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Chicago Symphony Extras: Missa Solemnis

The Dedicatee

In many ways, we who enjoy the music of Beethoven’s late period owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to an otherwise insubstantial member of the minor nobility.  As the sixteenth child of the Emporor Leopold II, Archduke Rudolf of Austria could be pretty well certain that he was not going to inherit his father’s title, land, or fortune; as such, he did what so many younger sons of the nobility did and went into the priesthood, becoming archbishop (and then Cardinal) of Olmütz in 1819.

Rudolf seemingly got a pretty sweet deal, because while his older brother went down in history for losing his empire to Napoleon, Rudolf began studying piano and composition with the most famous composer in Europe, Ludwig van Beethoven.

Though Beethoven complained about his obligation to give the Archduke daily lessons (sometimes lasting more than two hours), the two grew to be friends at a time when Beethoven needed friends most.  Napoleon’s wars had caused many of Beethoven’s most reliable patrons to abandon imperial Vienna for fear of losing their heads.  Beethoven had insulted, cheated, or otherwise alienated the majority of the princely families who remained in their Austrian palaces.

The Lawsuit

It wasn’t just other people’s families who Beethoven alienated.  The death of Beethoven’s younger brother Kaspar in 1815 precipitated the ugliest, most productivity-stifling event in his life: the fearsome custody battle he waged against his sister-in-law Johanna for the guardianship of his nephew, Karl.

The five years he spent engaged in litigation revealed the ugliest, least redeemable sides of Beethoven’s personality.  In the days leading up to his brother’s death from tuberculosis, Beethoven strong-armed his brother into granting him sole custody of the child on multiple occasions, only to have his brother revert his will back to co-guardianship between Beethoven and Johanna in moments of lucidity.

Beethoven’s initial reaction to his brother’s death was to accuse his sister-in-law of murder by poisoning.  When this turned out to be a dead end, he began the battle for sole custody of Karl.  He won decisive early victories against his sister-in-law in the Landsrecht, the court of the nobility.  Beethoven’s fates reversed in 1818 when he accidentally let slip in the course of a deposition that the “van” in his Dutch surname was not equivalent to the Germanic “von” which automatically conferred nobility.  As such, his case was sent down to commoner’s court, which was much more sympathetic to Johanna van Beethoven’s cause.

Though Beethoven finally won custody over Karl, his insane, possessive love took a perilous evinced itself again a few years later when the teenage boy attempted to take his own life with a pistol on a high hill overlooking Beethoven’s summer home.

The Second Mass

Though he sometimes played around with themes for decades before turning them into full pieces, the four years it took Beethoven to complete the Missa Solemnis (1819 – 1823) represented the longest sustained period of work Beethoven spent on any single composition.  Strangely for a composer who often went back and forth between projects, Beethoven did not work on individual movements and sections simultaneously; he composed it from beginning to end, beginning with the Kyrie and ending with the Agnus Dei.

This was in fact Beethoven’s second setting of the traditional Latin mass text, having written his first in 1807, the lesser known Mass in C.  Aside from obvious stylistic differences, the main difference between the two works is length: whereas the Mass in C clocks in at a respectable 45 minutes, performances of the the Missa Solemnis usually last about twice as long.

As such, Beethoven languished considerable attention on every word and phrase of the Latin text.  [N.B. the “Kyrie” is the only part of the Roman mass not in Latin; it’s in Greek.]  Let’s take as an example his setting of the phrase qui sedes ad dexteram patris (“who sits at the right hand of the father”).  Here’s how Beethoven set it in the earlier Mass in C:

And here it is magnified in every dimension in the Missa Solemnis:

The Difficulties

Beethoven rarely took into account the technical limits of the musicians he was writing for.  He was as difficult and irascible a composer as he was a human being, especially when it came to writing for singers.  The Missa Solemnis is arguably the most daunting challenge in the choral repertoire.  It’s not exactly easy for the soloists or the orchestra either.

Here is an excellent performance of the Gloria given by the august London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Sir Colin Davis.  It’s high order music-making, but you’ll still hear the sopranos straining, the orchestra struggling, and the soloists straying from their ideals of intonation.  And yet the overall effect is, well, glorious:

I wanna be like you

Randall Thompson (not pictured above) was a fine American composer, though distinctly unphotogenic (see below), and his 2nd Symphony is a piece I’ve admired for a good long while.  There exist two recordings that I know of, one, of course, by Lenny and the other by Neeme Järvi of all people.  This is one of those piece that I fell in love with, via Lenny, in high school, and I still pester people to program it (though I admittedly have never programmed it myself.)

