Dial "M" for Musicology

Asteria in Boulder

Jonathan Bellman

Imagine the Platonic Ideal of a performance of songs about Love—Love incarnated as a poetic idealization.  You might conceive of vocal lines sinuously interwoven with the kind of insouciance born only from total contrapuntal command.  You might imagine performers able to match pitch and timbre to achieve the two-becoming-one and one-blossoming-into-two effects with seeming effortlessness, and you might fantasize that, when short phrases were exclaimed together, the singers would be in such sympathy that breath and enunciation, attack and release were utterly simultaneous, a poet singing in stereo. 

Last night, one of the culminating events at Early Music Colorado’s Fall Festival took place: at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder, there was a performance by Asteria, an early music duo specializing in late medieval Burgundian chansons: Du Fay, Binchois, Robert Morton, a few less familiar names, plus other anonymous but gloriously refined works.  The time period was, roughly, the third quarter of the fifteenth century and the context was the wealthy and artistically inclined courts of the Dukes of Burgundy (Phillip the Good and Charles the Bold).  These chansons all have to do with Love, in the prevailing conception of amour courtois, Courtly Love: the despair of love lost, the exquisite pain of love found, the miseries of gossip and insecurity, the poison of suspicion, the exaltation (or thrill of the chase!) of a love affair in full bloom, and so on.  The artistic culture of the Burgundian court centered, at last as far as the secular poetic and musical realms, on love above all else; the repertoire seems to be primarily three-part, delectably elegant music featuring graceful counterpoint, musically realized dialogue, and sweetly expressive lines realizing the middle French poetry.  

Asteria consists of a married couple: Sylvia Rhyne, soprano, and Eric Redlinger, tenor and Lute.  Their performance was surpassingly intimate, from a musical perspective: timbral matching, interwoven lines, and miraculously unisono declamation, when homorhythmic lines called for it.  They also incorporated a certain tastefully theatrical realization to the performance: close physical proximity, gazing into each other’s faces, turning sorrowfully away when the text called for it, singing both to and (seemingly) about each other, and so on.  The concert felt like an ideal courtly performance: performance artistry of the most sensitive and refined kind, conceived for an appropriately sensitive and knowledgeable audience who could appreciate what they were hearing.  So we heard a selection of all-but-unknown repertoire, interpreted with superb musicianship but always proceeding outward from the poetry.  For the encore, Rhyne and Redlinger stepped well outside this repertoire: all the way to the 1530s, for a song by Claudin de Sermisy.  This, too, was stunning.

This is a stellar sort of music making that transforms this repertoire—usually limited to doctoral-exam fodder—to something glistening and vivid.  I find myself wishing that interpretations of this quality (and all Asteria’s live-performance intimacy survives, miraculously enough, on their recordings) could be required listening in undergraduate music history classes.  What the Burgundian art was about and from whom it was produced seem so clear and natural, upon the hearing of it, that the explanation can wait: it bewitches and compels without the necessity of the usual here’s-why-you-should-know-it justifications.  Asteria’s level of musicianship is stellar, the conception of this music profoundly informed, and the presentation an unmitigated joy.  Their music is available on magnatune.com, and the CDs readily available by order.

Really.  You DO deserve pleasure this intense.

Thinking with the ear

Phil Ford

I'm continuing to work on some of the thoughts I started writing about the other day. Thanks to everyone who responded -- the comments are so good it will take me many blog posts to get through all the questions they raise. And there have been a few blog posts in response: look here, here, here, and here. 

Last time I wrote about performance as a series of deliberative acts vs. performance in a "flow state" and thought about what understanding of self and volition these two states entail. It got me thinking about an old friend -- let's call him Chuck -- who was a music undergrad at the same time as me and with whom I played a little chamber music. This guy was one of the smartest people I've ever met in my life, a sponge for languages, ideas, literatures, whole fields of endeavor. His intellectual restlessness manifested itself in his approach to music; he was a seriously deliberative musician. When we played together, he would plan out everything that would happen in every phrase, every little pause and inflection worked out along the axis of a carefully-prepared analysis. And I, being at that time convinced that such an analytical orientation was indispensable for proper interpretation, went right along. I enjoyed the crossword-puzzle aspect of our rehearsals, the satisfying feeling of figuring out and verbalizing what he and I were to do at any given moment of the piece. But Chuck's playing never lost a certain stiffness, a certain lack of organic cohesion—everything he played sounded as if it were made out of Tinkertoys. And it never really grew past a certain point, as Chuck admitted himself, which is why he ended up doing something else with his life (and meeting with a great deal of success). 

I'd go so far as to say that those musicians like Chuck, musicians who think of performance as a highly deliberative act, are at a disadvantage. I've written before about my experiences studying piano with Michel Block, the result of which has been (among other things) a conviction that the duality between "form" and "content" (or style/substance, surface/depth, etc.) is an illusion. But he also got me past another conceptual blockage: the notion that piano playing can or should be a largely "intellectual," deliberative practice in which one applies analytical insights to the music one performs. This is a kind of dualism, too, because it entails an extreme concentration on critical consciousness and an associated separation from one's performance. One conceives of one's body as if it were a car and the self were a separate thing driving it. The body is unruly and must be disciplined; you can't just play a piece of music any old way your body might want to -- what would Beethoven say? You have to honor his intentions! And this of course entails having intentions of your own, which you enforce on your playing. But when you do that you are always outside of yourself, unintegrated, not flowing. 

