Britten’s Arrangements of Folk Songs

I’m listening to these for the first time in several months, and am struck anew by the genius in some of them. It’s all in the piano accompaniment. One of my favourites is that for The Ash Grove. The accompaniment is sweet and wistful but still in key for the first stanza, when the singer tells of his dear one. It does however start out already ‘out of sync’ with the singer’s melody. This contributes to the sense that the singer is speaking of a time and situation that is alien, that is not here and now. In the second stanza the melodies in the voice and piano are still out of sync, but now the harmony is off too. The singer retains the same harmony, but the accompaniment is dissonant. Thus even as the singer describes the still-beautiful scenery at the start of the stanza, the listener is beset with a sense of uneasiness — something is wrong, the piano is wrong, despite these nice words! When the singer tells of his sorrow, the harmonies become less alien but still not quite right — for there is no dissonance here with the pleasant scenery, but there is still the pain of sorrow, now in the open. For the final line, the harmonies come into line again — the maiden, we learn, is at rest.

Here is a recording (FLAC) of Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten performing this piece. And here are Pears and Britten performing the latter’s arrangement of O Waly, Waly. More of the unsettling harmonies again.

Orchestral Snobbery

From my favourite music blog:

The salesman had an agenda. I don’t remember the models, but he was pushing a certain brand of amplifier, mostly by denigrating the less costly ones. During his presentation I continued protesting I couldn’t really hear the difference so I might as well go with the less expensive item.

After going back and forth a few times he invited me to make a choice. In part to rankle him, I pointed to one of the cheaper models.

“That is actually very well selling,” he said with calculated derision. “It suits the popular taste.” And then to the barely contained mirth of my colleague and me, he began digging his own grave, so to speak. “It’s like the XSO.” (Using the name of the orchestra I play for) “Oh, they may have a lot of Grammys,” he dismissively waved a hand, “but their sound is crass, unsophisticated, like this.” He pointed to the amplifier I had chosen while my colleague and I bit our tongues. “This is something a man off the street might mistake for quality, just like the XSO. But this,” indicating the more expensive model “is like the Concertgebouw, much more sophisticated. People who don’t know anything might not be able appreciate the polish, the tradition…”

I’m not sure of everything he said, but the salesman proceeded to lay it on thick, bashing the XSO, uplifting the Concertgebouw in comparing the two the amplifiers while we remained silent. My colleague later confessed to growing angry somewhere along the way, but I wanted to see how deep a hole the guy would dig, and also because I wasn’t sure I could have opened my mouth without laughing.

Perhaps mistaking our silence for tacit approval, he moved in for the kill, asking me if, knowing all that, I sill wished to throw my lot in with the crass, the unsophisticated, the man-on-the-street, with the XSO!

I think I blurted out something along the lines that none of the items on offer recreated the sound of the concert hall anyway, which only brought on a tirade. Eventually, he ended up with a finger in my face. “You,” he said “you don’t sit and listen to a live orchestra every day of your life, do you!”

Read on for the Orwellian ending.

I must confess that having heard both orchestras live and on recordings (admittedly one far more often than the other), I have crass enough taste to prefer the XSO’s sound to the Concertgebouw’s.

Update:
Gramophone readers dissent.

Out

I’ve never been fond of the obsessive, bangy last movement of Schubert’s Wandererfantasie, but by god is it a good tool for exorcising an insistent, whiny voice from one’s consciousness. Just stamp that motif over and over into your auditory circuits until nothing else is left. Five or so repeats should offer a thorough cleansing.

Music Theory and Musical Experience

Casual music lovers are often puzzled by why I find that a knowledge of music theory enhances my music-listening experiences. They voice a common intuition that music is all about the immediate phenomenology — knowing what ‘underlies’ it does not affect the phenomenology of musical experience, and hence should not enhance your immediate musical experience. You may feel an additional sense of satisfaction, after listening to a familiar piece of music, if you’ve studied the piece and hence know some particularly beautiful and thrilling facts about its structure, but this sense of satisfaction is apart from the usual satisfaction you get ‘in the moment’ from listening.