The piece is richly orchestrated, overtly melodic, and veeery 1930’s American.  I’ve always found something deeply familiar about the second movement, and I’ve just figured out what it is.

Listen to the second movement of Mr. Thompson’s symphony

and notice that the melody, harmony, key, orchestration and style were all lifted shamelessly by one George Bruns for the score of Disney’s The Jungle Book.

And I applaud him for it!

[Addendum: it would appear that Walter Sheets also deserves some of the blame/credit for this lift.  And for some of the best alto flute writing ever.]

Editorial

It’s been three big projects in as many weeks here at willcwhite inc., all of which – I think – bring up interesting topics for discussion, but we may as well begin with the first one, which involved me revising and re-editing this piece for this performance coming up on September 22 (which, if you happen to live in Chicago, wouldn’t kill you to attend…)

This piece, the so called Fantasy on “Les Folies d’Espagne” is what I would consider my first professional work, my Opus 1, if you will.  [Ugh, you guys, should I be using opus numbers?  I go back and forth…]  Even though I wrote it over seven years ago, the upcoming performance in Chicago will be only its second performance, the major reason for which is that the score calls for prepared piano, harpsichord and portative organ, which, you try finding those three instruments in the same room!  I would have performed it myself several other times were it not for the fact that amassing all those keyboards is such a hassle.

My task in getting ready for this performance was to update the score and edit the music, on which much more below.  Some of the changes I wanted to make were based on my own long-held dissatisfactions with a bar here or there, but others were based on comments I received about the piece shortly after I had written it, in that period when a young composer proudly shops around his latest achievement and seeking approval and guidance from his elders in the field.  I showed it to Easley, who seemed to enjoy the more impish, comedic moments, but told me to change a note in the viola part to make the chorale more consonant.  Later that summer, I showed it to Claude Monteux whose basic feeling was that the piece was “really wild”, and who told me that one of the rit.s should be a subito meno mosso.  This past week, years after the fact, I incorporated both of their changes.

But now, picture this third such encounter, on a cold February day in 2006, in a small music classroom at the University of Chicago.  The quasi-illustrious composer John Eaton had come to give a masterclass at the university where he once taught, in which a small group of student composers were invited to present a recent work and receive words of wisdom from the master.  Just the sort of thing that I was looking for.  The master turned out to be a strange little man who spent the first hour of this hour-and-a-half-long seminar playing – at maximum volume on the tiny classroom’s sound system – one godawful cacophony after another from his renowned catalogue of chamber operas, the playing of which clips was punctuated only by the master’s trips to the bathroom at 10-15 minute intervals.

Finally it came time for Mr. Eaton to hear one or two of the student compositions.  A young doctoral student offered a short movement for string quartet.  This, the master regretted to say, was not a piece of music, but rather a technical exercise.  A burn no doubt, but one couldn’t help but agree.  Thinking that there would only be time for my piece if we started right then, (and in spite of the fact that I had already graduated and had weaseled my way into the seminar) I piped up next.

We listened to the whole 13 minutes of my piece, which, let’s just get it out there right now, is sort of an oddball, and certainly features a wide variety of musical styles that John Eaton had clearly worked at length to distance himself from in his own work.  The master sat there, flummoxed, for a good 10 or 15 seconds before beginning to sputter out the beginnings of various disapprobations, finally working himself up into a tizzy and shouting, “well, the orchestration’s not very good,” and proceeding to point a measure in which he could not hear the flute in it’s lowest tessitura.

I, of course, calmly accepted his criticism, but really, this wasn’t what I wanted to hear because a) I thought the piece was pretty well orchestrated (I still do) and b) when you present a work at a seminar like this, especially when pressed for time, isn’t the master-composer supposed to give a more general analysis of the big issues that the work presents?  Couldn’t he say something about the form, or the twisted mélange of styles, or all of those ridiculous keyboard instruments shoved into one piece?

