Where Pärt and I Part

The Estonian mystic minimalist composer Arvo Pärt (b.1935) is having an Orgy.


On December 19th and 20th Harvard's WHRB radio 95.3 FM presented a two-day marathon featuring 19 hours of Pärt's recorded music.

I can't say that I listened from beginning to end, but I did tune in to hear a sampling of his work distributed throughout his long and still active career. The first piece in the Orgy [a registered Trademark of Harvard University] was Pärt's Opus 1 Sonatina from 1958. The Orgy concluded with Pärt's Symphony No. 4 performed in concert by the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Walt Disney Concert Hall earlier this year - a work that signaled the composer's return to the symphonic form. Pärt's 3rd Symphony was written some 37 years earlier, and while not yet available on CD, can be obtained as an iTunes download.

In the United States we have been aware of Pärt's compositions since about the mid-1980s when the jazz and new music label ECM Records released some of his works. He has steadily grown in popularity.

To be honest, his music never caught my fancy. From the beginning it seemed completely antithetical to my musical interests. His music is painstakingly slow, repetitive, sparsely orchestrated, soft, built entirely on a static single mode or scale, and relentlessly periodic. My preferences in musical expression are just the opposite. I have a penchant for fast, frenetic, densely orchestrated, pitch-rich, aperiodic, abrasive, loud, grab-you-by-the-balls high-octane music. Frankly, Pärt's brand of modernism (or mystic minimalism as they say) - pretty as it can be on the surface - ain't my cup of tea.

Granted, if musical success can be measured by the number of commercial recordings or making it to WHRB's Orgy list, then Pärt's notion of music is a hands-down winner and my preference for musical discourse is dead as a door nail. My hat is off to you Mr. Pärt. But this is where we Part.

Listening to Cantus In Memoriam for Benjamin Britten for string orchestra and bell (1977) makes my skin itch. The entire piece is based on a series of temporally shifted lines descending along adjacent tones of the Aeolian mode. Sure, if played in tune and by good musicians, this can produce a lush and pretty sound. But is it music? The thought crossed my mind that I could write out something quite similar with my music notation software (using the cut and paste function) in less than an hour. By contrast, I have spent up to a year and a half writing a single piece of my own music. I don't want to equate time spent composing with artistic value, but jeez, something that simplistic in my view is the definition of pure boredom. Perhaps listeners latch onto the purity of the idea, but I just can't ignore the boredom aspect it.

Call me a dinosaur, but I think listeners should be presented with a wealth of aural excitement for their entertainment dollar (figuratively speaking). What Pärt offers is a sparse and immobile sonic backdrop for listeners to zone-out. Music should assault you rather than facilitate or encourage passive daydreaming. The contemporary musical aesthetic that I subscribe to says that listeners need to be emotionally and intellectually engaged, challenged, and confronted. If a composer uses his or her art as a form of meditative prayer or devotion, that's fine, but it should be a private matter. I'm a stanch advocate of secular "headache music" (as some have described it).

Another series of works by Pärt that drives me up the wall is from the Fratres collection. Fratres I (1977, revised 1983) is for string quartet. It was orchestrated in 1980 by the composer for string orchestra and percussion. [This version I heard performed a number of times by the Amsterdam Symfonietta when they were on tour in the United States. My brother-in law is a cellist]. Pärt also created a solo violin version (Fratres II) and a version for cello ensemble (Fratres III). In my view, one version of Fratres is more than enough. The music just does nothing for me.

Clearly Pärt does not have to defend his music to me or anyone else. He has become very successful. In fact, a symposium on the composer will soon be held at Boston University titled "Arvo Pärt and Contemporary Spirituality Conference." It's scheduled for March 25, 26 and 27, 2010.

"...the conference will examine Pärt’s music using and developing cross-disciplinary methodologies drawing on media studies, theological studies and different analytical approaches to music. By working on issues of interpretation it endeavors to bridge the traditional gap between scholars and performers, and it directly addresses the largest group of people who come across Pärt’s music: the audience."

Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvo_P%C3%A4rt
http://www.arvopart.info/
http://www.sinfonietta.nl/

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Henry Brant

The Canadian-born American composer Henry Brant (1913-2008) was a maverick who worked well within the constraints of practical practicality. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2002.