I’d previously described Jerrold Levinson’s position that knowledge of music theory is irrelevant to the immediate musical experience. At that time I surprised myself when I admitted to myself that he had a strong argument. But after re-listening to a few of Andras Schiff’s lecture recitals today, I’ve alighted on an aspect of musical experience that Levinson seems not to have considered, an aspect that is troublesome for his argument.

This aspect dawned on me, appropriately, because I noticed the aspect perception-like reaction I was having to Schiff’s descriptions of the music. Even for pieces that I consider myself to know really well, some of Schiff’s remarks suggest new aspects of the music that I hadn’t considered before (and some of these aspects require a knowledge of music theory if one is to grasp them). After those suggestions are made to me, the next time I hear the piece of music, I hear it differently. And I hear it differently not in the sense that I actively interpret it differently after first ‘taking it in’ through my ears. I mean that it just sounds different in a direct, picture-like manner, the same way that a Necker Cube looks different in its two possible ‘poses’. I hear the music as something else the same way that I sometimes see the Necker Cube as something else.

Levinson’s mistake is in assuming that knowledge of music theory has an impact only in adding to your stock of possible reactions to the music, rather than in fundamentally changing the way you confront the music. Although listening to music is often portrayed as a passive activity, at least relative to other mental activities like reading, it doesn’t have to be that way. The active listener can get very different things out of the music, even on the level of the most superficial layer of his immediate musical experience, just by altering a little his stance towards the music. It’s something like how he cocks his ear towards it, if we must use metaphors. I don’t hear the new aspect that Schiff has taught me to hear in addition to the aspects I used to hear. Instead, I hear a new excerpt (or possibly even a new piece, depending on how much of a holist you are) of music altogether.

“Strong Impingement” in Musical Experience

More Stream of Consciousness blogging. In chapter 8, Dainton defines Strong Impingement as the thesis that

Phenomenal wholes have certain parts that possess intrinsic phenomenal features that reflect the character of that whole, and parts with the same character could not possibly occur except in a whole of the same or similar type.

He thinks that examples of strong impingement are at most extremely rare in our experiences. However, I think he really steps into it when he discusses, as one of the first few examples in his evaluation of strong impingement, the phenomenology of music. He writes:

The individual tones that make up a melody are heard as parts of a whole that evokes various responses in us. We might recognize that the notes form a melody without recognizing the melody as one we have heard previously. Or the melody might be familiar: as we listen we can anticipate the notes to come. In either case, the melody might produce affective and aesthetic responses, for example we find it beautiful but sad, or pleasurable but hackneyed. But as in the visual case, these responses involve our broader state of mind — they are not confined to the phenomenal characteristics of our perceptual experience — and they are produced by the melody as a whole, as it unfolds, rather than any particular note. Consequently, it remains unclear to what extent, if any, the intrinsic phenomenal characteristics of the constituent notes would be different if they were heard in isolation.

So Dainton doesn’t want to deny that something about our experience as a whole is altered by holistic aspects of our experience. But he doesn’t think what is altered can be said to be any of the “intrinsic phenomenal characteristics” of the parts of the experience.

This line doesn’t work too badly for visual experience. Dainton uses the example of an isolated eye versus the same eye framed by a cow’s head. Obviously the presence of the whole “cow’s head” experience alters our perception of the eye in some way — it is a now a cow’s eye, not just a disembodied eye, and we’re likely to unconsciously attribute cow-associated characteristics to it (passive, bovine, who knows). But Dainton would say that such attributions do not form part of the “intrinsic phenomenal characteristics” of the eye-experience. Instead, they are simply part of our overall mental state as we contemplate the eye.

