Josquin des Prez – Praeter rerum seriem (early 16th century)

I never know what to write about pieces like this.  There’s no weird chromaticism or shocking texture changes — just beautifully written six-part vocal polyphony.  More than 400 years after Pérotin, there’s still a bit of chant turned into a cantus firmus, sung in ultra slow motion while the other voices play around it — but now the cantus firmus appears not only in the tenor but also in the superius, and the play of the other voices is largely built out of little canons.  (Hey, that sounds like a piece of architecture, doesn’t it?)  At times the combination of long held notes, harmonic stasis and frequent points of imitation create a texture that sounds awfully like someone singing through delay and reverb effects.  In fact, I recently heard a piece for sax quartet that intentionally imitated the sound of a delay pedal — Aristides Llaneza’s The second time I have looked out the window (2010) — and the effect wasn’t that different from what Josquin achieves.

The motet’s text is about the mystery of the virgin birth, and the music’s melanch0ly air seems to reflect Josquin’s sadness at being unable to fully understand the workings of the universe:  ”Who can fathom the profundity of your labor’s beginning and its end?”  At the end, there’s something of an answer, but it’s one of those mystical answers that doesn’t really answer anything:  when the text refers to God having “ordered everything with such perfection,” the music switches to triple mensuration, a symbol of divine order since the Middle Ages.  It’s surprising how much continuity there is with Medieval music, here in this piece by the first composer ever to take the brash, arrogant, artist-comes-first attitude usually associated with Romanticism.

Cipriano de Rore – Calami sonum ferentes (1555)

Two things I know about Rore:  One, he was a crazy experimentalist that Monteverdi called “the founder of the Second Practice,” and two, he’s supposedly responsible for the existence of text-painting in 16th-century madrigals.  Only one of those things is evident in this piece — the first thing I’ve actually heard by him.

Calami sonum ferentes is a Latin madrigal, a setting of a poem by Catullus.  The meaning of the text is somewhat opaque to me — unlike Renaissance intellectuals, I know very little about Classical literature, and the references to various places in Rome are lost on me — but as far as I can tell, the gist of it is:  “I’m miserable, and I don’t like listening to people play cheerful Sicilian music.  Muse, come inspire me and make me feel better!”  Rore’s setting is not what you’d normally think of as “madrigalistic”:  he’s working with text on the paragraph level, reflecting Catullus’s dark mood, rather than on the individual word level, like Luca Marenzio setting the word “occhi” (“eyes”) to two whole notes that look like eyeballs staring off the page in Occhi lucenti e belli (1582).  But it certainly does qualify as “crazy experimentalism.”  First of all, it’s for four bass voices — a very difficult ensemble to write for without muddying the harmonic waters, but Rore manages it.  Secondly, and more importantly, it’s by far the most chromatic piece of music I’ve heard in the entire span of time between the Ars Subtilior and Gesualdo.  It opens with a four-part canon based on a theme that consists almost entirely of half-steps;  unlike in highly chromatic Baroque music, there’s no attempt to fit the half-steps into a tonally functional chord progression.  I guess to Renaissance listeners with progressive tendencies, it probably just sounded like a series of consonances related by highly expressive intervals, but to my modern ears, accustomed to tonal harmony, it sounds both startlingly disjunct and intriguingly awkward, full of uncomfortable third relations like G major followed by D# minor.  Nothing that isn’t familiar from Gesualdo’s madrigals, I guess, except that this was eleven years before Gesualdo was even born.

Actually, the ultra-chromatic opening isn’t my favorite part of the piece.  What spoke to me more was a passage that comes later.  It starts on the words “me adi” (“visit me,” addressed to the Muse):  an F major triad falling to E major by way of A minor, repeated twice to create a pained augmented second between the high-register G# at the end and the low-register F at the beginning.  And then a passage in which Catullus writes about his wretchedness and Rore gets chromatic again, but this time it’s not just ascent by half-step:  instead, all of the parts slide up and down, sometimes with a slight delay but often simultaneously, so that whole triads are shifted around by half-step:  G major, F# major, G major, Ab major, G major.  It’s an utterly bizarre and eerie effect.  I don’t know if it conveys wretchedness, exactly, but it certainly makes it clear that our protagonist is not the kind of person who enjoys light-hearted Sicilian music.

