The Third Man (Score)
My lovely wife and I watched the 1949 movie The Third Man last week. It was a good movie, with an interesting mystery plot and featuring Orson Welles in what he called a “star role” (where people talk about his character for 45 minutes before he actually shows up). I was disappointed in the score, though. It was comprised entirely of zither music; the zither is a stringed instrument common in Eastern Europe, and since the movie was set in Vienna I suppose it made sense, as it would have been a style of music native to the movie’s time and place, and the carefree, happy folk music it played provided a nice artistic contrast to the film noir elements of the movie. But it did get annoying pretty quickly.
But it also set me thinking about the interesting challenge of setting the whole score of a movie for one instrument. I’ve written before of how I like the idea of a self-imposed limit on one’s palette of colors, and this seems like a great example. What would be a good instrument for such a challenge? (Solo piano doesn’t count.) Stringed instruments suggested themselves immediately; a violin or viola could certainly be used to striking effect, although a cello would have a richer tone and range. It’s hard to think of another instrument that could be used as effectively by itself throughout the course of a whole film (whether short or not). What do you think?
John Adams’ Blog
A fellow CFAMC composer recently shared a link to this post, called “I didn’t realize I was sitting next to the composer!” on the blog of John Adams, one of the most successful and widely-known of contemporary American composers. I liked the post and read through several others; Adams has a very entertaining and engaging writing style, and has a number of insightful comments on various musical and non-musical topics. I’ve added the blog, which is called “Hellmouth,” to my RSS feed, and I thought I’d share it with you, my loyal readers. Even if you don’t read the blog, though, you should definitely check out this post, entitled “Anger Builds at Dudamel’s Mishandling of Oil Leak” (some of the best work on the blog are these type of satire posts).
Hellmouth
Hell Mouth is a blog about music (mostly contemporary), literature (mostly good), politics (mostly pernicious) and culture (mostly American). It is written by John Adams with the help of several “friends” who live in the redwoods of coastal Northern California.
Pianist Brett Richardson on Classical Music (from Listen Magazine)
This past Christmas my mother gave me a subscription to Listen: Life With Classical Music, “America’s classical music magazine,” which is published by Arkiv Music. In the Summer 2010 issue, there’s an interesting article about Brett Richardson, a pianist who performs regularly in a bar in New Orleans called The Spotted Cat. Along with the usual suspects–stride piano, ragtime, blues–he also plays Chopin, Poulenc, Bach, Prokofiev, Schumann, and the music of other classical composers. The article isn’t available on Listen‘s website, but Richardson had a couple of great quotes that I hope they won’t mind me sharing with you here.
“I’m disgusted with [the institution of classical music]. And I participated in it for a long time before I was able to articulate what bothered me. Basically, I don’t think the tradition is currently conducive to the masses. It’s a stuffy thing. To force someone to sit still and pay attention, it’s just alienating and furstrating. I wouldn’t wish it on anyone! But if you go somewhere and play some Scott Joplin, play some blues, and then sneak in some Beethoven, people are like, ‘Oh, man, that’s great! Some fine piano-playing right there.’ People like Beethoven, they really do. But if you present it in a lofty way, people will be put off, agitated, even insulted…. Ultimately, I would prefer to contribute to the atmosphere rather than be at the center of it. To be on stage and playing Rachmaninoff is a big responsibility. To say, ‘Okay, you have to be still and quiet and pay attention while I do this,’ well, hey, you better do it damn good. But if you’re playing where people are telling jokes and flirting and you’re contributing to that, that’s the whole point of sharing music. If people want to sit and listen quietly, they can do that, but if they want to get in fights, well, that’s fine, too.”
Although I wouldn’t say I’m “disgusted” with the institution of classical music, I do agree with his comments about it to some extent. That’s the reason why the institution is struggling all over the country–because it’s not conducive to the masses. And that’s why a lot of the contemporary classical music that matters isn’t being written for and performed in concert halls (though some of it is, to be sure). It’s being fused with popular music and played in spaces like galleries, lofts, and yes, even bars; places where it’s not portrayed as “sophisticated” or “high-brow,” for the “hallowed halls,” but for people to come together, hang out, share and enjoy. I certainly wouldn’t want my only experiences of listening to classical music to be in a noisy club. But if I knew of a bar nearby that played classical music, you’d definitely find me there a lot.
Bach, Beethoven, Brahms–and Bits and Bytes?
Slate.com has another intriguing article in their music section, this time a profile on modern composer David Cope, who wrote one of my college textbooks and works primarily in the field of computer music. He’s apparently created a computer program (christened “Emily Howell”) that takes input from the greatest composers of Western music, including Bach, Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Barber, and Copeland, and composes its own music by recombining elements from the music in its database. Now Cope’s primary method of composing is to listen to Emily Howell’s work and tell it what he likes and doesn’t like–most of his music is created by the computer. As usual, several clips of Emily Howell’s music are included in the article, though unfortunately they’re too short to make any judgments of quality.
