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Top 10 Most Influential Composers

List #2 in my Top 10 Top 10 lists game.  Today, we look at the composers whose music inspired the musicians who came after them.  I’d like to note that, in general, this is something that is totally out of a composer’s control – how can they possibly know if their musical language will be absorbed by anyone following them?  [The big exception is people like Shönberg who were also significant teachers and disseminators.]  So, I’m mostly trying to judge a simple historical fact here, not a composer’s talent or skill in “being influential”.

1. Guillaume de Machaut (1300 – 1377)

I realize it’s sort of obnoxious to start my list with someone who is only slightly older than music itself, and whose name is only vaguely familiar to the most astute of  Early Music History Review students, but isn’t being sort of obnoxious one of the tenets of good blogging?

Guillaume really does deserve pride of place here for a lot of reasons – basically, he influenced a century and a half of musicians after him, something that very few other people have done.  He popularized the use of four voices in mass settings, he added complexity to popular song forms, and he was also an accomplished poet.  His intense vanity compelled him to publish his “collected works” in several volumes at the end of his life, something noone else had ever done and something that added considerably to the idea of music publishing and dissemination, not to mention scholarship.

Guillaume’s music sounded like this:


(Messe de Notre Dame, Hilliard Ensemble)

Influenced: Basically every 14th, 15th, and 16th century composer right up through Josquin and Vittoria.  In fact he’s so influential, that some crazy person let loose on the grounds of Deutsche Grammaphon’s corporate headquarters even released a CD of Machaut remixes (including one by Brad Mehldau).

2. Johann Sebastian Bach (1685 – 1750)

Time to break out the big guns, boys – Johann’s in town.  Bach’s name will appear on a good many of these lists, because he did a good many things.  Even though he was beyond everyone in his own time period, he was considered old-fashioned.  Ever the musician’s musician, he continued to be revered by composers and scholars even when his public image languished.

Influenced: His sons (JC, CPE, and the rest of his alphabetic brood), Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Brahms, Hindemith, and probably everyone that ever wrote two lines of counterpoint.

And he very definitely influenced Mahler.  From deep in the bowels of the “Resurrection” Symphony:

3. George Gershwin (1898 – 1937)

In his short lifespan, George Gershwin wrote popular tunes that were irresistible to broadway, classical, and jazz musicians alike.  Jazz musicians in particular latched on to his melodies and practically invented the idea of “standards” around them.

Meanwhile, he influenced several generations of popular classical composers (especially Lenny Bernstein) to try out jazzier idioms in the concert hall.  I don’t think any single person is more responsible for the state of popular music worldwide than George Gershwin.

Here’s a little tour through 20th c. popular music history via Gershwin’s “Summertime”:

Influenced: Bernstein, Sondheim, Ravel, Richard Rodgers, Cole Porter, Ferde Grofe, Duke Ellington, Billy Strayhorn, every jazz musician who ever soloed over “Rhythm Changes”, every jazz composer who ever wrote a new tune over “Rhythm Changes”, every pop composer up to the present time who ever stole the descending bass line pattern from “I got Rhythm” (otherwise known as “Rhythm Changes”), at least.

4. (Franz) Joseph Haydn (1732 – 1809)

Papa was on our first list because he was a musical ground-breaker, but he appears on today’s because all his innovations were taken up by other people.

Influenced: Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Prokofiev, Ravel, and literally anyone who ever wrote a symphony or a string quartet.

5. Wolfgang Amad̩ Mozart (1754 Р1792)

Master of every domain, including opera, chamber music, symphony, and concerto, Mozart cast a wide net over his successors.  Not surprisingly, opera composers down the ages worshiped him – Rossini was even dubbed “The Little Mozart” because of his affinity for the composer.

Tchaikovsky, however, was probably his most ardent admirer.  Tchaikovsky’s opera The Queen of Spades is totally saturated with Mozart, but I don’t even know if Mozart could have written as Mozartean a number as this:


(“Moi milenki druzhok”, Gergiev)

Influenced: Tchaikovsky, Rossini, Schubert, Schumann, Haydn, Beethoven, Stravinsky, Rachmaninoff.

6. Arnold Sch̦nberg (1874 Р1951)

This poor man is so maligned for having opened the Pandora’s box of 20th century modernism in music.  And with good reason.  Starting with his close circle of pupils in Vienna, everyone just had to compose using his various systems.  The real hook was dodecaphony, Schönberg’s principal for organizing the 12 pitches into previously unthought-of combinations.  The 12-tone technique spawned an even more mathematically rigorous offspring: serialism.

There’s no point in judging whether or not this was a good thing – it simply is what happened.

Influenced (for better or for worse): Berg, Webern, Boulez, Nono, Messiaen, Stravinsky, Stockhausen, Eisler, Babbitt, Sessions, Wolpe, and leagues of other composers who wrote even uglier music.

7. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770 – 1827)

Beethoven’s an interesting case – sometimes he even influenced people not to compose.  That was the case with Brahms who couldn’t get it up to write a symphony while Beethoven’s shadow was still in the room.  More than any technical specific procedures, I think Beethoven’s biggest influence was in the philosophical scope of music – would Mahler ever have been able to compose the “Resurrection” symphony without Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”?

Influenced: Berlioz, Schumann, Brahms, Bruckner, Ravel (I think), Bartok, Mahler, anyone who put a chorus in a symphony, anyone who ever thought music could literally change the world.

8. Richard Wagner (1813-1883)

Few composers had such a devoted cult in their own lifetime (not to mention after).  Wagner’s innovations were far reaching, and spread like wildfire.  Others had used themes to represent characters and objects before, but Wagner’s organized use of leitmotifs became a principle followed by several generations of composers.  He also influenced a number of non-compositional disciplines: conducting, dramatic staging, architecture, and, unfortunately, philosophy.

Influenced: Mahler, Strauss, Zemlinsky, Schoenberg, Webern, Berg, Franck, Sibelius, Puccini, Rachmaninoff, Dvorak, Elgar, Max Steiner, Karl Goldmark, Howard Shore, and anyone who wanted to convey a dramatic impulse through music.

9. Mikhail Glinka (1804 – 1857)

I know hardly anything about this man or his music, but what I do know is that any time you read anything about a Russian composer who came after him, those guys are always talking about how big an influence he was.  So, it’s a slightly “provacative” inclusion on this list (and yes, I do expect wide-spread violence as a result of it) but maybe it will induce someone – anyone – to give his music a first listen and a fair shake.

Tchaikovsky adapted this theme from Glinka’s “Ivan Susanin” for the head motif of his 5th symphony:

Influenced: Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Glazunov, Rachmaninoff, Shostakovich

10. Claudio Monteverdi (1567 – 1643)

In the first list, I quoted the eminent music scholar David Ewen in noting Monteverdi’s profound accomplishment.  The fact that we still have people writing operas today is largely due to him CM, not to mention the fact that he more or less invented the idea of instrumental tone painting.

Influenced: Schütz, Cavalli, Lully, Scarlatti, Rameau, Vivaldi, and essentially everyone who ever wrote an opera.

Discuss

Rules of the game: either submit your own top 10 list, or submit one or more alternates to my list in the comments section.  If you choose the latter option, note that you must replace someone on my list, and make sure you tell us who it’s going to be.

Or just use this space to chat amongst yourselves about various Influential composers.  “Composers”, for our purposes, means people who write music using any Western notation (it could be of their own devising).  There is no limit as to genre or time period, so I’d be very interested to see some bizarre responses (think: Anton Reicha).

Top 10 Most Innovative Composers

Day 1 in my audacious response to Anthony Tommasini’s Wild and CRRRAzy idea of choosing the top 10 composers.  Today, we focus on Innovation and Originality.  Which composers took the boldest risks and were willing to suffer the consequences?  Which composers were marked by thinking of musical ideas and sounds that simply nobody had ever thought of before?

I’ll further define this list in opposition to tomorrow’s list.  Tomorrow, we’ll look at the Top 10 Most Influential Composers.  Today’s composers could all be cul-de-sacs in musical history – no later composer need have taken up their particular style or innovations.  We’re talking about brazen, unfettered originality for originality’s sake.

1. Hector Berlioz (1803 – 1869)

For my money, Berlioz is the greatest musical innovator.  His experiments often failed, but they never lacked for ambition.  Every piece was grander, bolder, and less practical than the next, beginning with the Symphony Fantastique and continuing up to his sprawling 4 1/2 hour opera Les Troyens. Berlioz never wrote in a prescribed form: he preferred inventing them.  He created tone poem-symphonies (Fantastique), symphony-concertos (Harold in Italy), and even bold admixtures of drama, narration, art song, and choral symphony (Lélio).

Before Berlioz, composers had depicted birds chirping, storms raging, and the rolling seas.  Berlioz depicted opium hazes, witch’s covens, and rolling heads:


(Symphonie Fantastique, MTT)

2. Carlo Gesualdo (1566 – 1613)

The Renaissance Italian prince is primarily known for two things: 1) finding his wife in flagrante with her lover and subsequently murdering them both (which, btw, was not only his prerogative, but his duty as a member of the nobility) and 2) composing Renaissance madrigals that made use of outlandish, expressionist harmonies.  Anybody who writes something like this in the 16th century is pretty original:


(Beltà poiché t’assenti, Concerto Italiano)

3. Arnold Sch̦nberg (1874 Р1951)


In a lot of ways, the music that lead up to Schönberg’s radical departure from tradition did pave his way: Mahler and Strauss and Zemlinsky and those types were already stretching the boundaries of the Tonal system of chords and scales.  But Schönberg took their groundwork in much bolder directions.  He then concocted, out of thin air, a mathematical re-imagining of how notes could be structured into music – that is a real innovation, and that’s exactly what Schönberg did with his 12-tone system in 1921.