I have my reservations about this claim, but these reservations turn into vehement objections when it comes to musical experiences. Consider any harmonic progression, let’s say a cadential progression, I-II-V-I. I would say that the strongest phenomenal characteristic of the V chord is not the phenomenal characteristics of the notes themselves (their pitch, timbre, loudness, etc.), but the “penultimate-ness” of the dominant harmony. A listener with perfect pitch may also be aware of the pitch-characteristics of the chord, and most listeners are going to be at least vaguely aware of the timbre, but the penultimate-ness would be stronger than all these other characteristics — and I’m not just saying this from a music theory perspective, but from a phenomenological perspective — the tension and drive towards the tonic that a listener would experience is far stronger than any of the other phenomenological characteristics of the chord. And the dominant-chord-like quality of V is of course due to the experience of the whole chord progression — alter some of the other chords, and we could easily change that quality to something quite different, say a tonic-like-quality (stability), or a dissonance (alien-ness).

Now this still doesn’t strictly rule out Dainton’s probable claim that the emotions we have upon the entrance of the dominant are simply due to our “mental background” and should not be attributed to the phenomenological characteristics of the chord itself. An extremely strong phenomenal quality could still be attributed to one’s “overall mental state”, rather than the experiental part itself. But let’s look again at Dainton’s reason for concluding that the emotional aspect of melodies aren’t “intrinsic phenomenal characteristics” of the components of melodies: “these responses involve our broader state of mind — they are not confined to the phenomenal characteristics of our perceptual experience — and they are produced by the melody as a whole, as it unfolds, rather than any particular note.” (Emphasis mine).

I think it is uncontroversial that the “melody as a whole” is a necessary context for us to experience the particular note as it is experienced — the note itself cannot do that. But the question is not the causal one of what is responsible for the particular note sounding (say) tense. It is whether we should attribute the tenseness we hear in the note to our “broader state of mind”, or to the note. To me, it is intuitively obvious that it should be the note. This is not something I feel to be in my overall mental state. It is not an unlocalized, pervasive presence. When the bittersweet Neapolitan 6th chord sounds, I want to point to it and say, that sounds bittersweet. It’s not that I feel bittersweet (I might, though). Instead, I am perceiving a phenomenal object in my experience to be bittersweet. And the phenomenal object is that chord. Or that cheerful motif. Or that dissonant, ominous trill in the bass. This localization of the experienced phenomenal quality cannot be explained away by any theory that says it is merely part of my overall mental state.

So I would conclude that Strong Impingement holds for musical experiences, to a significantly greater, or at least more obvious, extent than for visual experiences. And part of the reason why it seems to be important in musical experiences is because of the way meaning in music is created. Meaning in music is far more contextualized than meaning in visual experience (let us, for the moment, discount visual experiences containing linguistic images). For the class of humans who know what an eye is, we can imagine them having a “core” type of phenomenal experience (but not identical experiences) whenever they encounter eyes — it’s easy to recognize an eye as an eye outside of its usual position in the faces of animals. But it’s outright impossible to recognize a dominant chord as a dominant chord outside of its surrounding harmonic context. The intrinsic phenomenal characteristics of a chord are necessarily a product of its context, whereas it’s quite likely that that may not be necessarily (but could be contingently) so of a visual phenomenal object.

One is then almost inevitably led to the question of whether Strong Impingement holds for linguistic experience (not counting music as a language for now). Dainton thinks not, for largely the same reasons that he thinks it doesn’t hold for visual experience. And I think he’s right to judge linguistic experience similarly to visual experience in this respect, because most parts of our linguistic experience have strong phenomenal characteristics (by association) by themselves. Again, contrast this with music, where two identical chords, which by themselves are phenomenologically the same, can have vastly different phenomenological effects when placed in different contexts. This is true for some words in natural languages, e.g. “bank” in the English language. Dainton does consider “bank” in his discussion of linguistic experiences:

But even in this sort of case, the influence of context is limited: the sound or inscription ‘bank’ means either ‘place or institution where money is deposited’ or ‘the side of a river’; context merely makes it clear which of these meanings is intended.