I recently came across a review of his 25-minute piece Orbits: A Spatial Symphonic Ritual (1979) in the NY Times (6/2/2009). The work is scored for 80 trombones, soprano, and organ. It had been premiered at St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco, but the East coast performance must have been a sensation. Two performances took place in the rotunda of the Guggenheim Museum for a select audience limited to 300 people each. The trombonists stood lined up on the spiraling walkways encircling the rotunda below. Each of the 80 dispersed brass players faced down to the audience and conductor. The texturing, cascading chords, and antiphonal effects must have been spectacular.

The part of the review that caught my attention was not about the "spacial" elements of the work that Brant became so famous for, but the polystylistic nature of his work. Brant was quoted to have written that music composed in a single style could not evoke the "stresses, layered insanities and mulidirectional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit."

Polystylistic? Hum. I've never given it much conscious thought. While at times I have veered into digressions of classic jazz from the primary perspective of a post-Schoenbergian atonal framework in my own music, I've always regarded the melding of opposing styles to be a tricky business. I've got an old school bias that says that works should be unified, fully-integrated, and organic at all levels. Somehow jumping around between cultural constructs or otherwise self-contained musical languages seems a bit like channel surfing on cable TV. Flipping suddenly between CNN and "I Love Lucy" does create a jolt, but does it contribute to the overall form and expression of the work in a meaningful and artistic way? I'm unsure, but willing to see if it can be done both tastefully and in holistic fashion (e.g. Luciano Berio's orchestral work Symphonia is one possible example of successful "polystylism").

By the way, Brant's orchestration text book Textures & Timbres has been published. It is the result of his lifelong work as a conductor, composer, and teacher. He worked on it from the 1940s up his death in 2008. Early on Brant found employment in commercial radio and orchestrated numerous films for Hollywood. Later he taught orchestration classes at Juilliard.

I never met Brant, but my wife Willemien did. On June 16th, 1984 she participated in his work Mass in Gregorian Chant for Multiple Flutes performing with hundreds of flutists situated in tour boats moving up and down the canals of Amsterdam. It was part of an entire week of Brant's music performed at the annual Holland Festival.

Links: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Brant

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Some thoughts on hearing

Neural Science may someday develop to the point where they will explain why we listen to music. But for now, the subject of how we listen to music is complex enough.

Although there is a theory that plants like to groove to Rock music, our fellow mammals don't seem to care for it. A neural scientist at NY University said, "...if you give monkeys a choice between music and silence, they choose silence pretty strongly."

Yet every human culture studied exhibits music in some form. It seems to have always been that way. An artifact of a 43,ooo to 82,ooo-year Neanderthal bone flute was excavated recently from the cave of our distant ancestor in Germany. It's tuned for "Do-Re-Mi."

Here are a few curious facts...

Humans come with eyelids which allow us to voluntarily shut out what we see. Why didn't we evolve with ear flaps? It would be nice to turn off an annoying sound - or a bad piece of music. (Those of us with hearing-aids thankfully have volume controls).

Of all our senses, hearing seems to be the most supercharged. We hear in the equivalent of a 60" LCD flat-panel HDTV with 1080p resolution in 3D. Compared to vision, hearing can differentiate between discrete temporal events much more accurately than the human eye. A percussionist playing on a snare drum can easily tap out a repetitive pattern of twenty beats per second. We will hear each tap on the drum as an individual event in time. But when twenty successive images are presented to the eye, we see it as a movie. The brain connects the images, unifies them, and interprets the string of visual events quite differently.

This means that music can potentially express ideas and relationships that the visual arts can not. Works that push the envelope of aural perception - such as Milton Babbitt's solo snare drum piece of 1987 - "Homily" - explore rhythm to the max. The ear is faster than the eye, and when the message includes stimuli from both senses, the ear usually wins.

But just how does the brain resolve conflicts between the senses? There is at least one example where visual cues override aural input. If you watch a film where someone on the screen mouths the word "bah" while the soundtrack plays the sound of "dah," your brain will perceive the word as "bah." However, when we are confronted with other contradicting pieces of information, such as rapid flashes of light and the sound of quickfire beeps, our brains usually defer to our ears for accuracy.