Cope’s case is that all great music is created by this process of synthesizing bits and pieces of music that the composer has heard before, which is of course true and seemed rather self-evident to me, though not (it appears) to the author of the article. But what do you think? Is there something “inherently distasteful” about composing through a computer–or rather letting a computer compose for you? Do you have any aesthetic objections to the process? Why or why not?
Slate Magazine on “The centuries-old struggle to play in tune”
Jan Swafford’s second recent article on Slate.com concerns the history of tuning and temperament, and it’s an excellent summary of the subject. It’s another enjoyable read–I particularly like the way he describes the impossibility of pure tuning as “the laughter of the gods” and continues the image throughout the article. And again he includes some great musical clips, including Peter Watchorn playing from Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier (which, Swafford says, was written “not only to show off this improved system but to help make well-temperament mandatory by writing irreplaceable pieces in every key”) and a side-by-side comparison of a Beethoven sonata movement in modern equal temperament and in a 19th century tuning called Prinz. Can you hear the difference? (Hint: I think it’s a little easier to hear listening to the Prinz first and then the equal temperament, rather than the other way around.)
“The Wolf at Our Heels: The centuries-old struggle to play in tune”
Slate Magazine on “Why you’ve never really heard the Moonlight Sonata”
Jan Swafford has recently written two interesting (albeit lengthy) posts on Slate.com‘s music channel that I thought I’d share with you. The first is about a unique collection of 19th century pianos in Massachusetts and their keepers, Pat and Michael Frederick, and how playing composers’ works on the pianos they wrote them for is a much different experience than hearing them on, say, a modern Steinway. It’s an enjoyable read, and best of all there are lots of music clips of performances on the older pianos to demonstrate the difference. The recording of the “Moonlight” Sonata on a Viennese piano from 1805 is a little disappointing–it’s very quiet, and there are lots of other ambient noises that obscure much of the effect–but the following recording comparing the modern and older pianos playing the “Appassionata” Sonata is much better and shows a very discernible difference in tone quality, especially in the lower register. The remaining comparisons are all pretty cool and worth a listen; and the closing remarks about the current homogeneity in piano brand sales and tone quality is also insightful.
“Why you’ve never really heard the ‘Moonlight’ Sonata”
Tragedy and Comedy
Last week my lovely wife and I completed the deal that we’d made a while back, that I would watch the 6 hour BBC version of Pride and Prejudice with her if she watched all three Matrix movies with me. The double wedding at the end of Pride and Prejudice reminded me of a simple, generalized classification system I’d heard of for Shakespeare’s plays: if everyone dies at the end, it’s a tragedy, and if everyone gets married at the end, it’s a comedy. My thought on the subject was also influenced by a book I read recently, Frederick Buechner’s Telling The Truth: The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy and Fairy Tale. Among many other excellent insights, he describes tragedy as the inevitable–what we expect to happen, happens; and comedy as the unexpected–what we didn’t expect to happen happens. This complements the Shakespearean idea, I think: we expect that Hamlet will destroy himself and everyone else, and he does; we don’t expect Beatrice and Benedick to end up together, but they do. (Of course, now we’ve come to expect that two people who quarrel in a comedy will end up together, but I think it’s only because we’ve been culturally conditioned as a society to expect it. It still creates dramatic conflict, though, so I would say it’s still valid to think of it from an objective standpoint as being unexpected.)
Although my creative art of choice is music, I enjoy all other forms of art as well, particularly visual art (not least because my lovely wife is an illustrator and painter). And as a lover of all the arts, I’m continually exploring ways to apply concepts I appreciate in other arts—such as symbolism, imagery and negative space—to music. I recently finished composing a piece (which I may post about later in more detail) about the Santiago de Compostela pilgrimage. One of the symbols of the pilgrimage is a scallop shell:
and the modern symbol of the way is a representation that looks like this:
One of the ideas behind this symbol is that of many people coming from different starting points but converging upon one destination. So in trying to depict that idea musically, I have each of the eight parts play the same theme–but they enter at different times and play it at different rates. Each instrument takes the same pilgrimage, so to speak, but in its own unique way, just as individuals on a journey would. And a good deal of interest and conflict is created in the way that the parts interact as they play the same theme in different ways. But then in the end every part converges into a unison note.
So I’m always looking for ways like that to incorporate aspects of other types of art into my music. And I love this idea of tragedy and comedy–of the sadness of tragedy being what is expected, and the joy of comedy being what is unexpected. But I wonder how to portray that musically?