In the end, his haranguing me over one minor detail at the expense of the larger picture probably said more about his opinion of the larger picture than a more direct approach would have.  But still, that’s seriously weak and not much help to a young man in search of serious criticism.

The point of this story really wasn’t supposed to be ‘John Eaton is a self-centered asshole’ (considering that he’s a composer, isn’t that basically a given anyway?)  I think it was more supposed to be about the things that stick with a young composer as he brings his first major creation into the world, but I’ve sort of lost that train of thought, so the former moral will have to suffice.

I had to edit a lot more than just an occasional viola note or tempo indication over the past couple weeks, because you see, when I wrote this piece 7+ years ago, I was a senior in college, and I was awfully precious about typesetting the scores and parts of my pieces, but I wasn’t so concerned with the practicalities of actually “reading” the “music”.  Seven years later, I’m still very precious about the visual presentation of my music – maybe even preciouser – but I like to think that I’ve come a long way in matters of clarity.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about.  What is now this:

once looked like this:

which, can you even imagine being one of the second violinists – sharing the same part, no less – confronted with those two bars?  I cringe.

It only gets worse.  For, example, there’s this monstrosity:

which now, thankfully, looks like this:

and which I freely admit is still pretty difficult to decipher, but a musician might at least have a fighting chance of figuring out what the hell is going on.

As difficult as parsing out these co-staved parts was (like separating Siamese twins, I tell you!), there’s a good 5-10 additional editorial decisions that had to be made in each of those excerpts.  Take this line

First off, there’s the matter of tuplets: should the numbers ‘5’ and ‘3’ go above or below the staff?  Traditionally, they go on the beamed side (so, in this case, below), but when I wrote this piece, I was very much in the thrall of Cliff Colnot’s rules for musical typesetting which state that dynamics are the only thing that go below the staff (I have, by and large, remained a faithful adherent to these rules.)

And then take the slur and the crescendo, which carry over from the previous system – should those begin where the first note begins or at the edge of the staff (as they do now)?  Should that crescendo be tighter so that it matches the diminuendo?  These two bars could look considerably different

but still express the exact same musical idea.

Or in this case

what’s the best way of indicating the empty space wherein a glissando occurs?  Is it worth notating that each of those crescendi starts at f and ends at ff?  Is that even an editorial question, or a compositional one?  Does it just add too much clutter to the page to include the dynamics?  And in the second bar there: there’s a trill over a tied note value.  Should there be a squiggly to show that it lasts the whole duration of the tie?

These are the questions that regularly vex music publishers and self-published composers, (or else it’s just me.)  I have a feeling that most performers never give any thought to how much time goes into avoiding those pesky “collisions” between stems and dynamics, tuplets and slurs, etc., but such things are the bane of the composer’s very existence!  Wah.

After all of this work, I really think you should go to this concert, btw.

PPD

It’s time for my annual bout with post-Monteux depression, and for some reason it seems even more acute this year than normal.  It’s probably because I have no rebound project to dive into immediately.  In showbiz (or at least in late ’90’s East Coast high school theater parlance) we call this PPD: Post-Production Depression.  It occurs when you’ve just dedicated tremendous time and energy into a big collaborative project; when the project comes to an end, the balloon deflates, and you’re left struggling to hold on to the feeling.

There’s something comforting in PPD though, because it means that what you were doing was worthwhile, and that you were working with great people – certainly the case for me this summer.  I think a lot about the kids doing WST this summer, a troupe I was involved with from ’99 – ’02, and which gave me my first major experiences of PPD.  These kids are about to wrap up a production of “Forum”, and even though that chapter of my life is ten years behind me (cue the next depressive episode), I know exactly how they’re going to feel this weekend after the run is over.  It’s a strange mixture of relaxation and malaise, of needing to rest and needing to move at the same time; it’s amplified by like a thousand if you had a crush on someone during the production, which you might as well do.

The geography always kicks me in the butt after these summers too.  Up in Maine, the bright Northern sun comes streaming into your window at around 5:30 in the morning and you wake up feeling like you’ve already started the day.  Add to that a few breaths of the freshest air known to man, and your batteries are pretty well charged.  Which is good for someone who’s about to go play viola for seven hours, bash around a tennis ball for two, and eat and drink too much in the remaining time.  Ah, Maine.