The complexity of the ear-eye relationship in music is quite pronounced for the orchestral conductor. The conductor has an almost impossible task to stand before a hundred or so musicians who sit at varying degrees of distance from one another and relay a series of variable beats to them on a rather precise time-grid. Orchestral musicians all see the conductor from a different perspective, and hear the flow of the music in differing degrees of delay because of the room acoustics. They have to meld together both visual and aural information in the context of the written music sitting before them on the music stand.

For the conductor, something as simple as communicating a downbeat is fraught with complexity. The exact start-time with which s musical event begins and how it will ultimately sound has many variables. Unlike an oscillator, musical instruments don't have two states: ON or OFF. The complex and important micro-events that occur within the short attack of a single note exists well within the human perception of time.

Individually and collectively the complex acoustical soup of these events are channeled through the front-end processing of the listeners' middle and inner ear. The information is ultimately parsed, processed and interpreted by the amazing audio engineering burned into our brains.

Generally speaking, we find pleasure with what we hear. Talented and trained musicians and conductors have honed their visual-aural communication skills to maximize results and minimize collective error. Exactitude and clarity is the name of the game.

Composers often have to delegate the details of implementation of their works to conductors and musicians, but are well aware of the complexities of aural perception and the limits of human performance. It's long been known that we can hear far faster than we can physically perform.

As a consequence, some composers have ventured into the world of electronic music to exploit the full capacity of the impressive engineering of the human hearing mechanism. Computer-generated music can (and often does) move at a dizzying pace, and often outstrips even the most agile of musicians who perform on acoustic instruments. Perceptually, we can process music at a very rapid rate - taking in events far quicker than anyone can physically produce them. Some composers (such as Babbitt) have skillfully explored this rich territory of sound, and pushed both our hearing and what can be considered valid musical content right up to the limits of human perception.

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Form and Function in Mozart

Last evening, as pain shot down my arm from a chronic slipped disk in my neck, I attempted to play through some Mozart sonatas on my beat up and out-of-tune piano.

Mozart's piano sonatas are old friends. They were pieces I worked on as an undergrad when I switched my principle instrument from guitar to piano. My old and tattered score is marked up with cryptic notations from countless analysis classes - including a memorable one with Andrew Imbrie at Brandeis regarding the B-flat major Sonata #13 (K. 333). I also remember an eye-opening analysis by Donald Martino of the Sonata #4 (K. 282) in E-flat major (hint: the first subject starts in measure three after an introduction).

The wide gulf between the sound I hear in my head, and what I can produce on the keyboard is at times frustrating. But it can often be enlightening. My mind wanders and I make interesting discoveries when fingering the notes that I wouldn't think about otherwise.

For example, the issue of deciding how to select a group of notes to phrase together as a unit is rather complex. It's not simply a matter of reading a phrase mark placed over a group of dots on the page. The true musical idea should emerge from the sound of music itself, and this information is not explicitly notated in the score.

How should a musician psychically divine musical phrases? Shouldn't the performer act like a sponge and receive information directly from the structure of the musical work? Often musicians proactively pencil in their markings based on long-held preconceived notions and externally acquired ideas. They assert themselves into music rather than let the music lead them. They seek to control it rather than be controlled by it.

This led me to an idea (which is probably not original): A performer should take some time to open up, become a neutral observer, and mechanically process the notes in the score in robotic fashion and without input or emotion. By playing through a group of notes on the page, the musical phrase should emerge, reveal itself, and become obvious.

Although the structure of the phrase is dependant on many factors such as pitch, harmony, melodic contour, and rhythm, the intention should be clear by listening carefully. I've learned that good composers are not ambiguous about this. The information held within the notes on the page will speak for themselves if we let them.

The notion that music "needs" a layer of interpretation is a fallacy. The music, if allowed to express itself, is the interpretation.

Well-constructed quality music is surprisingly durable and resilient to performer-induced distortions. For example, a former German Professor of mine was an amateur violist. He would perform in the university orchestra and really struggled to just play the notes. The orchestra was a far cry from performing at a professional level, but they attempted to play masterworks from the great orchestral repertory: symphonies by Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven.

The Vienna-born Professor (now deceased) confided in me that he couldn't actually play the notes, but that somehow the composer's ideas came through and were communicated despite this limitation. For some, it was a bad performance. But perhaps others were able to hear beyond the imperfections of the surface sound and take in the ideas that were implicit in the composer's musical structure.

I never forgot that.

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