Henry Purcell – Keyboard Suite in G Minor, Z661 (published 1696)

My knowledge of Baroque dance suites is limited to Bach and Handel, and my knowledge of Purcell is limited to Dido and Aeneas (1689), the famous “Trumpet Tune and Air” from The Indian Queen (1695), and a couple of trio sonatas I played in a chamber group in high school.  So I figured I’d kill two birds with one stone and check out a Purcell keyboard suite.  This one is from a group of suites published a year after Purcell’s death under the charming title of “A Choice Collection of Lessons” — apparently the first keyboard collection printed in England to be dedicated to a single composer.  The score I found online is actually a scan of a handwritten copy from 1705, which is a pain and a half to read thanks to obsolete conventions like six-line staffs (sometimes extended to as many as nine lines where modern notation would use ledger lines) and the use of sharps rather than naturals to indicate raising a note that’s flatted in the key signature.  The beats are also not even close to lined up, although I don’t know if that’s an obsolete convention or just plain sloppiness on the copyist’s part.  At least it’s educational, since I’ve forgotten most of what I learned in college about the history of notation.

As for the piece itself, it’s not too different stylistically from the Bach and Handel suites written a few decades later.  It’s not as texturally or rhythmically varied — no gigues, no fugal passages — but it follows the familiar Prelude-Almand-Corant-Saraband pattern, with all the dances in bipartite form, fairly contrapuntal, and generally abstracted enough that you wouldn’t want to try to actually dance to them.  By far the most striking aspect of the piece is Purcell’s free treatment of dissonance and cross-relations, especially in the Prelude and Almand.  He often has a te in the right hand at the same time as a ti in the left, even if the te doesn’t resolve down by step immediately.  At one point in the Prelude he has le in the right hand at the same time as a la in the left, and at another point the left hand plays a fast ti-la-te-sol-la, with the te serving no real harmonic function, presumably being there just for color.  These aren’t the kind of dissonances that Bach uses.  They don’t sound like the elegantly handled deviations of a master planner;  they’re more idiosyncratic and “half-baked” than that.  Actually, more than anything else they remind me of the keyboard sonatas of Sebastiàn de Albero — sort of a low-rent Scarlatti who’s actually pretty good in his own right — though that could be my ignorance of Baroque composers who weren’t born in 1685 speaking.

Morton Feldman – Rothko Chapel (1971)

Just two posts after I wrote about Nono’s A Carlo Scarpa, here’s another piece inspired by architecture — specifically a non-denominational chapel in Houston built in tribute to and designed in collaboration with color-field painter Mark Rothko.  I bet it would be fun to dig up more architecture-inspired music — off the top of my head all I can think of is Dufay’s Nuper rosarum flores (1436) and, more loosely, Debussy’s Pagodes (1903), but I’m sure there’s a lot of it — and see how various composers handle the representation of buildings.  Certainly Feldman’s approach is very different from Nono’s:  while both pieces are spare and spacious, Feldman’s is more intuitive, more sensuous, more timbrally distinctive, less violently formalist (the pitch limitations Nono imposes on himself in that piece are downright perverse), and as far as I’m concerned, a lot more musically compelling.

The piece is in five sections that are played without pause.  The first introduces the basic material, floating as if suspended in a room full of water:   single celesta chords, wordless choral harmonies, slow abstract viola lines, bass drum and timpani rolls.  Almost everything is quiet, understated, eerie, and mutedly dissonant.  At one point Feldman shifts away from chromaticism:   suddenly the celesta is playing F minor triads with added seconds, and the mood becomes less eerie and more mournful, almost Pärt-like.  In the second section, a two-note ostinato appears in the timpani, creating tension even as the music gets quieter.  In the third, the dynamics drop to “ppppp” and “barely audible,” as the high voices of the piece’s two choirs trade notes, sustaining a single shimmering harmony for almost three minutes.  In the fourth, the texture is reduced to solo viola, solo soprano and timpani;  the viola’s lines are atonal and lyrical, while the soprano’s are modal, repetitive and chant-like.  The overall impression is one of things slowly disappearing.