My Summer Listening List has consisted of the following, listed in no particular order:

1) Scissor Sisters: Magic Hour (Deluxe Edition)

2) Frank Ocean: Channel Orange

3) Guillermo Klein: Carrera

4) Punch Brothers: Who’s Feeling Young Now?

5) Styne/Sondheim/Merman: GYPSY the Original Broadway Cast

The Next Picture Show

I’ve snuck away to Los Angeles for something like 56 hours in order to hang out on the set of my friend Will Slocombe‘s new movie, Pasadena. Will is one of the most talented and hard-working artists that I know; there’s a lot of so-called “filmmakers” out here in L.A., but Will keeps plugging away, pounding the pavement, and getting movies made.  I would recommend that everyone watch the entirety of his web series RECEPTION if you want to get some insight into his brilliance in combining funny + sad (or if you just want an entertaining way to spend 20 minutes).

Will at work

Pasadena stars no less a titan than Peter Bogdanavich, and let me tell you, this is a command performance.  This will be the second of Will’s pictures that I’ve scored, and I already know it’s going to be much harder, because it walks a very fine dramedic tightrope.  The emotional content of each and every scene has to be perfectly calibrated.  I’m thinking flutes.

While we’re on the subject of me being in L.A., we also need to talk about my friend Caitlin, not just because she’s another fascinating, successful person, but because her apartment, in which she has so generously allowed me to stay while she’s gone, is one of the most fastidiously curated living spaces I’ve ever encountered.

Caitlin’s life is centered around Death.  She works as a funeral director, but in her free time she’s an internet celebrity and bloggeuse.  I think the overarching thesis of Caitlin’s life and work is that since we’re all going to die, it’s probably better that we understand death and develop a healthy attitude towards it rather than relying on the collection of irrational fears our society has foisted upon us.  People spend a lot of money to keep the very idea of death at bay, and the funeral industry reaps the benefits from our psychoses.

But anyway, back to Caitlin’s apartment, it’s pretty incredible what she’s done with the place.  Every available inch is filled with the photos, mementos, or very remains of someone who is no longer with us (there are at least two human skulls, one alligator skull and a large trophy bust of a deer scattered throughout her apartment.)

Some of Caitlin's actual stuff

There are also several things that seem like they could kill me, including a variety of talismans and religious icons, a snake, and this cat, who I think is a cross between a Siamese and a vampire bat (and who, let the record show, just farted and promptly left the room.)

It should come as no surprise that last night I had a riveting, all-night long dream about the zombie apocalypse.

Tonight I’ll get to catch an echt-Rattelian program at the LA Phil consisting of Ligeti’s Atmosphères, the Act I prelude from Lohengrin, Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder and Bruckner 9.  Then back to Cincinnati first thing tomorrow where it will all of a sudden be crazytown due to this wild extravaganza called the May Festival, after which I may be embracing death more than ever!

Can somebody please explain Music Publishing to me?

or How Much Longer Can We Go On Like This?


The publisher asks $500.00 as the replacement fee for the above score.  Because it’s Out of Print.  And I’m just like, bitch, I can xerox you that shit for seventy-five cent!  Unless that scotch tape was affixed by George Gershwin himself, five hundred dollars seems a rather high asking price.

Out of Print makes precisely zero sense to me.  I just don’t understand it.  Is someone at your organization not capable of typing those notes into a computer?  For $500, I’ll do it in less than a day and replicate every single aspect of your score (minus the Gershwin tape).

In these days of copy machines, pdfs, and Finale, I can’t see any way that the publishing industry will continue on the same model much longer.  Change comes stultifyingly slow in the classical music world, but sooner or later someone’s going to get wise and streamline a TON, and this whole rental business is going to look very different.

Or am I wrong?  Are perpetual copyright laws and publishing monopolies bound to keep things in the same state of disrepair?

I’m sensing the opportunity for a plug.  People, just buy my music.  It’s really good, I promise, and not expensive.  We can make the transaction super clean and scotch tape-free.  Unless you’re looking to increase the resale value, in which case I will gladly affix tape, scotch or otherwise, thereupon.

My Week with Philip

It’s not so often that Cincinnati, OH feels like the center of the musical world, and it’s even rarer that I get to work with several of my musical idols on a single project.  But every once in a while, the stars align, and this past week was one of those rare occasions.