This was the main problem with my own playing before I started working with Block: my playing was "ticky ticky," as Block liked to say. Re-learning to play the piano at about age 20, I had to lose this sense of an imperial ego that was controlling everything and learn to play selflessly. I spent a summer playing very simple things -- the kinds of things that had always given me trouble. Another teacher of mine, James Tocco, once remarked that I played better when the music was complex and worse when it wasn't. I didn't know what to do in a simple lyrical piece. If the form offered no real difficulties (just a typical character-piece ABA shape), if the texture was just uncluttered melody-and-accompaniment, if the point was just to project a singing melody, I was unstrung by the overtness of it all. I wanted to make a statement, send a message, and the simplicity of this kind of music frustrated that desire. My big realization after spending a summer playing such pieces was a variation on Samuel Goldwyn's "if you want to send a message, call Western Union." There's a kind of practice where you don't think about what you're playing, you listen to it -- that's all, just listening. You're making discriminations, but they're different from rational, intentional discriminations. It's sort of like when you hang a picture and step back and look to see if it's straight. You're not thinking in the usual way, and not just zoning out, either (the worst kind of playing, automatic-pilot zombie mode) -- you're thinking with the ear. Another dualism, between the mind and the senses, collapses. 

As a teacher, Block was famously mercurial and eccentric, given to obscurities of speech and action in lessons. I was thrown by this at first. I would come in and play some simple songful piece Bloch had asked me to play and he would say or do something very obscure -- suddenly going on about Barbra Streisand, or saying "ticky ticky" (and nothing else), or playing the left hand of the piece while poking out the right hand melody with a pencil eraser. What he wasn't doing was saying play this part a little faster, or a little quieter, or with a little more pedal, or whatever. His teaching was deictic -- a process of "direct pointing," as those who practice Zen think of it. The reality of sound is not found in verbalized concepts, but only in itself. So if the reality of sound in itself, beyond or prior to all concepts, is what you're after (or what you want your student to grasp), you can't talk about it -- you can only point. 

That "reality of sound in itself" thing is the hard part, isn't it? It's the point where we become aware of the extreme limitations of language. Recent scholarly thinking on "presence" (Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht), "the drastic" (Carolyn Abbate), and "performativity" (you name it) and so on are ways of redescribing the same phenomenon—the simple mute thereness of actuality, what Buddhists call "tathata." It's not for nothing that one of the links to my earlier post connected my ruminations to Buddhism. Indeed, many of these thoughts, though gestating a long time within my work as a humanities scholar, appear to take on a new significance in the light of Buddhist thought, and Zen in particular, which I have been thinking a lot about lately. Music throws a light on Zen, and vice versa. This is perhaps fodder for some future blog post.

What's Polish for *scandale*?

Jonathan Bellman

Krystian Zimerman, Polish superpianist, declared—before his final piece at a recital at Disney hall in Los Angeles on Sunday evening, April 26—that he was never coming back to the U.S.  Our military is trying to take over the world, etc. etc.  Some audience members walked out, tossing obscenities at him (he lobbed an insult or two back), more cheered, there was tumultuous applause for his final piece (Szymanowski variations), no encore, finis.  Exeunt Krystian Zimerman and his Steinway.  News item here, full review of the concert here, post-mortem here.

 

I am of two minds on this.  I was taught that one never, ever, ever insults an audience or makes them uncomfortable, and making this kind of statement is, in a sense, holding them responsible for the policies of the Bush administration.  To then mock those departing—“Yes, some people, when they hear the word military, start marching” is really provocative as hell.  Zimerman is an artist I admire deeply and I, had I been in the audience might well have fired something nasty back at him at that point, perhaps something to do with murderous Polish behaviors in the 1930s and 40s, or Polish disposition to march when the commands are being offered by Hitler or the Soviets.  I can further imagine being torn limb from limb for having done something like that, so the fact that I would have severed all good relations with Polish friends (who have been generous with their time and help) would have meant little to me… bleeding to death as I would have been.  Probably ’twas a far, far better thing that I wasn’t in the audience, but I know myself well enough (I was short of self-control in class even in graduate school) that I might well have shot off my mouth—and, to be honest, throwing ignoble Polish behaviors in the pianist’s face would not have been an inappropriate response to his decision to rub Bush policies in the faces of a bunch of admiring angeleno concertgoers.

 

In any case, it was odd that he would choose to enact this bit of theater now that Obama is in office and so many things are changing; indeed, he spoke approvingly of Obama in Berkeley, where he had performed shortly before.  There had been some build-up, over the years, chronicled in the Los Angeles Times pieces linked above.  The only real explanation is one offered in the LA Times, via Zimerman’s manager Mary Pat Buerkle, is that this had been some time in coming, that Zimerman had been increasingly unhappy with the circumstances of touring in the U.S.  Here a particular anecdote comes to mind, one of which I was unaware until now. 