The results are sometimes strangely beautiful.  Sometimes, they are unspeakably ugly.  Usually, they are at least cool:


(Moses und Aron, CSO/Solti)

4. Harry Partch (1901 – 1974)

How much more original can you get than inventing your own instruments, scales, notational system, and musical language?  I mean, what’s even going on in this score for “Delusion of the Fury“?

While there’s no denying that everyone on this list had plenty of influences, Partch really stands out as an individualist.  What planet did he wander in from to write this?:


(“The Street”, Newband)

5. Claudio Monteverdi (1567 – 1643)

David Ewen writes:

Compared to the archaic vocabulary and methods of his predecessors, Monteverdi’s operas represent an entirely new art.  This is not a revolution: there was nothing before Monteverdi that he could have revolutionized.  This is invention, the discovery of a brave, new world.  He was the first one to understand and appreciate the role of the orchestra in an opera, to use an instrumental style and resources as an ally for his dramatic mission.  To use instruments for the purpose of mood painting and characterization was simply without precedent.  He knew how to make his characters not the abstractions they had been before, but human beings.


(Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, Concerto Italiano)

6. Edgard Var̬se (1883 Р1965)

This French-American composer wrote the first piece for an ensemble made up exclusively of percussion instruments: Ionisation from 1931.  Many composers invented ensembles, but percussion instruments lack one vital element of music: pitches.  [Usually.]  In eliminating all reference to traditional pitch systems and leaving himself with only rhythm, timbre, and dynamics, Varèse forced himself to create a musical language all his own.

Even when he did use more traditional instruments and ensembles, his music displays an undeniable individuality that was not linked with any of the prevailing trends in musical modernism.  That he later turned to electronic composition in the 1950’s simply confirms his ever-curious musical mind.


(Ionisation, Die Reihe Ensemble/Cerha)

7. Franz Joseph Haydn (1732 – 1809)

Please let’s not forget about everything Haydn did while he was toiling away in an obscure Hungarian field somewhere: he invented the symphonic form (four movements, fast – slow – minuet – faster), modernized the orchestra, invented the string quartet – both as a genre and as an ensemble (although, can you really separate the two?), and totally revolutionized musical language.  He is also the first composer to ever make significant use of folk music as source material for his compositions.

Suffice to say, when he started writing music, it sounded like this:


(Symphony No. 8, Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orch/Fischer)

and when he finished, it sounded like this:


(The Creation, LSO/Colin Davis)

8. Igor Stravinsky (1876 – 1963)

I know that Igor Stravinsky stole left, right, and center from Debussy, Ravel, Rimsky-Korsakov, and probably a lot of other people.  But did any of them write this?


(The Rite of Spring, LSO/Davis)

I didn’t think so.

9. LeoÅ¡ Janáček (1854 – 1928)

This Czech composer was a really late bloomer – his early works were indebted to a folkloric, watered-down version of Brahms that he received via Dvorak.  And then, something happened – maybe it had to do with the death of his daughter, perhaps with his increasing fame and prosperity, but slowly and late in life, he forged a deeply personal style, especially in opera.

Janáček was everything you’d expect from an eccentric, craggy composer – he was an ill-tempered and obstinate man.  His radical style often sounds like it:


(String Quartet No. 1, Melos Quartet)

10. Claude Debussy (1862 – 1918)

Almost all the composers listed above were chosen because they created brash, aggressive, dramatic new sounds.  Debussy did just the opposite – he explored the many cool, washy colors that classical instrumentation had to offer.

It’s really important to remember that Impressionists in music and Impressionists in visual art may have ended up with “similar” effects, but they came at it from totally different starting points: whereas Visual Impressionists were trying to add vagueness and mood to their canvasses (so as to lessen distinction and increase the sense of an “impression”), Debussy was doing the exact opposite – he was trying to enrich his musical language so that sounds could actually turn into musical scenes with literal places and characters.

His real innovation was to combine the mellifluous sounds of Indonesian gamelan music with the greatly expanded harmonic palette of Wagner and Massenet.  Thus:


(Ibéria, Cleveland Orch/Boulez)

Talk Amongst Yourselves

I’m going to resist the temptation to write about all of my notable mentions, because that would defeat the purpose of just putting up 10 people, and plus, the whole point of this exercise is the discussion. Your job now is to argue with me and point out all of the people I either stupidly left out or stupidly included.