All of the above is very beautiful.  I’ll admit that it’s sometimes hard for me to focus on such spare music, but I can find a lot to appreciate in Feldman’s use of timbre, space and harmony, and I can imagine how powerful the music would be if I were hearing it while actually sitting in the Rothko Chapel.  Still, the first four movements pale in comparison to what Feldman does in the fifth.  If things are slowly disappearing, what happens when everything is gone?  Something unexpected:  a vibraphone playing a simple, childlike, diatonic four-note figure over and over again, and on top of that is suspended an E-minor melody that sounds like something out of the slow movement of a Dvořák string quartet.  It’s a melody that Feldman wrote as a teenager, and it shifts the tone of the piece from contemplative to nostalgic.  And then those dissonant choral chords reappear, now superimposed on the vibraphone ostinato, which never stops.  The effect is haunting — especially if you consider that Rothko, a good friend of Feldman’s, had killed himself a year earlier.

 

 

 

Richard Strauss – Don Quixote (1898)

When I wrote about Till Eulenspiegel, I mentioned that Strauss had to be pressed to say anything too specific about the program, and that I didn’t think knowing the details of the story added that much to the music.  Don Quixote is conceived very differently:  this time Strauss does everything he can to evoke specific images as vividly as possible, so that at times you can follow the narrative without even knowing the titles of the movements.  (A summary, complete with weirdly defensive remarks about the music’s ability to stand on its own, can be found here.)  What I find particularly fascinating is the wide variety of solutions he finds to the problem of musical representation.  Sometimes he mimics real-world sounds orchestrationally, the most astonishing example being the use of dissonant brass fluttertonguing to evoke the bleating of sheep.  Sometimes he goes even more literal than that and actually includes the thing represented in the orchestra, like the tambourine that represents a country woman playing the tambourine.   Sometimes he combines the two:  the ride through the air is depicted by wild harp glissandi, chromatically whistling flutes and violent wind and string arpeggios — plus an actual wind machine.  But elsewhere he takes a more abstract approach, representing something not by mimicking its sound but by evoking its shape (a slow, cycling major-seventh-chord arpeggio to suggest the turning of windmills) or its character (the solo cello that personifies Don Quixote, by turns heroic, mournful, contemplative and discursive).

I think the encounter with the sheep is the most impressive section, the most successful at telling a story and conveying sarcasm rather than simply depicting the story’s props and characters.  The sheep bleat (brass flutertongues), then Quixote comes charging in (triumphant strings, led by the solo cello).  The fluttertongues get louder, the bleating more pained, while underneath the strings create a repetitive accompaniment texture based on the Don’s fanfare.  Soon the brass fades out:  the sheep have been driven away.  And then we have a victorious fanfare, complete with timpani and cymbal accents.  Don Quixote has vanquished the enemy!

The piece is pretty ingenious all around.  My only real criticism is its length — specifically the length of the recitative-like passages where Don Quixote is conversing with Sancho Panza or reminiscing about Dulcinea, in the form of meandering, sparsely-accompanied solo cello music.  I’ve never been convinced by music that’s supposed to represent conversation, because the thing that makes a conversation interesting is its content, not its form.  Listening to a musical depiction of a conversation is like listening to two people talk in a language you don’t understand a word of — it might sound nice at first, but it gets boring pretty quickly.  I actually think Don Quixote would work spectacularly well as the score to a silent film, and then the conversational passages would make more sense:   while they don’t have a lot of musical interest on their own,  picture them accompanying a heavily made-up actor with an expressive, unusual face, and suddenly they take on another layer of meaning.