March 30 & 31 saw the world premiere of Philip Glass’s new cello concerto (no. 2) by our CSO.  I’ve never thought of myself as a big Philip Glass fan, but in preparing for the concert this past week I had occasion to go back through my CD collection, and there’s no denying that I’ve had my Glassy phases.  When I was a freshman in college, I used to listen to the last movement of his second symphony over and over again on repeat (and yes, I realize that many of my readers will find that concept delightfully ironic.)  The coda is SO MUCH FUN and it features my favorite repeat in all of Glass’s work, because just when you think the movement is about to finish, he goes back in for another round (1:03):

I’ve also harbored attachments to the first violin concerto and “Glassworks” among others, which, when I added it all up, made me realize that I really am a Philip Glass fan.  Which I think is one of those things that serious musicians aren’t supposed to say, but all the more reason for saying it.

And all the more reason why this week gave me such a buzz.  The experience was only amplified by the fact that Philip is a gregarious and charming human being.  A big part of my job this week was to interview him publicly, and let me tell you, that guy’s a talker.  If Charlie ever had him on the broadcast, he wouldn’t be able to get in a word edgewise (which, perhaps, is why Mr. Glass has never appeared.)

I’ll admit that I was a little put off when I first received the score to the concerto about a month ago, and I found out that the music for his new piece was not actually new — it turns out that the concerto is a condensation of his score for Naqoyqatsi, the third installation of Glass and Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi Trilogy.  But the thing is, everyone involved treated it like it was a brand new piece of music, and because of that, it became a new piece of music.

Much of that had to do with the collaborators involved, Matt Haimovitz and Dennis Russell Davies.  Now, when I said at the top of this post that I got to work with ‘several of my musical idols,’ DRD was definitely included in that mix.  My obsession with him also dates back to my first year of college, when my eyes were opened to the greater world of new music, and I eagerly began buying up recordings of Schnittke, Pärt, and Glass among others.  So many of the albums featured Dennis Russell Davies as conductor that his became a household name in the house of my brain.

First off, I’m happy to report that he’s another class act, all the way.  Secondly, he fucking recorded Alfred Schnittke’s 9th Symphony, which, on a spiritual level, places him ad dexteram Patris as far as I’m concerned.  And this is in addition to the most baddass recording of the Viola Concerto and one of the single greatest albums of all time, Marianne Faithfull’s rendition of The Seven Deadly Sins.  Not to mention the complete Haydn Symphonies, which, correct me if I’m wrong, is only the third such survey ever recorded??

Ahh, just thinking about these people gets me all in a tizzy, but I want to emphasize that the best part is that they were all really dedicated to this project (especially Matt Haimovitz who became one of my musical idols after working with him), they all contributed ideas that made it work, and, what made it so fulfilling on a personal level, they actually listened to and incorporated my ideas — little old me, the assistant conductor.  That’s a rarity for artists who don’t even approach these guys’ stature, and it was an honor to contribute what little I did.

But wait, there’s more!

Because when I said that earlier that Cincinnati felt like the center of the music world this past week, it wasn’t just because I got to hang out with famous people.  The seventh annual MusicNOW Festival took place, organized by Cincinnati native Bryce Dessner.  He collected, among others, the following musical entities: eighth blackbird, Nico Muhly, James McVinnie, Sam Amidon, and no less a deity than Sufjan Stevens.

Sufjan was premiering a new song cycle co-composed with Nico Muhly and Bryce Dessner himself.  The one bummer of my week is that I couldn’t get over to hear this collaboration (since I had to be next door attending to the recording of the Glass concerto).

Thank god for YouTube bootlegs!

Mysteries of “Mysteries of Lisbon”

“Mysteries of Lisbon” is a 2010 film of epic proportions, a 4 1/2 hour Portuguese-French period drama that was included on several Best Of lists last year. It’s a visual stunner — every shot looks like a 19th century oil painting, not to mention the fascinating camera work, long takes, and bold editing. But for me the big mystery watching this film was “what is this music??” Two names are listed under the music credit on the movie’s web site: Jorge Arriagada and Luís de Freitas Branco.