My only request is that if you propose a composerly alternative to any of my suggestions, please specify who you would like to remove from my list to be replaced with your contestant.

More than anything, I’d like to hear your all’s Top 10 Most Innovative Composers Lists.

Let the games begin.

Top 10 Top 10

I guess Anthony Tommasini can do whatever he wants, but this whole Top 10 Composers thing just isn’t as fun as it should be somehow.  Here are his rules: Western art music, starting at the Late Baroque, ending short of the contemporary period.

But what are we looking for?  He says “The Greatest”?  But what do we mean by Great?  The Best?  Personal favorites?  Most influential, or innovative?  I just think there would be a lot more room for discussion and interesting reasoning if we could narrow our  criteria and widen our scope.

Luckily I can do things the way I want to in my own home… and you don’t have to suffer Mr. Tommasini’s pitiable performances of great repertoire as a consequence.*

So, I propose we get waaay meta here and do a Top 10 Top 10 lists re: composers.  By “composers”, I mean people who express themselves in music by writing notes on paper (or a computer), using a Western musical notation (traditional scores, figured bass lines, lead sheets, etc.); this needn’t be their exclusive vocation or mode of expression.  So, we could include Sufjan Stevens – but not Irving Berlin.  By “lists”, I mean the following:

1. Top 10 Most Innovative Composers

2. Top 10 Most Influential Composers

3. Top 10 (Harmonic) Melodists

4. Top 10 Composers for Non-Concert Settings (NCS’s)
i.e. incidental music, dance, theater, film, etc…

5. Top 10 Composers Born During or After the year 1900

6. Top 10 Genre Composers
i.e. Chopin: Piano Music; Sondheim: Musical Theater Songs; Cliff Colnot: Jingles for Chocolate Candies… we’re not looking to cover any specific genres here, just choosing composers who are really excellent in one particular field.

7. Top 10 One Hit Wonders

8. Top 10 BEST, i.e. Most Technically Accomplished Composers

9. Top 10 Composers Who Make You Seem Cool When You Tell Other Musicians You Like Them

10. Top 10 Personal Favorite Composers
This is a favorite game of mine and has very prescribed rules… to be explained hence.

The games begin tomorrow.

*[N.B. – and this is going to be a long one – wtf gives w/ AT’s lackluster performances?  Perhaps this is the ultimate declaration of naïveté, but wouldn’t you expect a critic to have a little more sensitivity to things like color and emotion in his performances?  Like as opposed to technical polish?  I’m not saying that AT is a virtuoso performer, but his playing is clean enough… and yet it seems totally to lack substance.  Isn’t that artistic substance what he’s supposed to be reviewing?  It’s definitely what I’m more interested in reading about.

Caveat: I do respect Mr. T for putting his skillz out there to be witnessed by all, which is a bold thing to do, esp. for a critic.

But speaking of critics as practitioners, let’s just talk about Terry Teachout for a second, because I do respect him as a critic, I think he’s a good writer, and I like the breadth that he presents on his blog.  I also like his regularly posted, detailed philosophy and guidelines of how to get a regional production reviewed.  But the other day, he tweeted this:

Isn’t that kind of an embarrassing trove of ‘firsts’ for a man who’s been reviewing theater for like 20 years or something?  Critic as fan v. critic as practitioner… I’d better stop before this whole thing turns into a post about Pauline Kael.]

Residency, ramifications

I was in (rather: ON) Long Island this past week doing a sort of mini-residency.  It involved a bunch of things: conducting an all-county orchestra, working with a high school band on the piece that I had composed for them, and teaching a theory class at said high school and talking with some of the students there about various careers in music, etc.

Which was all great fun, and there’s certainly nothing more rewarding than working with enthusiastic, talented young people.  The rarest pleasure among the bunch was getting to work with a large ensemble in a collaborative environment – which basically never happens.  Band’s sort of where it’s at these days – even John Corigliano is writing articles about how much more rewarding it is for him to partake in residencies on college campuses for 2 or 3 weeks at a time and work with near professional-level students who are enthusiastic about his own music instead of writing for the New York Philharmonic who expect every piece to come as a ready-made masterwork and flatter them at the same time.

And I think he’s really got a point.  I’ll just say it: as a conductor, and especially as a composer, much of one’s time spent working with orchestras is geared towards making sure that musicians can remain lazy and uncreative.  I’m lucky, or maybe just picky, but more likely lucky, to work with really generous and engaged collaborators.  And I try my darndest to make sure that people get their money and time’s worth when they work with me, and to pay them fair wages when I hire them.  But professional orchestra rehearsals tend to be kind of the worst.  And I’ve heard very good orchestras play very good pieces totally half-assedly because the writing for their individual instruments doesn’t match up to their idea of greatness, even if the whole blows away the sum of its parts.