 

Shortly after 9/11, when Zimerman entered the U.S. on tour with his personal Steinway, U.S. officials (Customs? Homeland Security?) thought the glue smelled funny and, suspicious that he might have been smuggling in explosives (!?), destroyed the instrument.

 

Destroyed the instrument.  Let me explain.  To musicians, instruments are living things.  Even those who would not go so far as to say the sort of thing quoted on Zimerman’s wikipedia entry—“My friendship with the Steinway piano is one of the most important and beautiful things in my life”—we have all had the experience of people coming to us after performances, in tears, transformed, etc. etc.  Yes, it was the music that reached them, and if we have any sense we acknowledge that we personally did not have all that much to do with it.  But to the violinist with his Guarneri or Strad, or the guitarist with his classic Martin or Stratocaster, or Zimerman with his Steinway, that is a living thing, an object miraculously fashioned of star-stuff that can be animated to the point where it communicates directly to listeners’ souls.  I don’t think I exaggerate much; it is akin to how Jews traditionally think about books and scrolls: most certainly not just inanimate objects (hence our reactions to book-burning; that means far more to us even than it looks like).  Rock aficionados should consult John Hiatt’s “Perfectly Good Guitar” if they’re skeptical of my point here; that song is a cri de coeur roughly equal to Clapton’s “Layla,” and it addresses just the subject at hand.  So here’s Zimerman with his beloved Steinway, and the U.S. geniuses—taking a break from renaming pommes frites “freedom fries,” perhaps, or putting up “if you ain’t a patriot you’re a SCUD” posters—destroy his piano.

 

Since then, Zimerman has chosen to return to the U.S., and now he apparently travels with his piano in pieces, which he reassembles (something I find unimaginable).  I can readily see, though, that such a thuggish act of wanton destruction—needless cruelty, in an artist’s view—would burn away at someone like Zimerman.  Finally, I imagine, he had had enough, though probably the pressures were building up more from within than without: all auguries in the good old U. S. of A. are that we’ve turned back from the moral precipice, governmentally speaking, and are hell-bent on reassuming moral leadership, reestablishing the rule of law, reassuming our responsibilities to our citizens and those of the world, and so on.  It makes no sense for Zimerman to flip us what Bruce Springsteen calls “the New Jersey state bird” now, unless this is a long-term buildup of rage and resentment.

 

I really have no great conclusion.  Krystian Zimerman is entitled to do what he likes; I continue to admire his artistry, which is equaled by very, very few other musicians.  I hope he decides to return here at some point.  (Since he has returned since the post-9/11 debacle I have to conclude that he decided that return trips would be commercially adavantageous to him.)  All that said, I also think that he was very wrong to allow his feelings to boil over at a bunch of people who had come to be mended and improved by his music, who had paid premium for the privilege, and who had little or nothing to do with Cheney/Rove/Bush (in order of importance) policies.  I have never found artists (or humanities scholars, even) to be deep thinkers, politically—Zimerman or the Dixie Chicks or plenty of other historical examples, so their principled stands can sometimes end up looking a bit…well, simpleminded.  So, while acknowledging his heartfelt feelings, I—proudly American, despite whatever criticisms I choose to level at my government and fellow citizens—would probably been among those bellowing insults back at him. Yet he who[se country] is sinless cast the first stone; it is intellectually so lazy so say something like “your military is trying to take over the world,” now, that however heartfelt this seems like a petty, theatrical display.  Whether Mr. Zimerman returns or not, I’m sure there will still be interest in his playing, but given his choice to make that kind of exit—cape billowing, nose in the air—if this was the final chapter there may not be a lot of mourning here, even among pianists.

Where is the self that performs?

Phil Ford

A while ago I started writing a series of posts about sound and technology studies. I stopped after doing two of them, partly because I've been getting blog fatigue anyway, and partly because it seemed like an impossibly large problem (actually, a complex of interrelated problems) to tackle in the blog medium. It feels like trying to bail out a lake with a china cup. But whatever, anyway, OK, so here's something I've been thinking about in the same line. 

In my earlier posts I had argued that the concept of the musical work not only regulates and guides our formal study of Western art music, but also ends up ignoring a good deal of our actual musical experience. Then why study only musical works? Why just study compositions? Why not study performances of compositions? And of course a lot of scholars have started doing just that. 

I'm listening to a recorded musical performance -- the Vladimir De Pachmann 1907 recording of the Chopin Barcarolle. At 1:06 De Pachmann starts playing a new theme (those of you who know the piece will notice a big cut). The melody starts on scale degree 5, slides down (by way of a chromatic passing note) to 4, then skips down to 2 and curls back around, landing on 3 and moving upward through an arpeggiation of the A major triad. The apex of this arrival is the tonic pitch (1). When De Pachmann gets there, he gives a little pause. It's a nice little pause, an apt way of marking a short-range melodic and harmonic destination, and De Pachmann makes the pause in a very characteristic way, articulating the highest note of the chord a little after the accompaniment, so that the hands go slightly out of phase for a moment. One might be able to map this moment, perhaps on a temporal graph. (There are problems with this approach, but it's certainly practicable -- tempo graphing is common in musical performance studies, if only because tempo is more quantifiable than other parameters of performance.) If we gathered enough information about similar moments of rubato, we might be able to start talking about De Pachmann's general approach to rubato. We might use this general understanding of De Pachmannesque rubato to understand certain exemplary moments of interpretation, moments where De Pachmann makes some interesting decision -- for example, when he does something especially noticeable to mark the boundary between sections or the end of a piece. 

