| The BOOKPRESS | December 2000 |
In
the introduction to his recently published essay collection, Critical
Entertainments: Music Old and New (Harvard University Press, 2000),
Charles Rosen discusses the difficulty of writing substantively yet accessibly
about music. Where the literary critic "can easily quote something from
the work in question," and "the art historian can display photographs,"
printed musical excerpts will likely "scare away almost all readers except
for a few professional musicians."
The layperson’s fear of a musical score is, however, as much a reflection
of the sad state of musical literacy in general. It seems that we are simply
reverting to, or perhaps rediscovering—depending on which paradigm one
subscribes to—an aural-oral music culture, but one that relies heavily
on an instantly gratifying mode of amplified digital transmission. Thus,
Rosen concedes that "even experienced musicians do not call up all the
details of a score in their imagination by looking at it with the ease
of the reader of a poem," and speculates that "the day may be coming when
music criticism will be easily and routinely accompanied by an audible
illustration of the subject in hand."
CD-rom technology already makes that day possible. In fact, there are many
"click-n-hear" programs available on the educational and entertainment
markets, including self-administered aural skills tutorials, music notation
and playback software, and "CD-pluscore" recordings which enable interactive
access to the musical score on screen (Beethoven Piano Sonatas Op. 22,
26, 53, by Maurizio Pollini on DG, 1998). But Rosen is certainly not advocating
the type of sound-byte aesthetic into which such potentially instructive
innovations often degenerate—for the essence of a musical composition,
like that of a poem or any other interpretive genre, exists off the page
and requires an active audience willing to engage beyond a "mac-reading."
Ideally, then, the expectation held by a serious music critic—and one who
is, furthermore, a practicing concert artist like Rosen—is that the reader
would have enough interest and know-how to play through the printed musical
examples for him or herself, and to consult the complete score for overall
context.
If being expected to play or otherwise recreate a musical illustration
for oneself seems like a tall order, something only trained professionals
do, consider this: that the development of popular music journalism, along
with the field of musicology, paralleled the unprecedented growth and democratization
of musical literacy in nineteenth-century Europe. Influential critics such
as Francois Fétis, Schumann, Berlioz, and George Bernard Shaw, and
even the more theoretically-oriented like Donald Tovey and Heinrich Schenker,
wrote during a time when virtually every middle-class household had a piano
and, presumably, one or more family pianists accomplished enough to read
through solo works, songs, operatic airs, and four-hand arrangements. In
this pre-phonograph era, the parlor piano and pianist served as the primary
means of musical realization and dissemination, and the fashionable amateur
would have kept up on the music scene by reading popular sheet music as
well as reviews and journals (and also attending public concerts and the
opera). So the sort of analytical music commentary with printed excerpts,
which
now strikes us as
highly specialized, originated in a cultural milieu where broader and more
immediate familiarity with the musical language lent immediacy to such
discussions.
The marked proliferation of vernacular and pop music journalism in recent
years presents a comparable situation. Among mainstream magazines, for
instance, classical music commentary has dwindled down to a single imported
publication (the British Gramophone, almost solely a CD-review rag,
and with no printed music excerpts, by the way) while Rolling Stone
forges ahead, followed by a raucous entourage that includes Down Beat,
Rhythm, Blues Access, Guitar Player (which does print
notated musical examples, interestingly enough), Dirty Linen, etc.
This pervasive vernacularism has even managed to infiltrate musicological
academia, making rock-n-rollogy a veritable growth industry: new volumes
of documentary and critical writings about jazz, rock, and pop folk—many
put out by tony university presses—appear almost weekly, and this fall’s
American Musicological Society/Society for Music Theory conference in Toronto
features presentations on James Brown, the Police,
and the Pet Shop Boys
(with Schenkerian and neo-Riemannian sessions the morning after, of course).
