Pérotin – Alleluia, Posui auditorium (c. 1200?)

The same kind of highly rhythmic florid organum as Sederunt principes, but this time in three voices rather than four, and without the variety or inventiveness of the other piece. It does have one striking feature:  toward the beginning there’s a melodic sequence (rare before the end of the 14th century), and the phrase containing the sequence is literally repeated (also rare at the time).  The entire opening section is also repeated at the end, although I don’t have the score, so I don’t know if that was Pérotin’s idea or the Hilliard Ensemble’s.  (There’s an entire closing section in their recording of Sederunt principes that didn’t appear in the score — but then again, the score I found was a modern edition with a lot of editorial markings, including tempo and dynamic indications, so who knows what else was changed?)  Other than that, I don’t have a lot to say about the piece.  It’s an enjoyable listen, but doesn’t strike a chord with me like the one I wrote about in my last post.

Pérotin – Sederunt principes (1190s?)

Well that was awesome.  I was all set to listen to a Strauss tone poem, but then I got a headache and figured I should try something less tumultuous.  Not only is Sederunt principes a wonderful piece of music, but I think it might have cured my headache.

The language of the piece is basically the same as that of the one other Pérotin piece I know, Viderunt omnes:  a chant as cantus firmus, each note stretched out seemingly forever, while the other voices sing little melodic figures in 6/8-ish rhythms on top.  To use an analogy that the composer would have found incomprehensible, it’s like putting the chant under a microscope and seeing whole layers of texture and detail that are invisible to the naked eye.  What really amazes me, though, is how much variety Pérotin gets out of that structure, especially given that composers before the mid-13th century were limited by the notational practice of the time to only six rhythmic figures, based on the feet of Classical poetry.  He’s able to do it partially because small changes have large effects in such a stripped-down style:  a simple shift of texture or rhythmic motion can come across as a striking contrast because so many other elements are kept constant.  Variety is also built into the structure of the piece, in that every time the cantus firmus changes pitches, the modal flavor of the music changes with it.  After all, F-major-ish music sounds very different over an A drone than over an F drone.  But there are also two moments in the piece where Pérotin pulls a big, unexpected change out of his hat.

The first is at the beginning of the word “adjuva” in the chant.  The music suddenly shifts from typically Medieval fourths and fifths to beautiful, almost mystical triadic harmonies that sound like they should have been written several centuries later.  The second is toward the end of the piece, when the cantus firmus suddenly goes from endless drones to moving so fast that you can actually understand the words:  ”salvum me fac propter misericordiam” (“save me according to Thy mercy”).  In the Hilliard Ensemble recording that I listened to, the singers of the top lines always use whatever syllable is going on in the chant, which means that when the chant speeds up, their little melodic figures are now separated from each other by vowel changes and consonant attacks.  It’s as if the microscope suddenly zoomed out and we can now see whole words, rather than the wealth of hidden detail contained within them.  For the most part, the piece very much feels like a communication from a monastery in a pre-industrial era, a world in which life moved slowly and music was written to encourage contemplation, not to create a sense of drama or excitement.  But when I hear the chant suddenly speed up like that, I think that the idea of musical drama must be built into the human brain.  It’s amazing to me that 12th-century music can speak so easily to a 21st-century listener, and feel so contemporary in its way of creating structural meaning.

Johannes Brahms – Clarinet Quintet in B Minor, Op. 115 (1891)

I once named Brahms’s First Clarinet Sonata (1894) as my single favorite piece of the second half of the 19th century.  I also remember loving the Second (also 1894) when I listened to it for a precursor to this blog, though I have to admit I don’t remember it well at this point.  Considering that the Clarinet Quintet was written only three years earlier, and for the same clarinetist, I’m amazed that it took me this long to listen to it.  I do know why:  it’s because of a time years ago when I tried to listen to it and found it thick and dense and impenetrable.  I remember feeling like the instruments were packed together like bricks, unable to breathe.  I figured that it probably just needed a few more spins to make sense, but I was afraid of being disappointed, and of being unable to explain why I didn’t like one of the Great Classics — and an all-time favorite of two of my best friends.