And when we do that, we will be talking about De Pachmann's interpretation as if it were like a work, but just a different kind of work. Instead of being a notated composition, this kind of work is a creation of sounds, gelled into some kind of permanence by recording technology. It's the special ability of recorded sound to allow us to repeat a moment of time endlessly, to take what is evanescent (music played on a piano more than 100 years ago) and make it permanent, so we can review and analyze the minutest details of a performance in the same way that we can go through the score of a piece of music and look at long-range connections between different themes separated by hundreds of measures. To analyze music in this way you have to be able to freeze and reverse time -- otherwise it doesn't hold still long enough for us to nail it down. Recordings and scores freeze time in different ways, but in either case they are technological contrivances that give us an object for analysis. 

Now if performances are works, performers are their authors, so we naturally will start interpreting particular moments within a performance (like that little hitch at the beginning of the new melody) as authorial utterances. Notice I used the phrase "interesting decisions" in a previous paragraph to describe the sorts of things we might want to go looking for in an analysis of a performance. But to what extent are performative gestures decisions? Are performances the result of conscious choices that performers make? We don't ever really ask this question when we're thinking about things like the Chopin Barcarolle that De Pachmann plays. We speak of the composer's intentions, which performers are enjoined to realize; we speak of tonal structures, phrase lengths, motivic relationships (etc.), everything in a composition we might be inclined to analyze, as the result of a conscious application of mind. Chopin chose these things, they didn't just happen. This is not usually something we argue, but rather something we assume, and this assumption enables us to write sentences like "Beethoven shortens the lengths of his phrases as he approaches the modulation to G major" (or whatever). It feels natural to assume the same thing of the distinctive features of a performance. ("Serkin slows down as he approaches Beethoven's modulation to G major.") On this account, a performance takes the form of a virtual conversation between conscious subjectivities. And indeed I have assumed just this sort of thing before. 

But here's the problem. If you have ever performed music professionally you have probably had this experience where you're playing and everything is going really well: the music is just flowing out of you without anything to block it. You're not thinking, "I am am playing this thing," you're just playing it. And in such states -- "flow states" -- you aren't exactly making conscious decisions. In a really good performance, you're just kind of going with it; your subjectivity merges with "it", the thing you're playing, or whatever it is that lies behind what you're playing. And time has a different meaning; you begin a piece, you end it, you begin another one, and so on to the end of the program, playing as if in a dream where time is mysteriously dilated. Your concert is over in like five minutes (or so it seems) and you can't really remember what you were playing. The worst thing that can happen is that you're kind of flowing along and then suddenly your conscious mind, your ego, the thing that makes conceptual statements, suddenly interrupts and says "oh shit, we're in the recapitulation! how did we get here?!" And at this point, as you well know if you've ever played Western art music from memory, you are most in danger of having a memory slip. In these moments you become aware that there are at least two kinds of consciousness that come into play when you perform -- the state in which you stand apart from what you're playing and can make little comments about it (oh god, here comes that leap, don't fuck it up now; well, you fucked it up, didn't you? hope it goes better in the exposition repeat) and flow state, where you are fully integrated to what you're playing. And it's in the boundary between the two -- coming out of flow and into critical consciousness with a jolt and possibly a memory slip -- that the distinction becomes clear.

My point is this: the kind of interpretation of performances that I've described here, where we treat the recorded performance as if it were a new kind of work, treats everything in a performance as if it were the result of a critical consciousness. We tacitly assume that when (for ex.) De Pachmann makes that little hitch of rubato that I described he is actually thinking something like "OK, here I am, coming to the apex of a melody -- I'm going to take some time." But anyone who's ever played music in flow state knows that you don't necessarily think any such thing. In a flow state, it's almost as if someone else is playing the music. This explains why musicians are often surprised (sometimes pleasantly) by what they hear when they hear a playback of their performance. Ornette Coleman's liner notes for Change of the Century mentions this experience:

When our group plays, before we start out to play, we do not have any idea what the end result will be. Each player is free to contribute what he feels in the music at any given moment. We do not begin with a preconceived notion as to what kind of effect we will achieve. When we record, sometimes I can hardly believe that what I hear when the tape is played back to me is the playing of my group. I am so busy and absorbed when I play that I am not aware of what I'm doing at the time I'm doing it.

So in a situation like this, where is the self that performs? Where is the subjectivity to which we can ascribe intention, and whose intentions form the basis of our interpretations? It suddenly seems to me that the problem of consciousness is a great and unexamined problem of performance studies. And perhaps it is also a problem of musicology in general. Where is the self that composes? Not being a composer myself I have nothing to say about the degree to which compositional decisions belong to intentional states, but perhaps someone out there has something to say about this question.

Mendelssohn and Moscheles: The Premiere

Jonathan Bellman

Here is a link to the World Premiere performance, 21 February 2009 at Southwestern University in Georgetown, TX, of the two-piano-and-orchestra piece by Felix Mendelssohn and Ignaz Moscheles that Prof. John Michael Cooper and I reconstructed.