The allure of this pop criticism lies ostensibly in its relevance to contemporary
interests, but depends largely on simple accessibility to the object itself—that
is to say, we can easily recall or imagine the musical examples discussed
because our memories of them are recent, based on repeated hearings and/or
active singing, usually associated with memorable words (lyrics), and bolstered
by collective familiarity with the idiom. Our aural frame of reference
is, therefore, readily available when analyses mention "pulsating back
beats," "jangling chords," "wailing guitar bends", and ask "'how does it
feel?'" We don’t need notated details to recreate the sound in our mind,
perhaps even accompanied by visuals, and neither does the music itself
nor the critic. But in another 50 to 100 years, when digital technology
becomes obsolete and aural memory grows dim—CDs and Bjork as the 78s and
Puccini of the 21st-century—where will this mode of music commentary be
without the immediacy of its context? It seems that the once freely, exuberantly
accessible vernacular is falling victim to its own canonization.
But it is, after all, the very elusiveness of music which constantly drives
us to read and write about it, hoping somehow to encapsulate, document,
preserve the memory of a mercilessly temporal aesthetic experience. Whether
we listen to, perform, or compose music, we are always grappling with its
immaterial yet viscerally powerful nature, and thus we often try to assign
some kind of tangibility to our association with it. We seek form, meaning,
validation; we consider the music’s relation to the composer, to the recipient,
and to the structural elements within itself:
below the delicate
line of the violin-part, slender but robust, compact and commanding, he
had suddenly become aware of the mass of the piano-part beginning to surge
upward in plashing waves of sound, multiform but indivisible, smooth yet
restless, like the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into
a minor key by the moonlight. . . He could picture to himself [the piece’s]
extent, its symmetrical arrangement, its notation, its expressive value;
he had before him something that was no longer pure music, but rather design,
architecture, thought, and which allowed the actual music to be recalled.1
This quote is from a celebrated example of writing about music (authors
and sources will be revealed below; feel free to play puzzler or mystery
date in the meantime). Without referring to printed music or using technical
terminology, except for "minor key" which is metaphorically evoked in any
case by "silvered" and "moonlight," the writer conjures forth a vivid,
specific image of the music and captures the psychological and intellectual
state of the listener. The passage uses sensuous, physically-based qualities
to characterize the music, and does so to great poetic effect by avoiding
flatly representational comparisons.
Representational considerations of music, though often the most easily
written and read, generally yield naive and limiting interpretations. Sometimes
the results have exceptional kitsch value, especially when related to composer
biography.
[The E minor prelude
depicts] one of the paroxysms to which Chopin was subject on account of
his weak chest. In the left hand we hear his heavy breathing, and in the
right hand the tones of suffering wrung from his breast. At the twelfth
measure he seeks relief by turning on the other side; but his oppression
increases momentarily. At the stretto he groans, his pulse redoubles its
beat, he is near death; but toward the end he breathes more quietly (the
chords must be breathed rather than played).2
Injecting "meaning" into music by texting an untexted composition, and
preferably with some tidbit from the composer’s life, is an ingrained habit
nonetheless. It makes for a lot of unfortunate musical biography, even
if the parenthetical directive above to the performer is potentially useful
(we needn’t encourage aspiring young pianists to smoke, however).
How about the private lives of compositions themselves, then? Here is an
oddly endearing way to think of Brahms’s first piano concerto:
One cannot separate
architecturally the astonishing nonconformity of its opening measures—the
triadic expostulation of B-flat major as the opening of a D-minor work
and the confirmation of its chromatic stubbornness by that mysterious A-flat
in the third measure—one cannot disassociate all this from the exigencies
of formal symphonic behavior to which it ultimately does conform: the poker-faced,
absolutely verbatim recapitulation of the secondary thematic group, for
instance.3
This anthropomorphic analysis brings the concerto first movement to life
as a stubborn, nonconformist poker-player who is ultimately a gentleman.
But the writer, addressing an educated though general readership, presumes
a working familiarity with the tonal and formal conventions of Western
classical music.
From here on it becomes an increasingly specialized world of printed musical
excerpts, and the words used to explain them.
