The greatest single composition of the 20th century

I thank God for the simplicity - naivete even - that allows me to listen to music as a simple soul surveying something inexpressible in words, something miraculously unexplainable, something where words seem to me nothing other than an impediment in terms of the primordial emtional response to the beauty of it, or the sadness of it, or the joyfulness of it ...

Something blending craft in its making and art in its emotional consequence.

In this way, I am entirely excluded from conversations here that discuss the balance of craft and art in music, the composer's intent, the significance of it in a political or philosophical sense.

All very interesting, but luckily for me - at least on one level, for I can never discuss these aspects - well and truly beyond me!

It makes for good reading to see so many passionate words expended on aspects that not only do I not understand, but can hardly conceive of. Certainly I could never imagine the constructs without prompts such as these posts.

Very best wishes from George

PS: Dear Mike, My post much further up on this page did have a certain element of "tongue in cheek" to it!

quote:

Originally posted by GFFJ:
conversations here that discuss the balance of craft and art in music, the composer's intent, the significance of it in a political or philosophical sense.

PS: Dear Mike, My post much further up on this page did have a certain element of "tongue in cheek" to it!

for my part, i think i'm about talked out. too many words, not enough music.

i knew you were fooling around george ... :-)

quote:

Originally posted by GFFJ:
I thank God for the simplicity - naivete even - that allows me to listen to music as a simple soul surveying something inexpressible in words, something miraculously unexplainable, something where words seem to me nothing other than an impediment in terms of the primordial emtional response to the beauty of it, or the sadness of it, or the joyfulness of it ...

I count my blessings that I can hear music in exactly this way, and that I can also listen with an analytical mind in a way that doesn't impede this at all.

Best,
Fred

quote:

Originally posted by JWM:
Eleanor Rigby.

I'm not fooling around.

quote:

Originally posted by fred simon:

I count my blessings that I can hear music in exactly this way, and that I can also listen with an analytical mind in a way that doesn't impede this at all.

Best, Fred

Dear Fred,

I was taught to analyse music, and can even make a running commentary for the un-initiated on say a Haydn sonata form movement that shows the harmonic structure and rhythm, the name of the place in the structure [ie first subject group, second subject group, and the place and nature of the modulation between them, the developement, the reprise, the coda etc.], the interesting devices used for developement of themes, the wonderfully unassuming use of counterpoint that the great man so seemingly artlessly uses ... but for all that even working these things out in terms of my own playing, I honestly don't find it has added one jot to my enjoyment of the music concerned.

Yes, a study of the score can be useful when dealing with what is not clear to the ear from a concert or recording, but I don't find that the emotional aspect is altered.

It is one of the glories for me of no longer playing that I find I rarely consult the printed score these days!

An exception for some people is that they really do find that a study of the score of a Bach fugue does enhance their enjoyment. It does not hinder it for me, but neither does it enhance it!

I actually like the element of the unexplained [largely unexplainable?] magic in music. Not necessarily even having the curiosity in some unexamined cases, to actually study the score beyond knowing it well enough to know if there are any wrong notes!

Of course for composers, the story is likely to be different, but I could never imagine me expecting anyone to listen to any musical invention I might succeed in putting down on paper! I have tried and I was not convinced it had any merit!

ATB from George

...Either of these would make my list ...I'll let others choose ....!

.....Sheer unbridled joy in under 2 minutes




or







So beautiful yet so sad....

...............


................

quote:

Originally posted by GFFJ:

quote:

Originally posted by fred simon:

I count my blessings that I can hear music in exactly this way, and that I can also listen with an analytical mind in a way that doesn't impede this at all.

Best, Fred

I honestly don't find it has added one jot to my enjoyment of the music concerned.

That's your experience, George, which, of course, is fine. My point was meant to address the widespread misconception that analytical knowledge of music impedes emotional connection, diminishes the mystery and magic, ipso facto. It needn't ... not one bit.

On a related note, I once had a conversation with several world-class musicians in which they all agreed that while they're grateful for their ability to play music, they're even more grateful for their ability to listen to music, both for its intellectual and emotional content. And for them, knowledge of the nuts and bolts only enhances the poetry. I agree.

Best,
Fred

Listened to the Messian a couple of times - it is OK, but the greatest composition of the 20th C? Not on my list - hey ho, it takes all sorts to make the world go round, certainly worth listening too. Probably does not help that I find the faith aspects of it totally alien.

Dear Fred,

I do not say that reading and studying musical scores is an impediment to enjoying the emotional side of music, but only that continuing with it [in any given piece] after a while ceases to bring an advantage for me!

As I have got older there are two sorts of clearly defined music for me.

That which speaks to me emotionally and that which does not.

I have no interest in that which does not.

There is an awful lot of post 1914 classical music that does not speak to me emotionally at all. This is not to say that the music lacks intellectual rigour, but rather that that is all that is obvious to me in it.