Sr. Arriagada is a Chilean countryman of the film’s director, Raúl Ruiz, and has been one of his most frequent collaborators. His name is listed as the sole musical credit (“Original Music by”) on MoL‘s imdb page and in the film’s credit reel, which would make you think, OK, this guy must have written the music for the film… so who’s the other name?

Well, it turns out that this is the real mystery of Mysteries of Lisbon. Here’s some copy from the film’s web site:

To allow the Lisbon of the 19th century to ring true, Ruiz turned to the music of the great Portuguese composer Luí­s de Freitas Branco, a name that is synonymous with the Portuguese culture of the 20th century. His work continues to be a reference, with special mention for Paraísos Artificiais and Vathek, considered the jewels of modernism he himself created. He composed four symphonies of a classic quality that truly denote his appreciation for the polyphonic past of Portugal.

He died in 1955.

I found this text rather intriguing. (Let’s ignore for a second the fact that this was obviously and poorly translated from god-knows-what Romance language and that the phrase “polyphonic past of Portugal” is probably the title of some lame musicologist’s blog.) I may know nothing of the Portuguese culture of the 20th century, but I do know a few things about modern music, and I had never come across the name Freitas Branco, much less the music he wrote.

So began the investigating. It turns out that Sr. Freitas Branco’s entire orchestral output has been released on Naxos (who else?) as recorded by Alvaro Cassuto and the Ireland RTE National Symphony Orchestra. And what an output it is.

Having now listened through Freitas Branco’s four symphonies, two orchestral suites, and several tone poems, I can say this: almost all of the music (and all of the distinguished music) used in Mysteries of Lisbon is his. I can also say that Sr. Freitas Branco’s music has nothing to do with the Lisbon – or anywhere else for that matter – of the 19th century, but it has a surprising amount to do with film music of the 20th and 21st centuries.

This composer has flabbergasted me. Some of his music is very derivative indeed; his youthful “Suite alentajana” sounds like a pastiche reenactment of Rimsky-Korsakov’s greatest hits. There’s hints of Chausson and Vaughan Williams and even Bruckner. But this composer also created strikingly original music, most of it very dark in mood, with strident harmonies and brooding orchestration.

Have I piqued your interest yet? Here are some of the themes that feature prominently in Mysteries of Lisbon:

Symphony No. 1 (1924), mvmt. 1:

Symphony No. 1, mvmt 2:

Where did this stuff come from?? It’s so moody and enigmatic, weirdly proto-Herrmann, and — what? — post-Rachmaninoff? It seems custom engineered for film:

Symphony No. 2 (1926-27), mvmt. 2:

This next piece sounds like Stephen Sondheim and Philip Glass teamed up to write a Bruckner symphony:

Symphony No. 3 (1930 – 44), mvmt. 1

But here’s the real kicker, a section from a symphonic poem titled Vathek.  This canon for 59 voices was written in 1913, but it sounds much closer to Ligeti or Schnittke than it does to Stravinsky’s boldest pages (it pre-Bartóks Bartók, while we’re at it):

This stuff is amazing, right? And totally neglected and unknown and we should be playing it at least SOME of the time, right?? I’m so glad it made its way into the soundtrack of Mysteries of Lisbon, and I have to give mad props to Raúl Ruiz, because he used it just right. But, continuing the mini-theme from my last post, it’s at least mildly deceptive that Jorge Arriagada’s name is the default credit for the music in this film. I’m sure Sr. Arriagada made a valuable contribution to the project, and I haven’t gone back and tallied up the music minute by minute, but I’d have to guess that at least 75% of the music in this very long film belongs to Sr. Freitas Branco.

Why not help even out the disparity: buy the Freitas Branco oeuvre here. Not that he’ll really care. But I will! And you’ll enjoy it! And we’ll all be happy! And moody. Oh, and you should watch Mysteries of Lisbon too — it’s really great!

Is Osvaldo Golijov a musical thief?

A potential scandal in the world of contemporary classical music comes to us today from Eugene, OR of all places, via the Eugene Register-Guard.  Bob Keefer writes about the reaction of two audience members at the recent Eugene Symphony performance of Osvaldo Golijov‘s Siderius:

But when the concert opened with Golijov’s “Sidereus,” a 9-minute composition that premiered in 2010 in Memphis, Tenn., the two men looked at each other in shock.

