Dial "M" for Musicology

Silly heads, part deux

A couple of people have stepped up to the sleevehead/jackethead challenge. But not enough! C'mon! I thought we could get someone working in a music library to amuse us with the old LPs gathering dust in the closed stacks. As we all know, old classical LPs have some molto bizarro cover art. Surely someone can do something with some old Westminster Gold albums? Think what could be done with these jackets:

And of course there's this perennial favorite:

But in the meantime, Scott is representin' with Kenneth Burke:

While Ryan Dohoney at Columbia sports Gallic cult-crit flavor:

And the Nonchalant Savant (great handle, btw) offers an old-school sleeve-head:

Keep 'em coming.

A Style Out of Time

“They were graceful and heroic songs in a style out of time…” (Maddy Prior)

One of the questions commonly asked of music students and musicians—probably something like the one asked to physicians: “A friend of mine has this problem…”—is asked by friends and family members who, y’know, like classical music but not that dissonant modern stuff. The question is something like, “Well, why don’t people write like Mozart anymore? We’d like modern music then, wouldn’t we? I mean, what he wrote worked…”

This one is surprisingly hard to respond to. You’re studying music, and you’ve just fallen in love with Pierrot Lunaire, with George Crumb, with Bartok, with Cage, with Ligeti. And you’ve just fallen in love with all this really challenging music but you can’t really explain it to people who want their music to be purty, period. And they think they’ve stumped you, and you think they’ve let their stupid side show, and in any case there’s no real way to respond to them—you cannot explain to them why Mozart is really edgy, in a sense not pretty, why people who liked nice music didn’t really respond to Mozart, all that you hear in Mozart. Forget it. They’ll think you're crazy, or pretentious.

I wasn’t thinking about Mozart when I had the radio on a couple of days ago; I was thinking about…Traffic. (Not traffic but Traffic: the fabulously gifted early-to-mid 1970s ensemble, consisting of Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi, and Chris Wood.) Steve Winwood has a new solo album, and the single, “Dirty City,” sounds an awful lot like Traffic in the glory days. It sounded wonderful, but…old, from Back Then. I honestly was not sure if it was an old song or new song. Really enjoyable, beautifully played, but…well, dated. Great, but somehow not right. The retro stuff on Springsteen’s latest (I’m hearing “The Girls in Their Summer Clothes” on the radio these days) is not old-style dress-up in the same way, but rather a tribute, and (somehow) more current and immediate. I really like this new Winwood tune, but it just does not feel culturally vital; it feels not like the immediacy of my youth, but rather like me too comfortably remembering my youth.

There is a reason, though probably an inexplicable one, why even the best music written in counterpoint class sounds like a beautiful…museum-piece, exercise, or artifact, but not really an expression of anything real. Contrast Brahms’s olden-style pieces for, say, women’s chorus, which sound like he is ruminating on a beloved style of music, which is something different—there is still elements of Brahms and own time there, hence an intensity and vividness (and, I guess, the same is true for Springsteen). This may be why much academic music sounds so blisteringly yesterday; it is, too often, music constructed in response to a codified structure or belief-system or aesthetic (whether historical or “contemporary”) and ends up talking to itself only, if it talks at all. I can’t help thinking of the vanilla silliness of what the composition profs in the 1970s were turning out, or the sugar-water of the New Agers later. The Moment for those styles was brief indeed, and the compositional nokhschleppers (draggers-after) were so weirdly self-righteous about How It Ought To Be, long after their stuff stopped communicating. I have to admit that some of this self-righteousness can be heard among Classic Rock aficionados: it was fantastic then, now it has no foundation, the kids don’t know what they’re hearing, it all sucks. O Tempus, O Mores!

Myself, I can’t get through the wall to the Mystery—why music from its time can sound timeless, but music out of its time is somehow culturally less connected, less vivid and immediate. And I will still listen to it, and gladly; good music commands attention. There’s a nagging feeling, though, that music in a believable historical stylistic costume just a tad too comfortable. The sort of thing a middle-aged guy listens to in the car. No offense, Mr. Winwood, Sir.

