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| Hobby Forum Index » Music - Classical » TLS 7.8.3: Michael Downes: The fate of melody, and... |
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 Posted: Fri Oct 23, 2009 4:16 am |
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LS 7.8.3: Michael Downes: The fate of melody, and other motifs
WHY CLASSICAL MUSIC STILL MATTERS. By Lawrence Kramer. 251pp. Berkeley:
University of California Press. Pounds 15.95 (US $24.95) - 978 0 520 25082
6.
HOW EQUAL TEMPERAMENT RUINED HARMONY. (And why you should care). By Ross
W. Duffin. 160pp. Norton. Pounds 17.99 (US $25.95) - 978 0 393 06227 4.
A MUSICIAN'S ALPHABET. By Susan Tomes. 149pp. Faber. Pounds 12.99 - 978 0
571 22883 6.
Music's relationship with the language used to describe it grows ever more
uncomfortable. A paradox is involved. As Ross W. Duffin suggests, "every
musician I know would rather be making music than reading about it any
day"; at the same time, according to Susan Tomes, "music seems to need
mediation, between player and listener, more than other art-forms". Tomes
is addressing the specific phenomenon of performers being expected to
speak before playing a piece, but her comment is more generally
applicable: audiences who happily confront art, theatre or dance head-on
want the reassurance of explanation where music is concerned.
This need is perhaps the product of anxiety over whether, in Lawrence
Kramer's phrase, "classical music still matters". Many commentators have
charted what Kramer calls classical music's "sharply declining popularity
and cultural authority", citing as evidence the decline of CD sales, the
reduction of column inches for reviews, and the rarity of critical
discussions of new music.
Kramer's rejoinder to this pessimistic analysis is a text he describes as
"deeply personal", "without pretension or mystification": he dispenses
with footnotes on the grounds that his book is "essayistic -in a sense
because it tries to be musical". Though his previous books, including
Classical Music and Postmodern Knowledge and Musical Meaning, have drawn
deeply on literary theory, here he avoids any sort of theoretical
underpinning in favour of a series of loosely related reflections.
Some of Kramer's insights are striking and original, qualities whose
impact is indeed enhanced by vivid language. His discussion of the
"blissful" melody that begins Brahms's Clarinet Quintet, for example,
includes the telling observation that What makes this opening so arresting
is not just its sheer sensuous beauty but the implication that, starting
at a point of fulfillment, there is no place to go but down . . . . It is
as if the formal necessity of expanding the opening moment into a coherent
melody entailed the sacrifice of its lyrical self-sufficiency.
Likewise, his succinct appraisal of the tension between Romantic and
modernist elements in Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto ("reanimations of
Romantic sensibility are haunted by the modernist suspicion that they have
lost all credibility") is like the best sort of programme note, guiding
and inflecting the process of listening without demanding that the music
"should" evoke a specific response.
Unfortunately, such discussions are accompanied, perhaps outweighed, by
less helpful accounts. Kramer suggests, for example, that we take pleasure
in Die schone Mullerin, Schubert's tale of hapless love, because it allows
us to "set aside the burden" of aspiring to amorous success, affording us
a "secret release from the strict boundaries, required aggressiveness, and
performance anxiety of the normal self". Though cleverly constructed, the
argument doesn't convince: it exemplifies a tendency, too common in this
book, to tie music to particular meanings. This is evident, too, when
Kramer claims that Rachmaninov's second piano "concerto becomes more
itself . . . for its usage in the film (Brief Encounter)", appearing to
suggest that the concerto's true meaning -its destiny, almost -is found
only in the soundtrack to a high-class weepie; even the greatest admirers
of David Lean and Noel Coward will find this reductive -and detrimental to
the book's project of uncovering what is singular about classical music
itself.
Kramer wants to re-energize a Romantic view of music's emotional force
that became deeply unfashionable in the century of Stravinsky and Boulez:
he writes (in a deliberately planted verbal leitmotif) of "the fate of
melody" and argues that "classical music can help fill our emotional
needs; all we have to do is let it".
But these remarks betray the misplaced populism that is the book's chief
problem: caught up by the desire to reach out beyond his academic
readership, Kramer ultimately fails to commit himself to what, if
anything, is special about classical music. This timidity embroils him in
self-contradiction: at one point he tells us that "there's no point in
denying that classical music demands a bit more effort from the listener
than many others: stricter attention, a little technical know-how, a
little historical perspective"; but ten pages later he recants: "I don't
want to suggest that classical music matters because its form or structure
is complex or interesting. I don't want to suggest that to 'appreciate'
this music one has to listen for the form. All one has to do is listen".