  The entire experience was blogged about here, here, here, here, and here.  I’m stage left, Kiyoshi Tamagawa is stage right, and Lois Ferrari is conducting the Austin Civic Orchestra.  Enjoy!

The Critics Weigh In

Jonathan Bellman

The warm-up performance of my Mendelssohn/Moscheles piece was Monday night, and it went well.  I now know better what to work on for the real premiere in TX on 2/21, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to have gone through it.  I am deeply fortunate to have colleagues like conductor Russell Guyver and pianist Lei Weng who are willing to make something like this happen, and I have to observe—yet again—that Universities are the sorts of places where this kind of thing can happen: atypical ensemble, colleagues who are willing to take risks on unfamiliar works (especially a recent discovery like this) and like nefarious schemes, and so on.  It was a pleasure to walk among the students who were warming up in the corridors backstage.  All seriousness: cello here, oboe there, violins all over.  I’ve often thought that a documentary on the doings in a school of music over the course of a term would make for really compelling viewing.

Now for the morning-after critics.  Google Alerts informed me of two student bloggers who liked what they heard.  In all their marginally literate glory, they are to be found here and here.  One of them may be using the blog to practice her English, which is a fun task to set oneself.  It’s nice that these are students who would not necessarily be going to such concerts, so these are not music blogs. 

A Public Letter

Jonathan Bellman

Joel Shapiro, my piano teacher at the University of Illinois (where I earned my M.M. in Piano Performance over a quarter-century ago), recently asked me what was special or interesting about my current project, the Fantasie und Variationen über den Zigeunermarsch aus Webers Preziosa, jointly composed by Felix Mendelssohn and Ignaz Moscheles, which has not been performed in its original two-piano-and-orchestra form since 1833.  As I’ve blogged before (here and here), I've been involved in reconstructing the original score, and I'll be playing one of the solo parts for the twenty-first-century premiere, on February 21 in Austin, TX, and on the pre-premiere here in Greeley, CO on February 9.

 

It is certainly a fair question, so I will answer publicly, borrowing from the centuries-old practice of public correspondence. 

 

Dear Joel,

 

Yesterday we had our first rehearsal with the orchestra, so I now have heard the piece all the way through for the first time.  If the piece makes it to the culture-vulture threshold of the popular media, it will doubtless be called a “lost masterpiece,” which it is not.  To me, it is something perhaps more interesting: a work explicitly composed by two accomplished pianist-composers, within the space of a week, to entertain the English concert audience of 1833.  To learn and perform such a work is to see the rivets and seams, of course, since in such a case “composed by” might better be understood as “assembled by.”  The introduction and finale were collaborative efforts; Mendelssohn took variations one and two and Moscheles took three and four.  Naturally, we learn something about what figuration each man liked to play—all part of the standard vocabulary of post-classical Brilliant Style writing—and we see how compatible they were, which is no surprise to anyone knowing their biographies.  Had I not known of their collaboration, I would have accepted this work as an occasional composition of either Mendelssohn or Moscheles.

 

The theme is a popular one from the time, the Gypsy march from Carl Maria von Weber’s incidental music to the play Preziosa, which was a retelling of one of Cervantes’s Novellas ejemplares.  Although the subject is, of course, Spanish Gypsies (and Weber’s music does have some music of a Spanish flavor), the march (and this piece) mostly reference the style hongrois, a popular Hungarian-Gypsy idiom which as you know has been an interest of mine for decades.  I smile to find Mendelssohn undoing his collar button enough to have a good time in such a style, since he was generally uncomfortable with openly vernacular excursions into local color such as this.  (Obviously, the “Scottish” and “Italian” symphonies take a very different approach.)  There is also, I think, a reference to another style hongrois piece of Weber’s: variation three has a passage strongly reminiscent of the introduction to Ännechen’s comic second-act dream-divination song from Der Freischütz, which opens with a smoky style hongrois viola solo over pseudo-cimbalom tremolos.  As our conductor Russell Guyver has pointed out, the orchestration itself is very much in Weber spirit, which would certainly have had a resonance in London of the early 1830s.

 

Another thread running through the piece, for whatever reason, is Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto.  The second half of the first theme of the first movement serves as a motto for the Introduction of the Mendelssohn/Moscheles, and the broken octaves from the end of Beethoven’s finale—a fairly common evocation of idiomatic cimbalom playing—and the texture of the octave melody from just before shows up in a couple of places in the Mendelssohn/Moscheles finale also.  Moscheles in particular was a cult-of-Beethoven type, so it is not surprising from him, but it is interesting that Op. 37 should be so present in an openly style hongrois work.  There are some Hungarian elements in Beethoven’s finale, to be sure (and for that matter Peter van der Merwe heard some in the second movement of the Seventh Symphony), so this piece may give some indication of how vernacular elements in the Beethoven were heard and understood in the decades following its composition.