I have to confess, though, that I don’t see how this resolves the issue. It’s true that the word “bank” means either financial institution or side of river, but we almost never experience it with the disjuncted meaning “either financial institution or side of river”. In all but a few cases of contextual ambiguity, we experience the sound or sight of the word “bank” as indicating exclusively one or the other of its two possible meanings, not as a two-valued ambiguity.

Cases like the word “bank”, though, are relatively less common in natural languages (in comparison to the “language” of music). I’d say linguistic experience is between musical and visual experience on the spectrum of experiences to which Strong Impingement applies.

Parochial Piano-playing Thoughts

I’ve been trying to master the second movement of Schubert’s last piano sonata (in B flat, D960) for a few months now. It’s one of my favourite slow movements ever, because it breathes (not just describes) loneliness and desolation. A feature common to the first two movements of D960 is the intrusion of an alien-sounding motif in the bass. In the first movement, the motif provides an ominous contrast to the otherwise relatively upbeat lyricism of the main subject. In the second movement, which has an ABA’ structure, the motif is completely absent from the A section, but is pervasive in the A’ section. Here are the first bars of both sections:

Its ‘intrusion’ is one of the main reasons why the A’ section sounds significantly more ‘hopeless’ than the A section. The word ‘intrusion’ might sound inappropriate at first, but if you listen to both movements, the bass motif sounds as though it doesn’t belong. Before I started playing the piece myself, I’d assumed that it was simply because it wasn’t expected (not having appeared previously, at least not in the same prominent context), and because it was in an unusually low register (in contrast to the left hand’s rising octaves in the second movement). But I find that I’m having difficulties making it sound alien when I play it. Perhaps it’s because I’m playing it, so I can no longer fool myself into thinking of it as an intruder, especially when my left hand is dutifully keeping time with my right hand as it plays it. It sounds a little more alien when I play it more staccato and more stiffly, but still nowhere as alien as I expected and want it to sound.

On a more minor note, every performance I’ve heard of this piece significantly ups the tempo for the B section — understandably, since if they played the B section at the same tempo as the A section, it would sound unsuitably ponderous. But my score, at least, does not indicate any tempo change for the B section, and the acceleration when they transition from A to B always sounded a bit weird to me. I’ve always wondered if perhaps the outer sections are simply being played too slowly, or at least more slowly than Schubert had intended.

As lovely as D960 is, on days when I feel like doing something rather more vigorous and angry, it doesn’t suffice. That’s when I return to a section of Schubert’s Fantasy in F minor, a piece I’d essentially stopped practicing after my duet partner left. There’s something incredibly satisfying about having your left hand rage with the strident, accented melody while your right hand unleashes flurries of triplets:

A Sloooow Titan

I’ve been craving live Mahler since I left Chicago. Was quite spoilt by what was on offer there — someone in the programming division there clearly loves Mahler. To reduce that craving somewhat I have been watching my the sole Mahler DVD in my possession repeatedly and borrowing Mahler DVDs from the public library, but somehow none of them are even half as satisfying as the live experience. More recently, I attended a performance of Mahler’s 3rd by the local professional orchestra, but the best one could say about that performance was that it was patchy. Today I came across a DVD of Klaus Tennstedt conducting the CSO in Mahler’s 1st, and was most delighted with that find, but soon found that the performance is way too slow. Slow enough that the tension dissipates in many parts of the last movement and I start becoming bored. For fuck’s sake. I listened to Kubelik and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra’s rendition of this tens of times and not once did my attention wander. Dudamel’s concert with the CSO last year was not bad either.

Addendum: OK, I’m watching it for the second time now and am finding it much better. I still don’t like the tempo in the last movement, but the other movements are just fine. There are also some outstanding bits in the last movement that almost make up for the lack of momentum: the slow ‘soliloquy’ by the strings somewhere in the middle is particularly heartfelt and wrenching.