So, basically, Long Island was a cool place to spend a week, bands can actually sound really pretty if you write for them correctly, and it’s a shame that our musical culture doesn’t foster more creativity amongst professional musicians working in the trenches, but I suppose it just makes the ones who are genuinely interested in making art together all that much cooler.

I hate to burst everyone’s bubble,

but you know “Black Swan”?  It sucked.  Donkey.  I mean, you know, objectively.

What this film lacks is any sense of balance.  Certain works of art are painful, and that’s very necessary and natural.  But when a work is dark, it must, MUST have moments of joy and lightness in order to succeed.  “Black Swan” starts in a dark place just gets darker and darker as it goes along.

Plus, how much clunkier can an exposition get?  “You all know the story of Swan Lake…” but I’m going to tell it anyway.  Vincent Cassel was quite decent in this movie, but the script he had to work with was abysmal.  Same goes for Natalie Portman, though she did have the one really decent scene (calling her mother from the bathroom stall).

“Requiem for a Dream” was the same way, but even worse.  “The Wrestler” I thought worked much better, and that’s certainly my favorite of Aronofsky’s films.  That movie contained some redemptive moments.  One actually understood the characters and their motivations.  On the other hand, in “Black Swan”, Nina’s personal relationship with the Ballet is never made clear.

Plus, the details of backstage life were so laughably executed.  OK, I’ve occasionally heard of ballet rehearsals with a violinist present, and if City Ballet wanted one, I’m sure they’d have him.  The conductor was played by an actor, and that’s always the way of American films, and it’s really annoying.  But why was the pianist on stage during the orchestral dress rehearsal?  As a prop?  And what about this: she gets measured for her costume THE DAY BEFORE OPENING NIGHT?  I don’t think so…

The Tchaikovsky music was used rather basically.  The way in which the composer, Clint Mansell extended the ballet score into the film’s main score actually made me laugh out loud on a number of occasions.

Overall, this movie went well beyond just being naïve and childish: it was terribly vulgar in my opinion.  Egregious, and without any point.  If a piece is meant to be painful, I’d like to be able to revel in the pain a bit – sort of like when you feel a canker sore with your tongue.  This movie was more like amputating your own foot.

Let’s talk a bit more about scores though, shall we, because the score for The King’s Speech deserves mention in a particular context.  First off, I thought this was an excellent movie, the apotheosis of a commercial period piece.  And what a Period Piece it was.  Not being a historian of 20th century Georgian London, I could hardly comment on the degree of accuracy rendered in this film’s art direction, but as a spectator, I certainly noticed the meticulous level of detail, and I was suitably impressed.

So why then, when the directors are clearly doing everything in their power to evoke a certain era, is it OK to have a score that bares not even the slightest resemblance to music from the period?  Alexandre Desplat‘s score was fine, and very, very much in the mainstream film-scorey vein.  But wouldn’t it have added that extra touch of authenticity to use some Vaughan Williamsian harmonies here and there?  Perhaps a Waltonian melody?  A bit of Elgaresque orchestration?  Even an occasional boys choir or  English hymn tune would have done.

[p.s., Memo to David Seidler: “I was Glad” referenced in the film’s script as “a hymn”, is not actually a hymn – it’s an anthem.  An anthem by Sir Charles Hubert Hastings Perry, if you’re interested.  And it goes a little something like this, you anti-musical beast!:

]

Someone with sensitivities to these things (me) actually finds an anachronistic score quite distracting, even jarring.  But maybe that’s just (me).

The most egregious example of this particular sin may be found in Kurosawa’s epic Kagemusha (1980).  Like, what?, 90% of Kurosawa’s work?, it’s set in feudal Japan “in a time of increasing lawlessness”. And the score?  Sounds more like “Capriccio Espagnole” meets Monty Python and the Holy Grail:

That, by the way, is the work of the Japanese composer Shin-ichirô Ikebe.  Now look, it’s not like I’m saying that a Japanese film score has to be all bamboo flutes and taiko drums (not that that would necessarily be a bad thing…), and there’s no reason why a modern Japanese film composer shouldn’t avail himself of the expressive tools of Western music. I think Toru Takemitsu did a great job in another Kurosawa epic from five years later, Ran:

Yes the opening flute solo is great, but when that’s over, it’s a Western style studio orchestra. Do you hear that subtle gong action?  Those upper grace notes in the melody?  Just little hints of orientalism, yes, but they go a long way to making this score a very effective piece.

[p.p.s. You know who they should have gotten to write the score for The King’s Speech?  Whoever it was who wrote the lush, luscious incidental music for Two Fat Ladies.  Unfortunately, this particular person remains internet-anonymous, unless it was Peter Baikie who wrote the theme song.  If it was he who composed and orchestrated this:

and this:

I will be suitably impressed.  I will also be suitably embarrassed if someone points out that those are just excerpts from, like, a really obscure Bax piece.]