Silly Heads

There's a page devoted to sleeve heads -- photos that juxtapose record jackets and people in perspectivally interesting ways. A couple of my favorites:

And Cat Scratch Fever is always good for a laugh. I think I'd be wearing the same expression as Paul McCartney if I ended up in a tastefully-decorated loft with the Nuge:

Anyway, in the interests of wasting time at the end of semester, I hereby challenge academic bloggers and classical-music bloggers -- geeks, in other words -- to come up with their own sleeve heads. But it has to be geeky. Classical bloggers could use classical recordings. Academic geeks could do a "jacket head" adaptation of the concept with a favorite book. Here, for example, is my own humble first effort, with Tha Notorious H.U.G.'s Production of Presence:

You make 'em and I'll post 'em.

When They Carry You Out, You’re Gonna Have to Go

It’s hard to know how to feel at the news of the recent lawsuit between Matthew Fisher (formerly of Procol Harum; think of the organ obbligato to “Whiter Shade of Pale”) and Gary Brooker (composer, singer, pianist of Procol Harum, including on “Whiter Shade”). PH was one of my all-time favorite bands; I saw them three times, including a stellar college gig at Southampton University in late 1975. Fisher was long gone. Now, after 38 years, he was trying to claim composer’s co-credit for “Whiter Shade,” which would of course have amounted to a zillion dollars. The judge said that he’d discredited his case against Brooker by waiting 38 years to levy it. So it goes.

I liked almost all their stuff better than “Whiter Shade,” and it always irked me (probably almost as much as the band themselves) that the critical conventional wisdom was that every song of theirs was a remake of that one. I used to wonder if anyone had actually listened to anything after that first hit. The band did have a distinctive sound, but it also had several different personalities (the Robin Trower/Broken Barricades period was a departure, and also a high point), and I always thought that they were what classical/art rock should have been: heavy on the melody, harmony, and counterpoint, much lighter than everyone else on the tedious stoner-music synthobabble and ponderous jams. That I adored their music and that they never became huge is probably one more indication that I’ve always been out of step.

So Matthew Fisher has been a computer programmer since 1969, and Brooker became an OBE in 2003. And now they’re going to be arguing about who pays the legal bills, with everyone feeling wronged, bitter, and as if the past has been betrayed. Maybe we listeners are the lucky ones—we put the songs on and forget about it. They continue to slug it out. That kind of money makes people do odd, destructive things.

Not a risk we run in higher education—but that observation is only partially ironic. The poison that runs through the veins of the music business is truly a caution to those with stars in their eyes—that’s the water you’ll be swimming in. This is not to warn people off and tell them to remain in the higher ed womb; far from it. Just be aware, and be prepared to care for separate parts of your being—the artist part, and the business part. They can be complementary, but if they start affecting each other, watch it. So it goes.

Glenn Gould's 3-D House of Pancakes

OK, I'll admit it, I've been kind of phoning it in on the blog for the last little bit. It's lame to blog about how you're too busy to blog (something I've called "the Teachout method"), but you get to do it once a year, I reckon, so I'm doing it now. You might have noticed that the number of "cool" postings has increased in proportion to "hot" ones, which basically means, more posting to other people's funny/smart/imaginative doings and more posting of Youtube clips.

This isn't going to change anytime soon. I've still got a lot of stuff to do before the semester ends, and all discretionary brain power (i.e., whatever's left over after teaching) is being used to write about angry hippies with guns.

Another sure-fire way to get hits 'n' links without trying very hard is to write something -- anything -- about Glenn Gould. So here we go. The other day in my sound and performance studies seminar I talked a little about Gould's approach to recording. Gould thought of a recording as a crafted audio composition in itself rather than a transparent rendering of a performance -- or, in Thedore Gracyk's terms, it is an autographic artwork. Gracyk's excellent book Rhythm and Noise rejects what he calls realism in favor of a notion in which a recording -- rock recordings especially, though hiphop does it too -- tiles together sounds assembled in the recording studio to create virtual performances, which is to say, performances that never existed in real time or a real place.