But it turns out I was right:  it did just need a few more spins.  Also a good performance — it took me a while to find one on Naxos Online that actually had soul and weight and meaning, but I did eventually succeed:  it’s got Ralph Manno on clarinet and, oddly, a quartet whose members are named individually.  The piece is beautiful but very introverted and somber, not the sort that opens up to strangers easily.  It doesn’t even have the overt crypticness of the Clarinet Sonatas:  it’s stripped down, but it’s not aphoristic, it takes its time.   It has an air of mournful Slavic folk music, a tendency to stack the instruments into big blocks (see, I was right!), and above all, an emphasis on the cool, round, smooth, bluish sound of the clarinet, set off against the dark green foliage of the strings.

Every movement starts as one thing and turns into something else.  A gentle Andantino that recalls the last-movement theme of the First Symphony (1876) gives way to the nervous music of horse hooves on the streets of Vienna.  A wistful Adagio turns into a a strange study in red and black and gold, with elaborate clarinet lines built over big tremolo chords in the strings.  And in the first movement, the development section goes off on a long tangent, a noble melody in eighth notes that fits uncomfortably over a stuttering accompaniment, like an inversion of the shocking passage in the Cavatina of Beethoven’s Op. 130 Quartet (1827) in which a fragmented sixteenth-note melody attempts and fails to emerge from a texture of eighth-note triplets.  Even the finale, which suffers from the same problem as most tonal variation movements — namely, it’s tiresome to hear the same harmonic motion over and over again — takes an unexpected turn at the very end and becomes a vague fever dream of the first movement.

I wish I had time to write more, and to listen to the piece again before writing, but I’ve got to bounce.  Stay tuned!

Ottorino Respighi – Fountains of Rome (1916)

I don’t like this piece as much as its sequel Pines of Rome (1924).  The best thing about the later piece, as I wrote in my post about it, is the third movement, which somehow manages to sound like it was influenced by music written decades later, like some kind of surrealist lounge music.  There’s some of that here too, particularly when the celesta comes to the fore.  I’m thinking, for example, of the passage in the last movement in which the violas play a haunting lullaby against a backdrop of bird-like flute and violin trills and syncopated celesta chords.  Or the passage in the first movement in which a long oboe melody is suspended over a lush string accompaniment that cuts in and out like it was being played on a sampling keyboard, followed by disjunct descending triads in the celesta, piccolo and flutes.  But when Respighi isn’t inadvertently channeling the late 20th century’s weird blend of nostalgia and surrealism, the music often sounds like a cutesified version of Debussy — or, to be anachronistic, like Oliver Wallace’s score for Lady and the Tramp (1955).  I know, I know, he couldn’t have predicted how the musical vocabulary of the 1910s would be turned into Hollywood fluff in the decades to come — but it still sounds pretty cheesy, and not weird hypertrophied alarming-cheesy either.  I have the same problem with the choir in Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe (1912):  I just can’t get past the associations that have developed since the piece was written.  And then there’s the big, bombastic brass music in the third movement.  I almost always feel like someone boring is yelling in my ear when I hear this kind of thing, and this is no exception.  I will say, though, that Respighi sure knows how to orchestrate — in particular, how to use harps and the very high register of the violins to their best advantage.

Ruth Crawford Seeger – Nine Preludes (1928)

My initial impression was right:  I like these pieces much better than the Violin Sonata.  While some of them do have a wandery quality (I’m thinking of the Scriabinesque convolutions of #1), and some do contain stream-of-consciousness moments (in #2, a figure originally stated in pounding octaves is soon recast as a flowing melody hidden in a watery, Ravel-like texture), in general they’re much more stripped-down and single-minded than the earlier piece.  I keep wanting to compare them to various other sets of small, exploratory piano pieces — Bartók’s Bagatelles (1908), Messiaen’s Preludes (1929), Dallapiccola’s Quaderno musicale di Annalibera (1952), Peter Lieberson’s Fantasy Pieces (1989) — but they’re really their own thing.

