous, surprising wit of this piece, and even more importantly, it was an advocate of all of the composer's ideas. Beethoven is a writer of enormous invention, and musicians who don't understand that even the smallest gesture he makes (such as the offhand motif of the First Quartet's initial bars) is full of life and consequence are not going to give persuasive performances of his music.
Fortunately, that was not the case here. The quartet (Luo; second violinist Laszlo Pap; violist Debra Spring and cellist Susan Moyer) clearly enjoyed playing this work, and they made the most of its dramas, from the sudden silences in the middle of the slow movement to the almost giddy waltzing of the scherzo. Some of the detail work needed a little more attention — i.e., the contrasts of the scherzo weren't sharp enough, which didn't give us enough of the shock Beethoven has written into the score —- but that's the sort of thing that will come with more rehearsal and more time together as a group.
The Beethoven was followed by an intense, soulful rendition of the Andante cantabile movement from Tchaikovsky's First Quartet. Luo, also the focus of this piece, had some intonation problems in the first apperance of the exposed second subject, but that was not the case when the theme returned in its G-string version toward the end.
The concert closed with a tasteful arrangement, well-played, of Johann Strauss Jr.'s On the Beautiful Blue Danube, which as Moyer noted in a charming talk to the audience, is pretty much required listening for the new year. Another standard of the Viennese New Year celebrations closed the concert: The Radetzky March of Johann Strauss Sr., heard here in an effective arrangement by local composer Clark McAllister.
January 2, 2005
Leaves from a composer's journal
It's embarrassing, that's what it is, to see all these papers, covered with all these noteheads, beams, staves, sharps, flats and naturals, sitting on the foldout shelf of my beloved Hold Everything imitation Spanish mission desk.
Looking at them the other night, I was astounded at how much effort I'd put into creating my own music, and doubly astounded at how little of it has made it out of my study into the great wide world. This is the way it is with classical music in
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I think I speak for midnight scribblers everywhere when I say that it's hard to explain to myself, let alone to other people, what it's like to be in the iron grip of a dream. I guess it's more a compulsion than it is a dream, perhaps begun once long ago as a boy when I wanted to be seen as a being apart; perhaps continued now because that's the script I've written for myself and I wouldn't know how to stop reading from it.
But that's fanciful thinking, and it amounts to a search for something that isn't there. The plain truth of it is that I feel compelled to write music more than anything to satisfy my own curiosity, to set difficult puzzles for myself and see whether I can solve them. And also to reach other people in a way I can't reach them anyway else.
Because I could blog ad infinitum on this subject and still not say what I could say with four bars of a well-chosen chord progression, or a long, sinous melody, or even a couple beats of strategic silence suddenly inserted in the middle of a noisy, chattering exposition. It is the only language other than my native tongue that I can speak with any fluency, and it is the only one that creates its own language, that of my personal compositional style, the more I write: I build, in essence, a dictionary of me — my thoughts, my desires, my wishes, my frustrations and disappointments.
Sure, that sounds pompous. But I don't think it's very enlightening to shrug off musical creation as a sort of unconscious outpouring, or an irritation of a brain lobe. It's a deliberate process, and at some point you have to choose to wrestle with its problems as well as luxuriate in its joys.
I have two different compositional approaches. When I'm writing classical, I use music paper and sharp pencils to take down what's in my head or what I might come up with at the piano, though I try to stay away from the instrument as much as possible. I tend to sit at the keys and doodle endlessly otherwise, and get nowhere.
Walking, which I do each morning, is a good way to come up with decent compositional solutions. Things just seem to flow more naturally when I have only the narrative of the piece in my head and no piano to get in the way with other ideas.
When I'm done with something, I transcribe it into something readable using Sibelius software (it's a great program; here's the Web site: www.sibelius.com) From there, I might record it if it's something I can play myself, or if not, I try to browbeat other folks into playing it for me.
I do something quite different when I'm writing pop-rock-folk or whatever label it might fit under. There I try to start with the words, or at least an idea of what the words will be, before writing any music, though there are times I've force-fitted words to a tune I've already got sitting around.
When I was regularly playing guitars with a friend of mine years ago, I'd show up at his house with the songs I'd written, we'd play them through, and I'd leave the arrangement to both of us. I deliberately left a big part of the effect of the song collaborative, because it felt instinctively right to do it that way, and I also felt closer to folk traditions when I did that.
There, the satisfaction came from hearing the words and music fit together, and from the pleasure of the two of us playing through something we'd created together, on the spot, out of the air.
These days I'm finishing a trumpet concerto I sketched first back in 1997, but put aside for years before getting it out again a year or so ago. I'm basically finished with the first two movements, and hard at work on the third, and it's going reasonably well. Also on my table: a few more choral songs on poems by Pablo Neruda (I've finished two, sketched two others, and chosen poems for two or three more); revisions to two large instrumental sonatas, one for clarinet and the other for horn, that I wrote years ago; a one-movement fantasy for viola, and a string trio.
The work of composition seems to me a basic human activity on the one hand, and a tough exercise of the life of the mind on another. Either way, it's not something I can give up anymore, as I once did.
I interviewed an established composer once for a newspaper piece and when we'd finished the interview proper, we were talking about this and that, and he asked me about my musical background. I told him I'd been a theory and composition major in college for a couple years before throwing it aside for journalism, and he said that was probably a good thing.
"I know lots of musicians who wish they'd become lawyers or something else other than a musician," he told me, more or less (I'm quoting from memory). "So you're better off."
I said that it hadn't stopped me from trying to compose.
"Oh," he said. "Well, then you must have to do it."
Yes, I said.
And I suppose that's a lot of what being a composer is all about.
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