Anyway, the culture of classical music almost never challenges the realist ideal of recording. Even after 4+ decades of rock musicians and their audiences taking studio-based composition for granted, classical heads still get in arguments over the morality of splicing. Glenn Gould is an interesting historical figure (quite apart from the interest his piano playing as such might hold) because he is such an unusual figure within classical music, arguing what is basically a rock position on recording in a classical culture to which such a position is almost totally alien. A good article about all this may be found here. Its author makes the point that Gould's own studio practice is actually rather conservative in his piano recordings. Gould really only broke out into something more innovative in his "Solitude Trilogy" of CBC documentaries. There's a rather beautiful representation of his this in Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould:

In my seminar the other day, I played one of the recordings that Gould made late in life, when he had begun to experiment with what he called "acoustic choreography." This idea was basically that since studio recording allows one to create various acoustic "perspectives" on the piano, one could change from one perspective to another within the same piece, in effect creating the musical analog of a cinematic zoom. So, for example, in Sibelius's Kyllikki op. 41 no. 3,* Gould set up four microphones at varying distances from the piano, and in the first section, where he wanted a dry, analytical sound, he faded the distant mikes and boosted the close ones, eliminating most of the room sound and drawing close into the piano. In the more lyrical middle section, he "zooms" way back, boosting the room sound and giving the recording a "wet," bathroom-like acoustic ambiance. It sounds as if the microphone is mounted on a cart that has just been pulled away from the piano. Compared to the very sophisticated pseudo-spatial effects in an album like, say, Kid A, this is a rather obvious effect, even a bit absurd, like SCTV's classic skit, "Dr. Tongue's Evil House of Pancakes":

Still, you gotta love Gould for trying. And I think it's the fact that he did try, and in the face of considerable hostility and incomprehension from the classical music establishment, that has made him the unlikely hero of such musicians like Buckethead and Uri Caine.

*This example is drawn from Kevin Bazzana's extremely awesome scholarly monograph on Gould, Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work, the last chapter of which contains a fine detailed investigation of Gould's "acoustic choreography," including photo reproductions of the scores Gould marked up to reflect his planned zooms and pans.

The Original Instrument

I suppose this is what I deserve for studying performance practices, and what you deserve for reading a blog by professors. A student found an old recording of the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata (arpeggione, which is a bowed guitar—also called a guitarre d’amour in its time—and piano), and shared it with me. Coincidentally, the very same day a different recording came in on an old LP, ordered by our music librarian. I mentioned before the I was dying of curiosity to hear what the thing was like, how idiomatic, etc. Now, at last, my chance! This rare instrument, how Schubert plumbed its depths, the new light about to be cast on a familiar piece…

The first recording I heard, very well played by Gerhart Darmstadt (arpeggione) and Egino Klepper (Schubert-era piano) did not change my world. It is always possible—I admit up front—that my expectations are colored by versions of the piece with which I have already become familiar. That said, my initial feeling about the arpeggione os as follows: it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Six strings on one bridge doesn’t give the player much in the way of room to maneuver without hitting other strings; a cello allows for much more room. On the basis of the melodies and textures I hear on this recording, I suspect Schubert was no more intimately familiar with the arpeggione that was anyone else; he was probably thinking of a “Supercello’ with a better high range than the cellos we know. This music seems to need a member of the violin family to speak, really: powerful bow-work is balanced by gloriously insouciant melodies. And the arpeggione sounds like a …viol. For me, at least, that’s just the wrong sound-world. The instrument is not sufficiently robust and extroverted to stand out against a Schubert-era piano, and the entire presentation seems like an idea that just didn’t quite work. Of course, the straight, uninflected, and polite (though wonderfully accurate) interpretation did not help bring vernacular Vienna alive for me, either.