[In Chopin's etude,
Op.10 No.1,] subtle opposition between two principal melodic motives—a
turning figure around E (bars 1-9, 9-16, 15-24, 49-57 and 57-69) and either
chromatic or diatonic linear descents (bars 25-36, 37-44 and 69-76)—generates
tremendous momentum over and above the waves of arpeggios that provide
the Etude’s technical raison d’être. The insistent focus on E in
the treble is broken only in the middle section, where two circle-of-fifths
progressions accompany a twenty-bar linear descent . . . and in bars 69ff.,
where the chromatic descent from G to B in the top voice overcomes the
turning figure’s reiteration of E once and for all, reaching the tonic
pitch in the melody and thereby achieving definitive closure for the first
time in the piece.4
This is well-respected, mainstream, academic musicology. It assumes ability
to read a score, knowledge of terms, and understanding of harmonic conventions.
The only concession the writer makes to the extra-musical is in describing
the arpeggios as "waves"—not unlike Proust, incidentally—and maybe in suggesting
that the etude has a raison d’être.
And, finally, something for the specialist’s specialist:
This is where Siegmund
‘looks into the eyes of the Valkyrie,’ as Brünnhilde puts it later
on. The subinterval 3 of the FATE network 2=(-1)+3 now becomes the overall
interval of the FATE’ network 3=(-1)+4; (-1) remains a subinterval of FATE’.
The pitch class A of FATE’ is bereft of its FATE-partner B, just as Siegmund
will be lonely in Valhalla, bereft of his sister/wife.5
The complete analysis is required reading for all those glib commentators
who always insist on the music-and-math connection. This particular quote
is especially interesting in that the pitch manipulations mirror the psychological
state of the opera characters, and yet the extreme objectification of the
musical material disassociates it from both composer and listener, allowing
for sharp focus on the internal aspects of the work alone.
Now that you have glimpsed the range and extremes faced by readers and
writers about music, who is your ideal music critic?
1) If you settled immediately on mystery date number one, Marcel Proust
(from Swann’s Way, p.227-8 in volume 1 of Moncrieff’s translation—the
Franck violin sonata may have been the model), you have distinguished taste.
May your love be requited.
2) The second is an unusually gothic choice. The writer is Hans von Bülow
(as quoted by Harold Schonberg in The Great Pianists, Simon and
Schuster, 1963) who was a highly respected, late 19th-century pianist and
conductor. He wrote such programs for all 24 preludes in the set. Beware:
von Bülow was married to Cosima Liszt, until she left him for Wagner.
3) Expect only a midnight-to-dawn phone date with this critic, Glenn Gould
("N’aimez-vous pas Brahms?", in The Glenn Gould Reader, Random
House, 1984). The legendary pianist was as fond of his collie dog as he
was of sonata structure, probably.
4) If you liked example four (John Rink, "Tonal Architecture in the Early
Music," in The Cambridge Companion to Chopin, Cambridge University
Press, 1992), you should consider graduate school in musicology.
5) Those who chose the last author, Harvard music theory professor David
Lewin (Generalized Musical Intervals and Transformations, Yale University
Press, 1987), should probably get out more and try to hear a live concert
now and then.
Charles Rosen "began writing about music . . . largely to keep someone
else’s nonsense off my record jackets." Indeed, nonsense does abound in
the stew of fantasy, wishful projection, conviction, and innocent misinformation
that often serves as the basis for our passions. Even a composer’s commentary
on her or his own work can be misleading, limiting, or, yes, sheer nonsense.
"The best writing on music can make a small difference, but we must not
overestimate it," advises Rosen.
During a rehearsal documented in the film Straight, No Chaser, about
jazz pianist Thelonius Monk, the sax player squints over Monk’s manuscript
score (always a great learning moment for dispelling the myth that jazz
greats never read music) and asks whether he should play C or C-sharp in
a certain measure. Monk replies, "just blow whatever you feel like, man."
After all is written and read, we can only do likewise.
——
Kiko Nobusawa
is a writer living in Ithaca. Her next article will consider the difficulty
of musical biography
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