New year, new things

1) Can we all just agree that these are really good examples of percussion writing?

This, because it builds up patterns in the percussion section, which is such a good way to use those guys back there.  Who doesn’t like a good percussion pattern?  Ravel’s great at it – so is Stravinsky.  And then of course, there’s all that Popular Music.

This because it’s just raucous.

Both excerpts come from a piece that’s altogether new to me: Alberto Ginastera‘s 1934 ballet Panambi, his Opus 1.  Heard it on the radio the other day, loved it.  I think it has an awful lot to do with Stravinsky, Revueltas (I’m thinking specifically of “Sensemayá“) and more than a little to do with Varèse, and Who wouldn’t like that??

2) I’ve been thinking a lot more about Gordon Jenkins.  Jenkins is the gentleman who composed the final installment of Frank Sinatra’s ill-fated “Trilogy: Past, Present, Future” album from about 1980, if I’m recollecting correctly.  I presented an in-depth analysis of this particular work here.

Let there be no mistake: I love Jenkins’ “The Future”.  It’s wacky, wild, and wet all over.  It’s easy to laugh at and laugh with (ok, at), but I’ve started to look at it more analytically.  What is it about this piece that makes it so very strange and not “successful” in the way we might normally associate that word with great pieces of music?

A composer faces many little compartmentalized tasks that we tend to take as a bundle: concept (which the composer rarely chooses in collaborative projects), narrative (be it a ‘programmatic’ or theatrical work or the emotional narrative of an instrumental work), lyrics (sometimes), style, texture, orchestration, harmony, counterpoint, melody, rhythm.  Form covers many tasks: phrase structure, song structure, movement structure, key relationships.  And how about pacing which is sort of a formal issue, but also it’s own thing.

Then there’s other things: choosing which gestures to include and when, deciding who should play what and when someone should sing something (separate from the technique of orchestrating these decisions) and deciding how the various textures should be edited together.  I suppose what I’m getting at is that composing isn’t just as simple a thing as Concept and Execution – there’s tons of mini-concepts to be conceived and executed along the way.

Because we study the great composers to the exclusion of almost all others, we sort of expect a master composer to have mastery of all these categories, but it’s really not the case.  Take Gordon Jenkins: he’s extremely good at texture, harmony, melody, rhythm, and certainly orchestration.  Form, sometimes.  Some big misfires in the style department (that is to say, in choosing the appropriate style to suit his needs, not in executing his chosen style, so maybe those are really two different departments?).  I’m guessing he was commissioned to take on the concept of “future”, but even taking that as a given, his sense of narrative is pretty Loony.  And let’s just be honest, the man shouldn’t have been allowed within a 2,000 mile radius of a lyric.  But then again, the distinctively bizarre lyrics of “The Future” contribute greatly to the charms of the piece, so don’t listen to me.

Berlioz is kind of an oddball in all of the categories, and it’s always fascinating to see where his experiments worked and where they didn’t (see: Symphonie Fantastique, mvmt. 5, m. 11 – that’s figure 61 – for a major Berlioz fail.  I’ve always contended that this is the single poorliest-composed bar in the standard repertoire.)  I’d say the same for Janáček.  Even when Shostakovitch does really well in all the categories, he often paces his large scale forms very poorly.  Tchaikovsky, astoundingly brilliant in so many categories, frequently lets the seems show between his textures and sometimes had a really weird sense of narrative and concept.  But sometimes not.

I’d be very interested in knowing if people agree with me/have other examples of composers with blatantly compartmentalized skills.

3) I just finished reading Freedom by Jonathan Franzen.  Here’s another example of compartmentalization – Mr. Franzen has profound strengths: inner narrative, complex psychological motivations, weird family stuff.  And his prose flies right off the page.  But the guy’s got a tin ear for dialogue.  The narrative is propulsive – the book has a wonderful ratio of plot events to pages invested – but the concept is kind of zany (but then again, the narrative is so good, you don’t care).

The book’s ending is a real paradox: when you reach it in context, it’s very satisfying – it’s hopeful and conclusive, and your soul ravaged from the journey, so it’s much appreciated.  But give it a little distance and it appears way, way neater and tidier and than it ever needed to be.  It’s not only cloying, but it becomes the most unlikely event after a series of extraordinarily unlikely events.

But you know what, I still loved reading the book.  And he’s got some fantastic rules for writing fiction.