Enter Klaus Storck, arpeggione, and Aloys Kontarsky, Schubert-era piano, on the 1974 Archiv recording. My objections are softened somewhat, but not completely. Where Darmstadt sounded a bit awkward on strums and chordal playing (what they English viol players called “playing the lyre way”), Storck sounds lovely. This recording also has a lot more Viennese vernacular flexibility and rhythmic kick (if you think I’m making this up, read Hans Gál on the subject), and so I found it more persuasive for that reason also. It is also recorded better, so the arpeggione does seem to hold its own against the piano.

All that said, I don’t regard a cello or viola transcription as so far off as to betray the piece. It is still a masterpiece, and works beautifully on the members of the more robust violin family. As it happens, I have just recently, for the first time, heard a recording of Ravel’s Tzigane for solo violin and luthéal, as was originally written—some kind of a contraption that made a piano sound more like a cimbalom, I think. Interesting, but the piano is fine on that one. For the Arpeggione Sonata, I'm fine with the middle strings, though clarinet, alto sax etc. are beyond the pale. It is possible to take the original-instrument fetish too far.

So, let’s summarize. Those who read this far have read my comparison of two long-out-of-print recordings of an instrument that had, essentially, the life of a dragonfly and had a negligible effect on the history of western music, and some philosophy in the bargain. Is this self-satire? Am I really this boring and peripheral? If so, at least it’s MY turf to stake out.

Go easy on the comments, please!

Sexy Holidays To You!

This semester is OVAH! I'm sick unto death of music, musicology, and related matters, so I'm not planning on posting anything for a while. In the meantime, a few things:

1. Alex Ross linked to my post on tacky classical album covers and we got a bajillion hits. It's trashy, dashy, and gets the cashy, so here's a few more. Westminster gold, baby!

More cheesecake:

And one for the ladies:

One of our commenters pointed out this potent metaphor of fate:

And one more, sent in by Kyra Davies. This is not a Westminster Gold cover. It's far too strange for Westminster Gold. In fact, looks more like outsider art:

Someone call MOBA.

2. I changed the Dial M email address, because some #%*^#**%#@ has been spoofing our old one and using it to send spam. But I only keep a special Dial M email account because Typepad insists that I publish some email address, and I don't want the spambots to find my university email. So I almost never check the email account that pops up when you hit the "email me" link. If you send me something and I don't answer, that's why. If you want to send Jonathan or me a message, just look up our institutional emails on our department website profiles. Here's Jonathan. Here's me.

3. It wouldn't be Christmas without the Dusty Towne Sexy Holiday Special.

COMMAND—Greenberg Review II

[Part I of my Greenberg Review may be found here.]

II

The question will always arise: how normal is a talented young’un like Jay Greenberg? I’ve no idea, nor am I completely clear what is so valuable about all aspects of “normal” that one might aspire to it. I suspect there’s a lot of normality lurking at the fringes here. My suspicion is that an adolescent joke or two at the expense of family members (who else?) may be found in the composer’s notes; among those acknowledged are “my brother, who taught me the true value of silence,” and “my parents, who encouraged me to do my homework.” Having 1) a brother, and 2) parents, I sense the tiniest little needle (I foresee that he and the brother will end up either best friends or both missing teeth—or both). So it goes.

As for the crack about the homework, I wonder what connection it has with his description of the symphony itself: “My Fifth Symphony is a counter-stereotypical work combining a Romantic melodic sweep with the methodical mathematical thinking of the serialists. This is manifested in the third movement, which is based upon an exponential function, y=1/x2; the function describes an upward arc mirrored across the y-axis, never quite touching or reaching either zero or infinity, and then descending back down. In a similar manner, the music climbs up to a climax it never quite reaches, before descending to a resolution that doesn’t occur.”