The majority of the Preludes are slow, with markings like “Grave,” “Tranquillo” and “Andante Mistico.”  When fast music does appear, it’s often in the context of slower passages, emerging in bursts of activity and then sinking back into stillness.  Unlike the Violin Sonata, which focused on motivic interconnections, these pieces are focused primarily on harmony, sonority and texture.  #5 is all about building quick, bright, fluid lines over slow, dark repeated dissonant chords.  #8, one of the fast movements, contains passages built almost entirely out of perfect fifths (presaging “Fém” from Ligeti’s second book of Etudes (1993)).  #6, the one marked “Andante Mistico,” is a study in dissonant contrapuntal lines (the term “dissonant counterpoint” was coined by Crawford Seeger’s husband, Charles Seeger), very quiet and high in register, supported by occasional rolled left-hand chords that are built by adding one “wrong” note to a triad.  At the end, this texture is reduced to just three events:  a luminous mid-register rising major sixth followed by a quiet dissonant chord at the top of the piano.  It’s a very Ivesian way to end a movement, and actually, many passages in the Preludes remind me of Ives, and also of his friend Carl Ruggles, in their dense combination of chromatic tonality, atonality and added-note chords.  It’s funny:  the harmonic elements are pretty much the same as in the Violin Sonata, but they fit together so much better here that it’s hard to believe that it’s only two years later.

Ruth Crawford Seeger – Sonata for Violin and Piano (1926)

I remember liking Crawford Seeger’s String Quartet (1931) a lot when I studied it in college.  I’ve also taken a cursory listen to her Preludes (1928), and they sounded great.  This piece, though, doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.  It seems like it ought to, given Crawford Seeger’s Schoenbergian tendency to derive nearly everything in a movement from a single motif.  But what’s missing from the piece is a clear sense of large-scale form.  The harmonies are an inventive mix of Scriabin-like chromatic tonality, whole-tone structures, and modal dissonance that reminds me of early Bartók, particularly the 14 Bagatelles (1908) — but I don’t hear any directionality in the way they’re put together. The phrase structure is equally puzzling;  I guess you could call it improvisatory or stream-of-consciousness, but as we’ve established, I often have trouble with pieces like that.  Overall the piece feels like a bunch of phrases strung together rather than a coherent musical argument.

On the plus side, Crawford Seeger does experiment with notational conventions in some interesting ways.  The accidentals only apply to the notes that immediately follow them, and while I’m not a fan of that practice, I have to give her credit for doing it a good quarter-century before it became a common practice among European avant-gardists.  She also writes a number of time signatures with note values rather than numbers on the bottom, which I do think is a good idea:  7 over a dotted quarter note is a hell of a lot easier to process quickly than 21/8.  I also should say that I like the scherzo movement considerably better than the rest of the piece.  Its thinner textures and use of repetition help create more formal clarity, and I like its combination of quirky, staccato, rhythmically off-kilter piano lines and deftly tiptoeing Bartókian melodies.

One thing that might explain why the later pieces I’ve heard from Crawford Seeger were so much better constructed than this one:  she was only 25 when she wrote it.  I’ve noticed that a lot of composers grow very rapidly, both creatively and technically, between the ages of 25 and 30.  A remarkable number of composers in the 20th century wrote their “breakout” pieces somewhere during that time, including Schoenberg (Verklärte Nacht, age 25), Gershwin (Rhapsody in Blue, age 26), Boulez (Structures, age 27), Milhaud (Le bœuf sur le toit, age 27), Bartók (14 Bagatelles, age 27), Penderecki (Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, age 27), Stravinsky (The Firebird, age 28), Cage (first prepared piano pieces, age 28), Grisey (Périodes, age 28), Reich (It’s Gonna Rain, age 29) and Glass (first minimalist pieces, age 30).  So maybe for my next post I’ll take a closer listen to those Preludes and see what RCS was up to two years later.

Out of town.

Going out of town for a bit.  See you all Sunday!

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Masonic Funeral Music, K477 (1785)

First of all:  did you know that Mozart was a member of the BAVARIAN ILLUMINATI?  OK, so they were just a group of Masons who were more into Enlightenment rationalism than occultism, but still, as a former Robert Anton Wilson fan, I think that’s pretty cool.