 

From the perspective of the keyboard, the Fantasy and Variations almost plays itself.  Mendelssohn and Moscheles scored the piece with plenty of pianistic craft, so the soloists are able to hear where they need to be, to contrive effective cues, and to put the thing together with a minimum of rehearsal.  (Our ensembles are being kinder to us, but I still recognize when subtle fail-safes and safety nets are woven into a piece’s concept.)  The piece is ten to fifteen minutes total; beautifully crafted, loads of fun to play, and attractive and entertaining throughout.  Frankly, I like it much more than Mendelssohn’s first piano concerto, which I have never managed to like and which, to my mind, has a more limited vocabulary of keyboard figuration and no themes I would want to remember.  In comparison to the Preziosa Variations, Mendelssohn’s Op. 25 seems to me to aspire to more and achieve less.

 

And a personal note: I have always been grateful to you for, among many other things, the fingering principles you passed on to me in the early 1980s—thumbs-together, mirror-groupings, liberation from the standard scale fingerings and so on that both are optimally dependable and facilitate quicker learning and more effective memorization.  Such approaches to fingering have proven invaluable here, and some of the slightly quirky passagework (altered scales patterns, etc.) suggest to me that Mendelssohn and Moscheles understood such principles well, particularly when putting together a piece like this on a we’ve-only-got-five-days-and-this-needs-to-work basis.  Learning the piece with these fingering practices in mind has made me smile many times, as yet another passage falls neatly under the hand.

 

Thus my take on the Preziosa Fantasy and Variations for two pianos and orchestra by Mendelssohn and Moscheles.  It is a piece for the audience and for the players, well crafted with plenty of bravura and clever contemporary musical references—Freischütz here, a touch of the Spanish Fandango-like two-chord oscillation there, a playful fugato in another place—to please both Kenner und Liebhaber. I am less inclined to think of it as a Work in the sacralized sense, but we’re probably better off freeing ourselves from such needlessly delimiting concepts anyway.  It is a real joy to learn a historical piece with no received performance tradition such as this, because I can bring the entirety of my study of the contemporary musical language to it without having to get into arguments with this or that Influential Figure, Famous Interpreter, etc.  It is like when Jeffrey Kallberg sent me his reconstruction of an early Chopin Prelude in E-Flat Minor (which can be read about here and heard in my unfortunately incoherent performance here), which he reconstructed from a scrap of Chopin’s score-paper on which it was notated in a kind of shorthand; one doesn’t have to waste time disagreeing.

 

Back to practicing and grading now.  Hoping all’s well with you and yours,

 

Jon

Getz Postscript

Jonathan Bellman

I decided to write my old friend Charles for more information about the piece Stan Getz played at Stanford, mentioned here.  He said:

 

Re the piece for Stan, sure: Tenor Rhapsody, by William Thomas McKinley of the New England Conservatory.  His wife was some sort of Wiccan who cast various spells and hexes before every rehearsal, and the concert, sitting in the front row for the purpose.  Altogether nuts.

 

Charles also recalled:

 

I well remember that concert. When we started the first half we had no idea whatsoever if we would have a second—but Mem Aud was full, and even Herb Caen was there. Toth and I also cajoled Stan like the sycophants we were…

 

I was the one who spent night after night at his home…pounding out his notes on the keyboard—but that’s yet another lamentable story.

 

Fun days!

 

After I stopped laughing and wiping my eyes, I searched “Tenor Rhapsody McKinley” and found the following program notes to a recording of the same composer’s work Night Music, which is apparently a rewrite:

 

Night Music

 

This work owes its existence in no small part to the legendary jazz tenor saxophonist Stan Getz. It was Getz who, after having heard some of McKinley’s music in the mid- to late 1980s, approached the composer with an invitation to write a new piece for tenor saxophone and orchestra, which McKinley quickly accepted. Almost immediately it became clear to McKinley that the work would be a dramatic, rhapsodic composition of significant proportions. After consulting with Getz, it was further agreed that the solo part would be fully notated, even as it evoked Getz’s improvisational style. The Tenor Rhapsody for Solo Tenor Sax and Orchestra was completed in April of 1988, and its premiere followed less than two months later on 10 June 1988 in Palo Alto, CA. Getz was the soloist with the Stanford University Symphony Orchestra, with Andor Toth conducting. There is no record that Getz ever played McKinley’s Rhapsody again in public, and less than three years later, on June 6, 1991, the jazz giant lost his battle with cancer.

 

In the small world department: these notes are by my friend Scott Warfield, whose work I quote in the second edition of my Short Guide to Writing About Music because he’s so good at it.  My wife has done notes for MMC also.  And, to come full circle, I find this review of the CD by David Denton for Fanfare at the bottom of the same screen:

 

This is Volume 12 of MMC’s indispensable anthology of world-premiere recordings of 20th-century North American music. At the core of this new release is a work by the founder of MMC, William Thomas McKinley, one of the few composers who have successfully brought jazz and classical music together, and to such an extent that you can no longer find where on [sic] ends and the other begins. ‘Night Music’ is a reworking of the 1988 score ‘Rhapsody for Solo Tenor Sax and Orchestra’ originally intended for legendary saxophonist Stan Getz. The work came late in Getz’s all-too-short life, and McKinley subsequently decided to rewrite the score to take into account the exceptional skills of Michael Rossi, the remarkable soloist in this highly enjoyable performance.