Now, I am a long way from my second-year algebra (I LIE—it was never in any sense mine), which I completed with a C and then ran for my life. I could ask my son what this means, but 1) I don’t think it’s that important for the symphony, and 2) he has not distinguished himself by missing opportunities to mock me, so the last thing I need to do is provide more ammo. My suspicion is that Greenberg is tweaking brother, parents, and strict serialists, and perhaps he really did get a germ of an idea from a mathematical concept. To my claylike, nonmathematical mind, though, this does not seem anything like “methodical mathematical thinking.” Conductor Serebrier perhaps pushes the point a bit too far when he says (again, he is quoted in the CD notes): “What jumps out at once is the coherent form of each movement—the logic behind every choice the composer makes.” I wonder about this “logic”; it sounds like Cold War-era sciencization of music for purposes of respect and funding. See? We’re a science too! Very logical! To my mind, there is no logic that would dictate an equali-chorale in the finale of Brahms’s First Symphony, nor a verbunkos tune in the finale of Beethoven’s Third, or a zillion other such compositional choices. Yet they are are deeply persuasive, and have a kind of intuitive coherence that brings us back again and again. Something of this kind of compositional intuition seems to be present in Greenberg’s work; there are too many possible choices for a “logic” to apply, really, but some very, very RIGHT choices are being made.

As for the expected Quid nunc?/Whither? question, I hope Greenberg lives happily and enjoys the full range of human experiences; this will give him a wealth of stuff outside composition lessons to write about. I look forward with real impatience to hearing much more from him, because this recording has a lot to say to me and gives me real pleasure. For him, I use my favorite word for instrumentalists, arrangers, and composers: he has real COMMAND. More, please!

EXTREME!!!!!!!!!

I'm wasting time, and so are you. So, let's talk about ugly/weird/inappropriate classical album covers. This blog post made me laugh. (Parts 2 and 3 here.) The best image is probably this one:

Although "Tito Wayne Gacy" is pretty good too. There's the inevitable Lara St. John cover art:

St. John could use a whole blog post of her own. In fairness, I should post a link to her spirited defense of her cheesecake album cover art. And anyway, she's hardly the first to do it. For example:

And then there are all those album covers that seek to get all in our face with their totally gnarly 'tude:

I remember years ago I saw a CD of some chump playing a thoroughly conventional piano program but flaunting, on the album cover, (A) a sleeveless leather jacket, (B) moderately accentuated biceps, with (C) a spider tattoo. EXTREME!!!

Nigel Kennedy has been guilty of such things in the past. I remember seeing an interview with him on MuchMusic where, in a carefully studied rockstar* manner, he told the interviewer that Beethoven was a total wild man "pissing in his piano" and stuff. But did he also bite the piano?

UPDATE: Jonathan reminded me of Westminster Gold! How could I have forgotten! And what Jonathan wants, Jonathan gets: behold, a whole website devoted to Westminster Gold cover art. You want cheesecake?

Beethoven's facial expression seems to suggest that he is about to burst from his pedestal, Commendatore-like, and scuttle around the room like the severed hand in The Evil Dead, driven mad and antic by the the sheer hotness of the Westminster model. The Austin-Powers-like "strategically placed musical object" trope, as we see, did not originate with Lara St. Jean. Indeed, we find more variations on the theme in the Westminster catalog:

And this is not the end of the hotness. Not at all.

Black socks . . . and nothing else. That's how we rolled in the 1970s!

Did you know that Birkenstock made disco boots? I did not.

This is a very abstract kind of sexy:**

This is just bizarre:

It occurs to me that "Westminster Gold" should join "cop show" in the Dial M slang lexicon. "Westminster Gold" should mean that something is sophisticated, yet totally insane. Dapper and heavily medicated. It's like a line from a Blackalicious song called "Beyonder": "like a war with levity/melody felonies/ heavenly heavenly make you feel like the seventies."

*Jagger in intention, Nigel Tufnel in execution.

**UPDATE 2: Oh, I get it. Military . . . and Farewell . . . But why a VW? And I still don't get the fox with the balloon. Fox, OK, Virgil Fox, but the balloon with the peace sign? Anyone?