One other thing:  in the introduction to the piece, Strauss switches abruptly from D Major to Ab Major without any modulation, and then switches back just as abruptly five measures later — a move that seems to announce that functional tonality has reached its limit.  Later in that section, the music becomes so densely layered, with so many different kinds of material happening at different rates of motion, that it seems like the orchestra is about to burst open.  I don’t feel this way about the rest of the piece, which dilutes the radicalism of its most radical moves by presenting it as storytelling, but to my ears that introduction screams “Art form in crisis!  Massive revolutionary change is right around the corner!” — and it makes me wonder why anyone was surprised when Ives, Schoenberg, Webern, Varèse, Bartók and Stravinsky showed up.

Luigi Nono – A Carlo Scarpa, architetto, ai suoi infiniti possibili (1984)

I don’t know Nono’s music very well, but the few pieces I’ve heard have left me scratching my head — the one exception being La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (1989), a long and sometimes overwhelming but often eerily beautiful piece for violin and electronics.  A Carlo Scarpa is much shorter, but it doesn’t have any of La lontananza‘s sensuous textures;   instead it’s extremely slow and spare.  Every note is a microtonal variant on either C or Eb (called S in German, meaning that these are Scarpa’s initials);  Nono writes not only quarter-notes and eighth-tones but even sixteenth-tones, commenting ambiguously at the beginning of the score that these microintervals are “technically possible.”  The piece is full of long pauses, both metered and unmetered.  The overall intention seems to be to create large blocks of sound that evoke the work of the architect the piece is dedicated to.

What I can’t get past, though, is how un-blocky the blocks sound.  Thanks to Nono’s extreme pitch restrictions, there are no full harmonies, just microtonally altered octaves.  At its densest, the piece sounds more like wheezing machinery than panes of glass or stone walls, and even that effect is undercut by the pauses that come every few measures.  Nono obviously felt very strongly about what he was doing — some of the indications in the score are written in all caps with multiple exclamation points — but I find it hard to hear any of that intensity in these thin, scratchy sounds.

To be fair, though, this might be a recording problem.  I found four different recordings of the piece in the library, and all of them were live recordings from festivals, recorded in mono and with mediocre sound quality.  In the two that I listened to all the way through, you can hear the audience coughing and the musicians shifting in their chairs during the pauses, and the string players don’t always cut off at the same time when the blocks end.  I know it’s possible to evoke large architectural spaces using orchestral instruments and long pauses, because Andriessen did it in Mausoleum.  Maybe if I heard a beautifully produced studio recording of A Carlo Scarpa, with all the entrances and exits cleaned up, the extraneous noises removed, and most importantly, the sounds of the instruments put under the studio microscope, I would find it much more effective.  But considering that everyone who loves the piece now has been listening to the same lousy recordings that I have, maybe this piece just isn’t for me.

Claude Debussy – Jeux (1912)

Jeux isn’t really a new piece to me, but I’m getting to know it better these days because I’m writing a short paper about it, and I figured it couldn’t hurt to sketch out some thoughts in a more informal context here.  For those unfamiliar with the piece, it’s Debussy’s last orchestral work, written for Diaghilev and Nijinsky just a year before The Rite of Spring.  It’s almost as radical as the Stravinsky piece too, but because it’s less in-your-face about its innovations — because it confounded contemporary listeners with its surreal, desultory form rather than with violent dissonances, and because Diaghilev’s choreography tells a cryptic story of illicit adolescent love rather than a horrifying story of sexualized human sacrifice — because of all that, audiences largely received it with befuddlement rather than scandal.  In fact, even now the critical consensus on the piece seems to be essentially “WTF?”  And I can’t say I entirely disagree with that assessment.