That’s because, both said on Friday, they recognized large parts of Golijov’s composition from a different composer’s piece, one they both had been working with recently: accordionist Michael Ward-Bergeman’s 2009 work, “Barbeich.”

The two gentlemen in the audience that night were Brian McWhorter, a trumpet professor at the University of Oregon, and Tom Manoff, an NPR classical music critic and writer.  Mr. Manoff being the driven journalist that he is, has beaten me to the punch and offered a rather extensive blog post on this developing story in which he analyzes passages of both scores and tells us that they match up in many respects.

Gracious readers, here is a chance to listen and judge for yourselves.

First, a clip from about one minute into Sidereus, ostensibly by Mr. Golijov:

And a parallel fragment from Mr. Ward-Bergeman’s Barbeich for hyper-accordion:

It doesn’t take a musical genius to hear that these clips are two different versions of the same music.  Let’s take a listen to the B section:

Golijov:

Ward-Bergeman:

You get the idea.  Here’s what Mr. Golijov said about the work in an interview with his publisher:

For the “Moon” theme I used a melody with a beautiful, open nature, a magnified scale fragment that my good friend and longtime collaborator, accordionist Michael Ward Bergeman came up with some years ago when we both were trying to come up with ideas for a musical depiction of the sky in Patagonia. I then looked at that theme as if through the telescope and under the microscope, so that the textures, the patterns from which the melody emerges and into which it dissolves, point to a more molecular, atomic reality. Like Galileo with the telescope, or getting close to Van Gogh’s brushstrokes.

While Mr. Golijov may not be able to come up with his own musical ideas, he is certainly a potent generator of BULLSHIT.  What I think he meant to say was that he took Mr. Ward-Bergeman’s theme and created an arrangement.

In his blog post Mr. Manoff writes that he is awaiting responses from both Mr. Golijov and Mr. Ward-Bergeman, and he suspects they must have had a financial or personal agreement.  Certainly they must have.  This “borrowing” is so obvious that Mr. Golijov never could have gotten away with just using it and not saying anything.  But is it plagiarism?

These things are rarely so clear-cut in music.  The various jobs that writers have in the profession – orchestrator, composer, arranger – leave tremendous room for interpretation.  A Composer may be nothing more than a tunesmith or a “whistler”; a professional orchestrator may in fact do the lion’s share of the actual composing.  So who gets the credit?  Look at the case of Robert Russell Bennett, the greatest of the Golden Age Broadway orchestrators: Bennett was a composer in his own right, and his compositions pale in comparison to the great numbers that he orchestrated for the likes of Richard Rodgers.  Rodgers may not have had the time or ability to form his own music into full-fledged musical fabrics, but obviously it was his material that made all the difference.

Then there’s Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn.  Who was the composer and who was the arranger?  Were there any such boundaries?  Often one would write the first half of a piece and the other would complete it.  Duke almost always got the credit no matter how much work Strayhorn had done on the music.  But, so the thinking goes, this was to Billy Strayhorn’s benefit: the music sold much better with Duke’s name on it, and Strayhorn reaped significant financial rewards from their arrangement.

At least 9 out of the 11 minutes in Sidereus are based on Mr. Ward-Bergeman’s Barbeich.  Though Golijov adds what I presume to be his own introduction, interlude, and coda, and diverts the melody here and there, I think an honest musician would have to call this piece an arrangement.  Certainly many an arranger has done a lot more work than Golijov did and received less credit for it.  At the very least, I think it’s a little underhanded of Golijov to have fulfilled a commission under his own name with this work if he didn’t clear the concept with his publisher/commissioning agency.

You can listen to the entirety of Sidereus here and the entirety of Barbeich here and make up your own mind: what do you think?

A few additional remarks:

1) Mr. Ward-Bergeman does indeed have a long history of collaboration with Golijov: he is a member of the “Andalucian Dogs” on the Ayre disc, and a musician on the Tetro soundtrack.  Could this piece have been another instance of their musical collaboration?

2) I interviewed the work’s dedicatee, Mr. Henry Fogel, on the occasion of Sidereus‘s Chicago premiere and included a few extra notes about it in a blog post here.

3) “Sidereus” is one of the most awful titles in musical – nay, titular – history.

4) The accordion, and in fact all the members of the squeezebox family, are totally badass.  Witness.

5) This, in case you all didn’t read it already.