Civic Addenda 12/12

Béla Bartók, The Miraculous Mandarin

The CSO’s own Beyond the Score series is an astounding resource on The Miraculous Mandarin.  Here’s the first part:

The rest of the parts can be found here: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.  And if you’ve watched all of that, and you still just can’t get enough information about this piece:

Recommended Reading

  • Amanda Bayley (ed.): The Cambridge Companion to Bartok – google books – amazon – Get any book in the Cambridge Companion series and you will be richly rewarded.
  • Peter Laki (ed.): Bartok and His World – google books – amazon – Includes an excellent and thorough chapter on “The Miraculous Mandarin”.

Recommended Recordings

Beethoven, Symphony No. 2 in D

Heiligenstadt (map) was once a remote country village and spa – now now it’s a cozy Viennese neighborhood.  Here is the cottage where Beethoven did the better part of his work on the Second Symphony in 1802:

It’s also where he wrote the Heiligenstadt Testament – a heartfelt document that Beethoven hid away in a secret drawer in his desk for the rest of his life and intended to be read upon his death.  I’ve copied the famous opening lines below; the full text is here.

Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn, or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you. From childhood on, my heart and soul have been full of the tender feeling of goodwill, and I was even inclined to accomplish great things. But, think that for six years now I have been hopelessly afflicted, made worse by senseless physicians, from year to year deceived with hopes of improvement, finally compelled to face the prospect of a lasting malady (whose cure will take years or, perhaps, be impossible).

As classical music enthusiasts in the 21st century, we are (perhaps unfortunately) accustomed to thinking of a composer’s music as a soundtrack to his life.  Sometimes, that is what he has intended (Mahler and Shostakovitch are prime examples).  However, with most composers, the relationship is much more complicated than that – an artist can often try to escape into his work and avoid the torments of everyday life.  Perhaps that’s what Beethoven was trying to accomplish in his cheery second symphony:

Recommended Reading

  • Edmund Morris: Beethoven: The Universal Composer – google books – amazon – If you’re shopping for a classical music lover this season, look no further – this little book is wonderfully written, thorough, and keenly perceptive.  It’s great reading for the casual listener and a useful resource for the connoisseur.

Recommended Recordings
When it comes to the Beethoven Symphonies, I find Abbado hard to beat.  He’s recorded them all with the Berlin Phil and the Vienna Phil.  Take your pick:

However, for only $8, you can get a very respectable set of recordings of all 9 Beethoven symphonies by the London Symphony with Joseph Krips – that’s less than $1/symphony!! –Amazon MP3–

Songs of the Season

Her name is Christine Pedi, and she is spectacular.  The pianist’s name is Matthew Ward, and he’s pretty fantastic himself.  The conclusion of the actual “Twelve Divas of Christmas” doesn’t happen till about halfway through the second video, but just sit back and enjoy the ride.

Here’s as many as I can get:

Marlene Dietrich (thx 2 Tammy) – Joan Rivers – Patti Lupone – Bernadette Peters – Carol Channing – Angela Lansbury – “Edith Bunker” – Julie Andrews

Rudolf/Liza Minelli – Carol of the Bells/? – Dreidl/Judy Garland – Elaine Stritch – Barbra Streisand – Bette Davis – Katherine Hepburn

Rose’s Turn

Charlie Rose plays an inordinately large role in my life*.  He is quasi avuncular – sometimes a chum, sometimes a father-confessor.  In the space of a single interview – a single question, really – he can be simultaneously awkward and brilliant, bored and engaged.  To gaze upon him is to know that he is a man of intense contrasts: how can one man look so boyishly handsome and so ruthlessly haggard at the same time?

*[in my head]

Charlie is my particular subject today because he’s been giving a lot of love to the classical music world lately, but we’ll get to that in just a second.  I want to pause here to state publicly that even though I will fight valiantly to make sure cuff links remain a vital part of the male wardrobe, I love that Charlie just doesn’t wear them.  In fact, sometimes he won’t even bother to button his ordinary cuffs:

And in that picture, he was in London for goodness’ sake!  Ok though, enough about Charlie’s clothes. [And trust me, I could go on.]  Charlie has always been a great friend to the classical music community, but there’s been a recent spate of interviews that I’d like to talk about.  Let’s begin with the most interesting:

Valery Gergiev, in his 2nd or 3rd appearance on Rose, gave a blisteringly efficient and wide-ranging interview.  This was the Charlie Rose broadcast at it’s best: engaging, insightful, convivial, mutually respectful.  Plus, if anybody has ever embodied the phrase “rakishly handsome”, it would Valery Gergiev – which is astonishing in a world where we have Charlie Rose! [see above]  Let’s just say, this was a meeting of equals.

Bar none, the most interesting part of this interview was the last five minutes, in which Charlie posed Gergiev one of the most surprising questions I’ve ever heard him ask: Who are the 5 (or 6) most important living composers in your eyes?