Andrew Lloyd Webber vs. Stephen Sondheim
For reasons that will remain undisclosed for now, I’ve been listening to a lot of musicals on my iPod at work lately. Most of this music, of course, comes from my wife, since she studied musical theatre in high school and owns lots of soundtracks. A few that are on there now are Phantom (not Phantom of the Opera, but a different musical on the same story), The King and I, and Leonard Bernstein’s Candide, which is awesome. In addition to those, I also have Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Music, The Magic, which is a three-CD set of some of his “greatest hits;” and Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim. (If you’ve never seen the Into the Woods DVD, recorded from the stage production starring Bernadette Peters as the Witch, you owe it to yourself.)
It’s been interesting to compare Webber’s music to Sondheim’s in Into the Woods. Webber’s songs are basically pop music adapted to the theatre: simple, catchy hooks and melodies, pop-style chord progressions and relatively tame rhythms with pop-style syncopations, with pop-Broadway orchestrations. Sondheim’s music, though, is closer to opera (or at least to classical) than to pop music. The melodies often contain difficult jumps that aren’t typical for vocal music and are more fragmented and motivic than long and flowing. The chord structures are often very complex. And the rhythms are constantly changing and shifting, difficult to pin down to a pattern or single time signature, and more closely follow the pattern of speech than typical musical patterns. I was surprised and impressed when my lovely wife and I watched Into the Woods a few months ago; the performances were good in themselves, but they were terrific considering how difficult the music was.
There’s nothing wrong with Webber’s music, of course; it’s pop-music candy for the ears. But for a substantial meat-and-potatoes meal, Sondheim delivers something unique and masterful that’s quite inspiring to an aspiring composer such as myself.
“An Overwhelming Feeling of Confusion”: The Brain and Atonal Music
I was referred last week to an interesting article by a fellow CFAMC composer. It talks about a new book by Philip Ball called The Music Instinct, in which he finds that there’s a neurological reason why people find it hard to enjoy atonal music by Schoenberg, Webern and the like. Apparently our brains are always looking for patterns in the music we listen to, and while music by Bach, Mozart and other classical composers naturally has the sort of organization that lends itself to pattern recognition, the music of twentieth century atonal composers is devoid of such patterns. (An interesting quote: “We measured the predictability of tone sequences in music by Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern and found the successive pitches were less predictable than random tone sequences.”) To his credit, though, Ball qualifies, “That isn’t to say, of course, that it is impossible to listen to, it is just harder work. It would be wrong to dismiss such music as a racket.” It reminds me of something my piano teacher at Cal State Fullerton used to say: he said that he enjoyed listening to modern, avant-garde music–as long as he was in the mood to work hard enough to understand it. Check out the Telegraph article at the following link and let me know what you think!
“Audiences hate modern classical music because their brains cannot cope”
La Moustache Score
A few nights ago my lovely wife and I watched La Moustache, a French movie with English subtitles that she had heard about somewhere. It’s a story about a man who shaves his mustache on a whim, but is then baffled when his wife and friends don’t notice–and then is more baffled still when they insist he’s never had a mustache. We weren’t sure whether it was a comedy or a drama–since it seems like that premise could go either way–but it turned out to be a mysterious drama which was kind of frustrating because it never explained all the weird happenings in the movie. I don’t mind ambiguous endings, in general, but it never even tried to explain the increasingly strange things that kept happening. And the hilarious part was that in the special features, even the lead actress admitted she had no idea what was happening in “the mustache story,” and even the director himself said he didn’t really know what was going on. Weird.
But in any case, the music for the film was interesting. There was really only one piece that was used throughout the film, and really only two sections of the piece. The main part that was used consisted of repeated chords and arpeggiated figures in the strings. It had a haunting, ominous quality to it, so it was used effectively in situations that required that feeling; but it seemed a little repetitive by the end. As we watched the credits, I discovered that the piece was the Concerto for Violin and Orchestra by Philip Glass, one of the most successful modern American composers. The piece is from 1987 and is a good example of his tonal, repetitive, and minimal style. And it worked, more or less, as the only score in La Moustache.
You can listen to clips of Concerto for Violin and Orchestra by clicking here and then clicking the “listen/watch” button on the left side of the page. Then click on “Violin Concerto” in the second list that pops up.
P.S. I’m sure most, if not all of my TLB readers have heard this news through other channels (email, website, Facebook, Twitter…), but just in case you haven’t: I’m going to be releasing a new recording of an original Christmas song, called “Paradoxology,” this Christmas Eve 12/24/2009. It’ll be my first released recording in four years–the first since my album Following A Star was finished, on Christmas Eve of 2005. You’ll be able to download “Paradoxology” from my website, for free, next Thursday. So check it out! http://www.ajharbison.com