Listen to ten seconds of Jeux and it doesn’t sound so different from other Debussy pieces:  sensuous orchestration, vivid cinematic gestures, tonality thrown out of focus by chromatic, whole-tone and other dissonant harmonies.  But listen for a minute or two and you’ll quickly find yourself lost.  The music constantly speeds up and slows down;  musical threads are abandoned almost as fast as they appear, and when they return they’re often transformed almost to the point of being unrecognizable.  After a while all the melodies start to blend together, until it feels like the only unifying motifs are ones so small that they’re more like amino acids than genes — more like the fundamental building blocks of early 20th century music than anything specific to this piece.  Every time I’ve listened to it, I’ve found myself eventually giving up on trying to follow the moment-to-moment connections between gestures and surrendering myself to the larger flow of the piece.

The story told by the ballet is appropriately mysterious.  The synopsis at the premiere:  “The scene is a garden at dusk; a tennis ball has been lost; a boy and two girls are searching for it. The artificial light of the large electric lamps shedding fantastic rays about them suggests the idea of childish games: they play hide and seek, they try to catch one another, they quarrel, they sulk without cause. The night is warm, the sky is bathed in pale light; they embrace. But the spell is broken by another tennis ball thrown in mischievously by an unknown hand. Surprised and alarmed, the boy and girls disappear into the nocturnal depths of the garden.”

Full disclosure:  I haven’t actually seen the ballet.  (Based on this description, I kind of picture it looking like Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s short film “Phantoms of Nabua.”)  But I did find an article that describes in some detail which events in the story correspond to which passages in the music.  And I was happy to discover that my intuitions about the piece’s large-scale form are borne out by what’s happening on stage.  Specifically:

1.  About a third of the way into the piece, there’s a passage in which the music slows down, with the strings playing spooky parallel major triads.  Debussy continues to shift direction frequently, but in this passage, he’s much more likely to return to what he was doing before the interruption.  There’s a general sense of relaxation;  the music is free-associative but no longer so anxious and restless.

2.  About two thirds of the way into the piece, there’s another slow passage in which Debussy strips the texture down to almost nothing — a dramatic gesture in a piece that’s otherwise very lushly orchestrated.  Two clarinets play strange little phrases in parallel thirds;  the strings interject with two chords, one short and one long;  a flute and an oboe begin a phrase and then trail off.  All of these fragments are separated by silences.

3.  In the last quarter of the piece, the music becomes more and more dreamlike.  A drunken, sensual dance, all shifty Wagnerian chromatic motion, gives way to a strangely static passage in which the winds play the dance’s rhythm on a single note, interrupted by the flutes and oboes obsessively repeating the same little six-note figure.  Harps appear, playing repetitive figures in 4-against-3 rhythms.  The bassoons and horns enter with a mysterious octatonic-ish melody, still superimposed over that pared-down remnant of the earlier dance (now played by the high strings, with some help from a percussionist playing a tambourine and a cymbal), and high winds continue to repeat that six-note figure obsessively.  And then all that gives way to a melody played by the horns and cellos, a waltz shot through with nostalgia and yearning, surrounded by fluttering winds and high strings and harps.  The music builds and builds — at long last, sustained movement in one direction, without digressions or stops and starts! — and finally arrives at … an anticlimax, a four-note figure deliberately orchestrated without any big satisfying bass notes — in fact, without any notes lower than the G# above middle C! — which then dissolves into a texture almost as spare and fragmentary as the one I described above.

Well, guess what?  The first passage I described corresponds to the moment when the characters’ interaction turns flirtatious, and the third is the buildup to the triple kiss, which comes almost at the end of the ballet.  And as for the second, this is the strangest part:  Debussy left it completely open, writing that Nijinsky seize the moment and do whatever he wanted.   I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this passage, possibly the most striking and unusual in the piece, was intentionally written to be open to interpretation — especially in light of Debussy’s association with Stephane Mallarmé, the poet who wrote “The Afternoon of a Faun,” and who believed (in the words of another article I found) that “truth is essentially mysterious, and easily eludes our grasp.”  The fact that Debussy chose to make this moment the quietist in the piece reminds me of something that Greil Marcus says in his wonderful book The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice:  “You will find your audience not by shouting but by whispering, not by haranguing a crowd but by speaking so quietly, or so queerly, that a crowd will gather out of a helpless curiosity, just to figure out what it is you’re saying.”