COMMAND—Greenberg Review I

I

Some days ago I promised a response to Jay Greenberg’s Fifth Symphony and String Quintet, the recording of which finally arrived last week.  Full disclosure: I knew absolutely nothing of his work previously, and it cannot be denied that anyone’s music is going to benefit from readings such as these.  José Serebrier leads the London Symphony in Greenberg’s Fifth, and there is both a strong conception of the work and excellent execution.  The Juilliard String Quartet + Darrett Adkins on second ’cello give a nuanced and persuasive reading of the quintet, and so—in my opinion, anyway—one can really judge the pieces because they have passionate, thinking advocates like these performers.  You aren’t trying to listen through an under-rehearsed performance, you’re allowing the performance to tell you about the piece, to realize it.  Fortunate the composer—any composer—to have such advocates.

After quite a few listenings, my considered opinion (whatever that may be worth) is that this young composer really has something.  The pieces are immediately attractive, but they are also immediately challenging.  Greenberg has a great sense of what an orchestra actually can do—I don’t mean from a sense of color, so much, but rather from a sense of conversation and ensemble.  People have mentioned Shostakovich as an influence; frankly, I hear Hindemith (some Mathis in the first movement), Brahms also, and a variety of others.  I also felt the benign presence of several American composers of the twentieth century.  Still, it feels like a real symphony, not just like a real big something for orchestra that gets called a symphony for reasons of pretense.  Greenberg seems to understand the novelistic elements of the symphonic genre, the broad sweep and polygeneric nature of it (think, in a novel, of poems, correspondence, diary entries etc. that are part of the greater whole), the microcosms that make the macrocosm.  To my ear: not pastiche, but long-term coherence; not derivativeness and reliance on familiar gestures with familiar associations, but rather fearlessness about using them and, well, communicating.

The finale, one might imagine, might make some uncomfortable, since much of the orchestration and musical material sound as if they have relatives in the world of film music.  (N.B.  I mean this as a compliment: no better place to learn what an orchestra can do, plus all this indicates that Greenberg does not stay up at night twitchily fabricating ways to seem more “original.”)  To my ear, the composer sounds like a symphonist among symphonists, because he understands the language and the instrument—and and knowing this instrument means being able to encompass Debussyan, Brahmsian, American etc. orchestral idioms, which by this point may be taken as topics in the Ratnerian, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sense.  Here’s Hindemith, here’s a chorale in the third movement entering with a Brahmsian seamlessness, here’s America, here’s Russia, here’s film, and much more.  Not “derivativeness” but rather wit, odd juxtapositions, plays on musical words.  Oboes and flutes still work nicely for pastoral passages, and so sometimes that is what they’re given.  After centuries, it still sounds wonderfully natural and idiomatic.

As for the Is It Deep And Immortal, I won’t embarrass myself with an opinion except to say that I’m listening to this a lot.  For me, not a lot of music falls into that category, and it tends to be music to which I retain a long-term commitment. 

As for the Quintet, it is unsurprising that he writes for strings as a native; he started music study, if I’m not mistaken, on the ’cello.  There is twentieth-century music in the wings here, too: Bartók, Shostakovich, and again less in the material than in the use of the instruments.  I read somewhere that Greenberg has written three piano concertos; I would really like to hear these, because I understand that instrument better than the others, and it would give me a different, much wider door through which to enter his musical world. 

What strikes me in these two pieces above all is that there is no sense of apparent effort; in both works, he is unafraid of melody, unafraid of harmony, indeed unafraid of the instruments.  This may sound silly, but Greenberg is not writing a “symphony” on music by David Bowie or the Grateful Dead, the Symphoniæ Carminorum (that’s probably a mess; I have no real Latin) of our time.  (I hope neither Philip Glass nor Lee Johnson would make the case that “light classical” music is dead.)  He is writing more or less what’s in his head, and there was a time not so long ago when people were discouraged from being melodic or harmonic, perhaps in the same way they were discouraged from doing dissertations on Johann Strauss, or studying Gershwin.   There is a wonderful sense that Greenberg either never heard “you can’t do that anymore!” or simply never gave a rip if he did.  Again: he has decades of development ahead of him, but this is the most favorable of auguries.

This is already long enough by far; I’ll put the rest in a second blog.