 

So the redoubtable McKinley, founder of MMC, must be the guy I met backstage at Memorial Auditorium.  And the event was a couple years earlier than I thought, when I was a lad of but 30.  The composer’s notes to the piece are found on pp. 78–79 of this Googlebooks link.

 

I only heard the original Tenor Rhapsody, be it said, not the Night Music rewrite.  To be totally honest, my unfortunate meeting with the composer aside, I enjoyed the piece; it was like post-Gershwin, a style that I have always felt had much more in it than we ever heard.  I would welcome more performances of it.

Me and Stan Getz (and a Concerto for Tenor Saxophone and Orchestra)

Jonathan Bellman

OK, Re-Pete: by popular demand, here is my one rather unfortunate connection with the late Stan Getz.  Late in my time at Stanford—I believe it was the last year of my doctorate, 1989–90—I got an eleventh-hour call from Charles Barber, a friend and at the time a conducting student there.  He was organizing the Stanford Orchestra concert, which was some kind of mixed program with Stan Getz, the titular head of the Stanford Jazz Program.  Getz had, I think, almost nothing to do with Stanford other than showing up periodically, being a figurehead, disseminating misinformation about the Jazz Program on Johnny Carson, and so on.  There was a commissioned work on the concert, a symphonic Jazz concerto for tenor sax and orchestra composed for Getz by I can’t remember who (it is NOT THIS ONE, but MAYBE THIS ONE, though I don’t think it was by Bill Holman).  This piece, as it turned out, had a small piano part.  Since a Jazz combo was going to do a few numbers with Getz early in the program, the pianist had agreed to play the part, until…he saw it, and demurred.  He doesn’t read much, he’s an econ grad student, he’s really busy.  Jon, please, could you…?  It’s not that hard…

 

It was true; the piano part was not that hard—just some strummed chords and stuff, so I agreed.  When I showed up, though, I found that the combined insecurities of Getz (who didn’t like playing from music), the conductor Andor Toth, Sr. (who was not comfortable with Jazz, though he was called upon periodically to do it), and the logistics of the Jazz combo earlier in the program meant that I was to be playing with my goddamned back to the conductor.  To see him, I would have to look backwards over my left shoulder while simultaneously, one presumed, playing from my unmemorized part.  I tried to object, but no, Jon, we’re sorry, we can’t do anything, you’ve got to understand, you’ve got to work with it, Andor is already upset enough, no don’t bring it up to him, Getz has decided he won’t even play the piece anyway, feelings are running so high…

 

Apparently Getz was not confident about his music-reading ability.  Another Stanford student had made him a tape of the solo sax part played on piano, so Getz could learn it by ear, but he was still insecure, and had decided at the last moment not to perform the work.  Everyone was at sixes and sevens, and in walks yours truly, unhappy enough for my own impossible situation, completely uninvested in Jazz per se and neither knowing nor caring much about the fact that Getz was bona fide Jazz Royalty.  Backstage, I meet…the composer, whoever he was.  He sounded to me like a fast-talking Hollywood Mr. Smooth-It-Away type, full of strutting self-promotion (“I mean, you can see what I’ve accomplished with this piece!”), with his tux, big pink tie and equally strutting adolescent son by his side.  Since I was the only ear this guy could get, he began playing me: I should go talk to Stan, get him to do the piece, I’m in the piece, he’ll listen to me, it’s fine really, Stan should just improvise the cadenza rather than play the one written (complete with fulsome faux-flexibility: “That’s the feel I wanted anyway,” he claimed), etc.  I was raised in Los Angeles county and have a lifetime’s experience with the L.A. type, but still couldn’t fend this guy off.  So, somehow, I—a largely Jazz-ignorant doctoral-candidate last-minute walk-on—was given the assignment of convincing The Great Stan Getz to please play this guy’s concerto.

 

Well!  Wasn’t this a recipe for success! 

 

What tack to take?  Getz doesn’t know me from Adam, and he wasn’t even there for the rehearsal.  Maybe friendly familiarity… [those of you thinking “Uh-oh; cue the Don Giovanni D Minor chord” have it exactly right.]  So, I go to jolly him up; he’s nervously talking to the strutting, oh-so-cool Jazz combo (you know how Jazz guys can get when a classical musician is in the room).  He’s reluctant, and I’m trying to jolly him up (this is a stranger, remember) and I wound up with, “Oh, come on, schmuck…”

 

FREEZE-FRAME.  PLEASE.

 

In my mind, I have always heard “schmuck!” in my father’s voice, kidding and above all affectionate.  Yes, thanks, I do know what schmuck means literally, but in my family it always had a kind of “ah, geddadda heah’ ya joik” sense; Dad would say “you’re a schmuck!” when I scored a point on him about his driving or an unsavory aspect of his youth or my mother’s zinging him or whatever.  So for me the word was always a slight elbow in the ribs, always warmly meant.  OK, so my house was the only one I knew that had any discernible yiddishkayt in it, and so I thought our unique take on the various family dialects was standard, government-issue American Yinglish.  Wrong again, Jon!  This was brought home in a very uncomfortable way when Getz snapped back

 

“DON’T YOU CALL ME A SCHMUCK, SON!”

 

Oh, sh--.  So I apologized, immediately, profusely, and resentfully, turned and walked away, mentally washing my hands of the entire situation.