Anyway, Masonic Funeral Music is an odd little piece, written for the funeral of two of Mozart’s friends and fellow Masons.  It’s scored for an unusual mini-orchestra — oboe, clarinet, basset horn (basically sounds like an evil bass clarinet), two horns and strings — and contains a Gregorian chant melody used as a cantus firmus, 14th-century-style.  It starts out pretty dark, with big minor chords and melodies full of crying appoggiaturas (echoes of the “Crucifixus” from Bach’s B Minor Mass…), but later it spends a surprising amount of time in the relative major, sounding balanced and neutral and Enlightenment-y.  I did a little Googling and found that the Masons at the time believed that music should “inculcate feelings of humanity, wisdom and patience, virtue and honesty, loyalty to friends, and finally an understanding of freedom”  I also found that a few years later, Mozart wrote: “Death, if we think about it soberly, is the true and ultimate purpose of our life. I have over the last several years formed such a knowing relationship with this true and the best friend of humankind that his image holds nothing terrifying for me anymore. Instead it holds much that it is soothing and consoling!”  Given all of that, what’s surprising about Masonic Funeral Music isn’t that parts of it are calm and objective, but that parts of it are pained and tragic.

The piece has some odd moments in its basic musical material, too.  If the “Dissonance” Quartet felt too much like a collection of stock phrases, this piece errs on the other side of the spectrum and feels downright awkward at times.  I’m thinking particularly of the use of chromatic scales.  At one point, the strings play the figure do-ti-do-re-me-mi-fa-fi under a sustained minor tonic chord (when the melody resolves to sol, the harmony moves to the dominant);  a bit later, they play do-me-fa-fi-sol-le-la-ti-do, also under a sustained minor tonic chord.  In the first figure, the cross-relation created by the chromatic note mi against a minor triad isn’t sustained for long enough to feel like an intentional dissonance, but instead comes off (to my ears at least) as sloppy.  And in the second figure, the fact that le moves up to la rather than resolving back to sol robs it of its plaintive quality, which seems to me to be the last thing you’d want to do in a funeral piece.  Later in the piece, Mozart has the oboe play the figure le-la-te-ti-do, changing chords halfway through the bar so that the te-ti is part of a v chord that turns into a V chord, which feels to me like trying to have your cake and eat it too.  Earlier in the piece, there’s another passage that’s strange for reasons that don’t have to do with chromaticism:  the music moves from the tonic to the relative major by going i – VI – III – i – VI – III.  Shouldn’t there be a V between the third and fourth chords?  As it is, the sudden move back to the tonic seems very abrupt and unprepared.  And what’s particularly baffling is that this kind of thing is extremely unusual for Mozart.  I can’t think of any other piece by him that I would describe as “awkward.”  Even in the weird, drunken piano minuet, K355 (1787), all the jarring augmented chords are resolved exactly the way they’re supposed to be — not to mention that they’re emphasized in a way that makes it clear that Mozart was deliberately flouting harmonic convention.  So what’s going on here?

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – String Quartet #19 in C Major, K465 “Dissonance” (1785)

I can’t bring myself to care about this piece.  I just can’t.  It’s not that it’s too polite:  I listened to energetic, rough-around-the-edges performances by the Budapest and Takácz Quartets, and it didn’t help.  It’s not that it’s unimaginative:  I see all the creative things Mozart does with form, phrase structure and harmony, but I’m just not excited by them.  It’s not that it’s too early in his career (Mozart being a composer whose late work I prefer by a huge margin):  the 20th and 21st Piano Concerti, which I love, were written in the same year, and the K332 Piano Sonata, another old favorite, was written two years earlier.  It’s not that I don’t like Classical-period string music:  I’m a fan of Mozart’s G Minor and C Major String Quintets (both 1787) and Haydn’s Op. 64 No. 2 quartet (1792), among other things.  And this quartet even has a great little slow introduction full of chromaticism and unexpected harmonic shifts, which is where it got its nickname.  But after that passage, I find that I have to force myself to pay attention.  As obviously well-written as the music is, the materials it’s made of just seem so incredibly generic.  I know there are people who are enthralled by the way Mozart manipulates stock phrases — and hell, I’m fascinated by the way a lot of pop music (broadly defined, from 40s big-band to 00s club music), and notated music that draws on pop music (from Milhaud to JacobTV) does the same thing.  But these particular stock phrases — diatonic arpeggios and scales, chromatic appoggiaturas, cadential formulas — don’t have the kind of cultural resonance for me that the standard materials of the 20th century do, and that means I need more than clever or elegant arrangements of them to keep me interested.  Go ahead and break them down into their constituent elements, like middle-period Beethoven, or skew them into impossible paradoxical weirdness, like late Beethoven.  Just don’t leave them intact, or I’ll be bored stiff.