He "refuses to separate classical music from popular culture" -but his
very title suggests that "separating" the particular values of classical
music is precisely what he needs to do. The strategic chattiness of
Kramer's style is counterproductive: rather than making his prose musical,
breaking down the barriers between subject matter and commentary, as he
intends, it prevents him from achieving the perspective necessary to his
self-appointed task.
In How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony: (And why you should care), Ross
W. Duffin also adopts a much breezier style than one would normally expect
from a professor of musicology, but with the more straightforward motive
of making an arcane and technical topic easily understandable. The
principle of tuning is derived from the harmonic series: that sequence of
higher notes that may be discerned when a "fundamental" pitch is sounded.
The most basic interval in the harmonic series is the octave, followed by
the fifth: if a player sounds a string or tube that is exactly two thirds
the length of another string or tube, the resulting sound will be a fifth
higher than that produced by the larger instrument. This "natural fifth"
is the basis from which tuning of keyboard instruments proceeds. However,
if each of the twelve pitches on the keyboard were tuned in exact
accordance with these natural fifths, the chromatic scale produced would
be unbearable, as the total distance between twelve fifths is
significantly greater than that of the seven octaves that are supposedly
their equivalent. Since the earliest history of keyboard instruments,
then, some sort of "tempering" of this discrepancy has been found to be
necessary.
This much is familiar: most musicians are aware that the notes on the
piano are not the exact equivalent of those in the harmonic series. The
value of Duffin's book lies in his elucidation of less well-known aspects
of the issue. Equal temperament is, of course, just one of the numerous
ways of tempering the scale.
Though it is now invariably used, this is a much more recent development
than is generally assumed. Duffin uncovers evidence that other
temperaments were in widespread use until the early twentieth century
-descriptions of the tuning system apparently employed by the violin
virtuoso Joachim are particularly compelling -and concludes that it was
not until 1917 that equal temperament was universally accepted. This means
that much eighteenth-and nineteenth-century music would have sounded
rather different from how it is currently played.
Duffin convincingly argues that neither Mozart nor Beethoven "thought in"
equal temperament, and points out that Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier was
written not for an instrument tuned in equal temperament, as is widely
believed, but for a keyboard containing slight differences in the gaps
between different pairs of notes, and on which different keys therefore
sounded subtly different.
While it is unlikely that pianists and organists will ever revert to using
unequal temperament -the inconvenience and expense of retuning instruments
for different repertoire would be prohibitive -Duffin's arguments are of
more than academic interest for those performers who are able to effect
subtle modifications in the pitch of the notes they produce, most
obviously singers and string players.
Perhaps his most striking observation is that though many string players
do consciously inflect some notes away from the pitches dictated by equal
temperament, the changes they make are mostly in the wrong direction.
Duffin traces this tendency back to the great cellist Pablo Casals, who
advocated "expressive intonation": in particular, making the "leading
note" of the scale particularly high to emphasize its closeness to the
key-note.
Duffin argues that because equal temperament makes major thirds
artificially wide, leading notes should instead generally be played lower
than the standard keyboard pitch. Contentions such as these are of
relevance not just to solo string players but to wind ensembles, choral
conductors, and all who regularly perform without a keyboard, and Duffin
is right to argue their fundamental importance. Because most standard
textbooks on the topic are forbiddingly technical, the adoption of a
straightforward, colloquial prose style is an eminently justified
strategy, and Duffin argues his case with great verve and charm.
Like Kramer and Duffin, Susan Tomes seeks to draw untrained listeners in
to the complex activity of performing a piece of music, but whereas the
other two authors emphasize their amateur status as keyboard
practitioners, Tomes writes as a professional pianist. A Musician's
Alphabet is more substantial than its short length and somewhat whimsical
title would suggest: its twenty-six essays offer a multifaceted view of
the complex process through which "composer and interpreter try to catch
one another's eye through the veiled network of the musical score".
The business is often frustrating: in her tenth essay, "J is for a Job
(Not a Proper)", Tomes wittily conveys the lack of general understanding
and adequate remuneration of musicians' work. But she also writes better
than almost anyone else about the moments in which "it doesn't feel as if
one is playing oneself, but as if 'it' is playing". This description from
the final essay, "Z is for Zen", acknowledges the ultimate mystery of the
process -Tomes's prose style is not self-consciously "musical", does not
attempt to situate us inside the structure or formal processes of the
music she plays -but the very precision and delicacy of the language she
chooses takes us close to an appreciation of the particular state of mind
that classical music is uniquely equipped to create. |
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