 

The order of the program was changed, to put the concerto at the end so Mr. Getz could change his mind at any point.  Piece by piece the concert progressed, and at the end we all went on.  Getz played, improvising during the cadenza rather than playing the written one. I craned my neck wretchedly throughout and (if I recall correctly) made hash of the piano part.  After the concert, I was about to exit stage left, and turned around once more: there was Getz in the stage right wings, looking at me fixedly. 

 

I thought this at the time, and it looks this way in my memory, and for the rest of my life I will believe: there was regret in his face.  Probably I’m giving myself far too much credit, but that’s what I saw: he was looking at me, sadly, as if knowing our previous contact hadn’t gone right.

 

A mensch would have walked gingerly up to him, expressed regret at our previous conversation, and congratulated him on his performance.

 

I turned back and left, sick of the entire situation: sick of blowing my conversation with him and getting dressed down like a fourteen-year-old (I was probably 32 or so), sick of the stupid, manipulative composer's having put me in that position, and above all sick of the way I had been forced into embarrassing myself on the piano.  Two years later Getz was dead. 

 

What was I saying about the strutting pride of those awful stuck-up Jazz musicians?  God knows classical musicians never present any such behaviors.

 

It’s a shameful story, I freely admit.  I was insecure and unhappy about my own inglorious role and the untenable position I was put in, and I was resentful about the way he snapped back at me—but this does not belong in the category of That Stan Getz and How He Treated People.  One ought to know better than to call a stranger, particularly someone of Getz’s profile and accomplishments, a schmuck of all things!  I have always been a slow learner, though.  This one was my fault, not his, and it is a memory I will forever be ashamed of.  I do, however, hereby publicly own it.  And yes, I warned you that it was a long story.

A Pluto Transits the Canon

Jonathan Bellman

Pluto’s demotion from Planet to Minor Planet has been worked over to death. (In fact, didn’t Phil’s first blog on Dial M reference Pluto’s unfortunate encounter with fortune’s wheel?) So I’m not going to talk about the real Pluto. Likewise, The Canon (bless it) has—in the abstract and in actuality—been much discussed, problematized, reviled, and in general belabored. I’m not going to talk about that either, except indirectly. The way we regard Tradition means we are much more comfortable letting new additions accrue than we are letting go of the old. This is true with almost anything I can think of. Curriculum is an obvious case, as becomes apparent when someone suggests review or revision: “What do you mean, ‘incorporate new material’? We don’t have sufficient time to teach what we need to cover as it is! Perhaps if you added a separate class in X, taught by someone else, someone younger, someone who…but then, of course, you would have to add units in the Music Education major, which the state wouldn’t allow. Well, I suppose we could establish a committee. Besides, I’m not convinced that this more recent stuff is anything more than ephemeral; why don’t we wait to see if it has any staying power before we make it part of the curriculum? Well, I have another meeting to go to; perhaps if we revisit some of these questions at a later point, but not next year because I’m on sabbatical…” Jewish tradition is another example, much on my mind as we approach the Days of Awe. Over the millennia prayers and repetitions and other rituals were added for various reasons, but almost never deleted—how can you delete what is holy? Of course, far be it from me to imply that services are FAR TOO LONG, but… Reluctance to let go of things that have acquired both familiarity and sanctity is normal and all too human. Thus with the concert music canon: we study it, we play it, but we are really reluctant to let things go, sometimes in defiance of reason. So: I would like to make a nomination. I recently heard a live performance of Bizet’s early Symphony in C. It’s like a student work, really; lots of Mozart, some Haydn, a bit of Beethoven, some recognizable Mendelssohn, and a pseudo-Arabic oboe solo that shows (to me, anyway) a pretty clear influence from Félicien David’s Ode-Symphony Le Dèsert. It is formally clear and clean—going beyond “classical” to “textbook,” I would say—and it’s tuneful and attractive, or is generally considered to be. It has an additional existence as a famous Balanchine ballet, which means that in the minds of many of the dancers I knew (in my previous existence as a ballet pianist) it was sort of the artistic equivalent of the Bach double violin concerto. You know, one famous Balanchine ballet, another famous Balanchine ballet. (I know, I know. You get used to swallowing your outrage.) I’d like to nominate Bizet’s Symphony in C for the next Plutonian demotion. Bizet produced a competent piece, but he was not really a symphonist, and the piece is ultimately a bit boring. To what extent do we need the Immortal Western Performance Canon (irony intended) to include also-rans like this? With which other symphonies is this equal? Franck’s D Minor symphony used to be more a part of the Canon than it is now, and even D’Indy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Air (with piano obbligato) once had a firm place in the repertoire. Does Bizet’s piece stand above those? Are the overtures and concertos of Joseph Joachim really inferior to this Bizet piece? I’ve always enjoyed Virgil Thomson’s Symphony on a Hymn Tune; it is not often played, and the symphonies of Hanson and Piston are even rarer. The Bizet is better than all of those? It isn’t. It’s light and inoffensive, and the composer is famous because of Carmen, and that may be it. Time to allow this piece to recede into the distance; there’s plenty of New and Should-Be-Better-Known Old that is better deserving of time in the concert hall.