The reason for my surprise is that there are so few people in this world who are in any way interested living composers (the concert/art/academic kind, that is).  Charlie Rose could not possibly have expected to recognize any of the names on Gergiev’s list (unless happened to fall under the elusive “unknown known” category), and yet he asked the question.  I have never loved him more.

Let’s take a look and listen to Gergiev’s list of composers, shall we?

Rodion Shchedrin

Shchedrin is an interesting choice, I’d say.  Most Westerners, if they’ve ever heard of this composer at all, have only heard of one piece: the “Carmen Suite”, a sort of cartoonish, barbaric Russian ballet-fantasia on themes from Bizet’s Opera:

Shchedrin is often compared to Schnittke, and it’s not an unwarranted (though don’t get me wrong, I know Alfred Schnittke, and Rodion Shchedrin is no Alfred Schnittke).  At his poppier moments, Shchedrin sort of comes off as Schnittke-meets-John-Williams.  Gergiev makes a compelling case for the composer on his new album:

Henri Dutilleux

Dutilleux came as a surprise a) because I honestly did not know that he was still alive, and b) it’s not that he’s necessarily a bad composer, but I’ve never known anyone to be a major fan or champion of his music, and I certainly had no inkling that Gergiev might be that person (say in the way that Kent Nagano and Olivier Messiaen are associated w/ each other).

I’ve always thought of Dutilleux as a sort of solid but not terribly interesting mid-2oth century modernist.  I don’t know much [his] of music, so perhaps that’s not fair.  Give a listen and see what you think – this is the opening movement of his “Metaboles” and is the piece I’m most familiar with by him:

Alexander Raskatov

Raskatov is Gergiev’s near exact contemporary (they were born like 2 months apart).  Raskatov has actually figured prominently on this blog before.  Allow me to job your memory: he is the very person who painstakingly reconstructed Alfred Schnittke’s 9th Symphony.  This was no easy job, and by all accounts, he did very, very thorough work.  I mean, the piece that we can hear today sounds like Schnittke, and it’s all because of him.  Respect.

The Schnittke symphony was released on CD and that’s how Raskatov first came to my attention.  You see, he included a new piece, a Nunc Dimittis in Memoriam Alfred Schnittke (or Alfredom Schnittkom, I think, if we’re being correct about our Russian grammar.)  And it’s like, honestly, can you hardly blame the guy if he wants to put his own piece on this album after doing all that work?  I can’t – I’m sure I would have done the same thing.  And it’s not that it’s a bad piece.  It’s very Schnittkey, but you know, it’s just not going to come off so amazing in comparison when you pit it against this amazing transcendent work by an artist who was already halfway to the grave.  Here’s maybe my favorite section:

Thomas Adès

With all due respect to Gergiev’s Ruskii compatriots, I would have started my list with Thomas Adès.  Adès is arguably the most important, greatest, most tubular -whatever adjective you want to use- composer of concert music we have around these days.  And it’s not a hard argument to make.  Whether we all choose to realize or admit it, we composers today are living in the shadow of Ligeti.  (In Russia, Schnittke is the looming presence.  Give it time, and he will creep westward.)

Despite this pervasiveness, Adès is really the only major figure who is seriously grappling with the specter of Ligeti.  And he’s none the worse for wear.  Here is the first movement of Ligeti’s Violin Concerto, about a minute in:

and here is the opening of Thomas Adès’:

It’s not that the two pieces sound all that similar – my point is that they seem to inhabit a similar universe but they are worlds unto themselves.  The act of homage is subtle: both composers build rhythmically complex textures that are nonetheless extremely quiet; the effect is a luminescent haze of sound.

I think it’s significant that not only that Adès handles himself adeptly in a dialogue with Ligeti but that he’s chosen late Ligeti as his conversant [I might mention that Adès’ concerto also shares aspects with Ligeti’s Hamburg Concerto.]  Again, he’s not an imitator or a provocateur or anything like that – he’s got a very strong singular talent, perhaps one of the few strong enough to really grapple with Ligeti’s writing.

As for Charlie’s interviews with Vittorio Grigolo and Antonio Pappano, I’ll just point out a few things:

1) Grigolo might be the most Italian Italian person I’ve ever heard.  No offense to my Italian friends, but they tend to say in about 100 words what they could manage in 10.

2) You just know that right before the cameras started rolling, Charlie made Vittorio coach him on the correct Italian pronunciation of his name. Charlie really tried to retain this knowledge as he introduced his guest, and though this was definitely his most valiant effort yet at a foreign pronunciation, it still comes out gloriously mangled.

2) Plus, if you skip ahead to 16:42, you’ll see that Vittorio loves Charlie, and so do I.

3) Watch Antonio Pappano at the beginning of the show as Charlie is introducing him.  Do you see him subtly lip syncing the whole speech?  That’s kind of really weird, right?