All of this raises the question:  how come I’m such a fan of the 21st Piano Concerto, which isn’t really all that different in style or technique from the “Dissonance” Quartet?  Well, for one thing, there’s a lot more timbral variety in a piano concerto than a string quartet.  But that can’t be all, because I remember nearly being put to sleep by the 17th Piano Concerto when I saw it performed live.  Much more important is the fact that the basic materials of the concerto don’t feel generic to me.  The themes are memorable, distinctive, and somehow charged with emotional content, rather than feeling like assemblages of parts from a Do-It-Yourself 18th Century Sonata Movement Kit.  The wistful second-exposition second theme, in particular, has always had a powerful effect on me — maybe it’s just the way Mozart uses the ii and vi chords, but it feels like something that goes beyond analysis.  There’s also a passage based on a descending-fifths progression, with spiky little bass-notes that jump out of the left hand’s sixteenth note figurations, that I’ve always found both incredibly satisfying and strangely moving.  It’s not the progression itself, which is commonplace, and which in fact appears many times in the Quartet.  It’s something inexplicable in the way the progression is realized.

Maybe instrumentation has more to do with it than I realize, though.  The string pieces I mentioned liking above are either in minor keys  (which automatically improves Classical-period pieces for me about tenfold) or just plain weird (the C Major String Quintet).  Bowed string instruments have always felt a little alien to me — I’ll pretty much always pick something for a keyboard instrument, something with electronics, or something with a variety of timbres and instrument types, if given a choice.  So really, if I want to get to know more Mozart, I should probably listen to more of the late piano concerti.  I used to know them all fairly well, but I haven’t heard any except the two I mentioned for ages.  I also ought to give a good listen to the C Minor Mass (1783), which really impressed me in a live performance a few years ago.

Morton Subotnick – Touch (1969)

In a recent post, I mentioned that I love Subotnick’s first two Buchla Box pieces, Silver Apples of the Moon (1967) and The Wild Bull (1968), but have found what I’ve heard of his later work timbrally thin and unsatisfying.  (Possible exception: Trembling (1983).)  Given that, it seemed like the obvious thing to do was to start at the beginning and see what he did immediately after those two early pieces.  Strangely, though, despite having been written only a year later and created using the same technology, Touch is already considerably colder in sound than its predecessors.  Admittedly, there are a few warm passages here and there, my favorite being one in which clipped syllables are filtered to sound like cut-up bits of speech.  And the piece does have other virtues, particularly its witty use of rhythm, from abrupt pulse shifts to stuttering polytempo grooves.  But it never even approaches the ecstatic joy of its two predecessors, especially the incredible robot rave in the second half of Silver Apples — partially because, for the most part, Subotnik opts for the extremely unexpressive “plastic xylophone” sound that would take over the computer-music world about a decade and a half later.

Timbre isn’t the only problem, though.  I feel like there’s also something missing here on the conceptual level.  The piece has all sorts of interesting ideas and sounds in it:  allusions to African drumming and Balinese kecak, a passage that sounds like telephone button sounds having a party with a police siren, and an abrasive drone-shriek that comes out of nowhere.  But why are they all in one piece?  It’s certainly not clear to me after two listens.  I know I’m missing some of the piece’s content because I’m listening to a stereo reduction of something that was originally written to be projected quadrophonically — but I don’t think spatially redistributing the sounds would make the piece more coherent on a sound-material level.  I hate to say it, but maybe there’s a reason Subotnick is kind of a two-hit wonder.