Craft and Aesthetic Value

Disclaimer: I have almost no prior background in aesthetics, so this is just an uninformed ramble cooked up when I was too tired to read but not sleepy enough to sleep.

Came across this old music theory blog on which Rudolf Serkin was paraphrased as saying: “When two people hear a piece of music, and one likes it and the other doesn’t, the person who likes it is always right.”

That has to be right to some extent — it is often the case that some people hear things in a piece of music which the others are incapable of hearing, things that may be legitimate contributors to the piece’s artistic worth. But it can’t be taken too far either — at some point we have to put down our foot and say that no, “Mary had a little lamb” is not an artistically worthwhile song even if some listeners like it very much (perhaps more than they do the Eroica Symphony).

Furthermore, there are pieces of music which one does not gain satisfaction from listening to (because, say, one is unable to empathise with the emotions conveyed by it, or one has an innate distaste for a certain characteristic of it even as one realises it’s not an aesthetically justified distaste), but which one can still recognise as ‘great’ pieces. That is, one does not need to like a piece of music in order to recognise it as good music. This is roughly my attitude towards the works of Debussy, Faure and Chopin: while I can see how their compositions are great, I get no emotional satisfaction from listening to them. Or, as I like to think of it, I recognise the craft involved in them and hence judge them to be great works even if in a sense I cannot partake of the experential satisfaction they apparently offer to other listeners.

So now it seems like this idea of craft, of a thing being well-made according to (sometimes) vaguely defined standards, could be the essence of aesthetic value. It is more than emotional satisfaction, but it correlates with emotional satisfaction because the really well-crafted ones can take you to heights of emotional intensity that you rarely experience elsewhere.

But anyone who has analysed even a few of the ‘seminal’ musical works in so-called ‘classical’ music (Western art music from 1600 onwards) knows that many of them are great because they violate standards, not because they are the epitome of a certain style. They are great because they managed to turn the original purpose of traditions back on themselves and subvert them for the production of something with such emotional power/beauty/[insert aesthetic characteristic]. But the gold standard isn’t the wanton violation of existing standards. One has to choose which to violate, and for what purpose. And there seems to be no general formula for that. Should this stop us from thinking of music as a craft?

Mahler’s Thresher

I listened to piano versions of songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn for the first time today, performed by Thomas Hampson and Wolfram Rieger. Have to say I really missed the colour in the orchestral versions. There was an interesting aspect of Das Irdische Leben, though, that isn’t obvious in the orchestral version (at least, it wasn’t to me). Hampson remarked that the accompaniment in that song was like some kind of machine, possibly a thresher, pounding and grinding on, oblivious to the human misery narrated in the poem. In the orchestral version, the accompaniment is clearly rhythmic, but since it’s done by the strings, it isn’t choppy enough to suggest machinery to me. Rather, it’s so fluid (although still with a clear rhythm) that I originally interpreted it as a kind of painful stretching and compressing of already wrung nerves. The machine-like effect, though, comes out much more strongly in the piano version, simply because the piano is a percussion instrument and you can make notes on the piano sound much more like hits than you can with a string orchestra.

Hampson also remarked that whenever he sings this song, he’s not sure whether to portray the mother as good, bad, or neither. He eventually said he couldn’t help feeling a little sympathy for the mother. I too have this nagging intuition that the mother can’t be bad, but I can’t justify it through the words or the music. It’s just that it’d be pretty uncharacteristic of Mahler, and of the Wunderhorn poems, to portray a simple antagonist-protagonist relationship. One has come to expect a certain general message about the human condition. The both-are-victims-of-the-machinery interpretation seems to fit this pattern best.

A Compulsory Show

The third movement of Berio’s Sinfonia is on YouTube, in two parts. Beckett draped over a Mahler skeleton, interlaced with references to Ravel, Stravinsky, Debussy, and Boulez (amongst many others). What could be better?