If I had to make a choice of my favourite post 1945 composer, it would be between Sir Malcolm Arnold, and Leonard Bernstein. Both these composed music that speaks very powerfully to me. I have played the music of both [on the bass in the orchestra], and even studied the scores, which I did find more interesting than you you might expect, given that I am not necessarily an out and out enthusiast for this!

ATB from George

for many, or at least some, the enjoyment of classical music proceeds in fits and starts, where you enjoy some music for awhile, then look for more.

as your collection grows, you may find fewer and fewer new experiences that are to your liking. in that case, as a natural consequence, you look backward.

learning more about a well worn performance can breathe new life into it.

it also sharpens the senses.

my collection is filed as classical, pop, jazz, rock, r&b, new orleans.

within classical are orchestra, concerto, opera, piano, solo instrument, and other.
each section is further subdivided by century.

the music i am listening to from this thread that is new to me is going in a new category : 2009.

Dear Mike,

What you say about there being fewer revelatory discoveries as time goes by is certainly also my experience.

For me, rather than look back, I tend to look for more works from the composers that please me most.

I would be glad if I knew all - or the great majority - of the music of Haydn and JS Bach by the time I die.

As time is necessarily short, then I am fairly content not to stray too far from these two masters in reality.

My explorations of Beethoven Schubert, Schumann, Mendelsohnn, Brahms, and so on are as complete as they need to be!

But I really want to know every quartet and symphony of Haydn by heart before I die, and the same for the Cantatas of Bach.

At 47 that leaves me perhaps between twenty and thirty years to get my ears round these vast tracts of great music! It cannot possibly be done in the time! I am significantly more than half way through the time I can ever give to music! I started 38 years ago, so not a hope of as much again!!

ATB from George

PS: There is another thing that slows me down finding new discoveries. Some of the music I have known for a long time still has a massive call on my time. I never tire of it, and it is the music of the composers who music I never tire of, that I want to find out as much as time allows for. As I said above the composers who catch perhaps three quarters of my listening time to music are J Haydn and JS Bach!

for me its beethoven and stravinsky that get most of the air time. but brahms is moving up the ranks.

there are definitely j.s. bach that hold my attention, among them the brandenberg concertos, st. matthew's passion, goldberg variations and sonatas and partitas for violin.

and other composers are always breaking in.

quote:

Originally posted by GFFJ:

I do not say that reading and studying musical scores is an impediment to enjoying the emotional side of music, but only that continuing with it [in any given piece] after a while ceases to bring an advantage for me!

Just trying to understand you clearly, George ... earlier you had written "words seem to me nothing other than an impediment in terms of the primordial emotional response" and "I honestly don't find [score study] has added one jot to my enjoyment of the music concerned." This seems to be a bit contradictory to your quote above that score study is worthwhile in terms of adding enjoyment, but yields diminishing returns after awhile, with which I mostly agree.

Earlier I had said to Mike that, of course, music is foremost an aural experience ... that is primary. I've never recommended that score reading should always accompany listening; checking in with the score at various points in a relationship with a musical work can illuminate the intellectual appreciation and emotional response to it.

But I've also found that after I've come to really know a work, having already listened and studied the score, coming back to the score many years later can bring further illumination and emotional enrichment ... things I didn't see or hear before, or see and hear them in a different way.

Again, let me re-emphasize that my main objection was to the notion that such intellectual investigation diminishes the mystery and magic of music, which in my view it emphatically does not. Let me give a couple of examples ...

In Brahms' Intermezzo Op. 118, #2, in its secondary theme (what might be called the bridge if it was a popular tune), there is a harmonic device which can be described as the result of an E major triad stacked on top of a D major triad ... a jazz musician might notate this as a slash chord: E/D, or might identify it solely in terms of the D root, namely, a D major chord with a #11, a 9, and a 6 added to it.

I'll never forget the moment I first encountered this harmonic idea, alone in a practice room at college, and it literally brought me to tears. Subsequent investigation of its nuts and bolts did not diminish that primal emotional response in the least, and, in fact, only deepened it as I went on to identify this harmonic device in many other works by many composers, and, most importantly, started incorporating it in my own compositions.

The second example is a melodic/harmonic device Beethoven used in the primary theme of the Allegretto 2nd mvt of the 7th Symphony ... in the 12th bar of the second iteration of the theme, against the two static A quarter notes of the melody in the second violin part, the inner voice, played by viola and cello, takes prominence with two eighth notes - D falling through C# - resolving to a C natural quarter note. That's it: two eight notes and one quarter, falling in half-steps. As with the Brahms, it was a world of revelation to me, also bringing me to tears, and still doing so to this day.

In harmonic terms, what Beethoven is doing here, of course, is outlining an A triad with a suspended fourth, moving through an A major triad, resolving to an A minor triad. So simple, yet profound. Admittedly, it's somewhat of a simplistic reduction to describe major and minor tonalities in terms of joyful and melancholy, respectively, but as a wise teacher of mine once said, it's a fine place to start. The suspended fourth that starts this little passage connotes emotional ambiguity, which passes through joy (A major) and resolves into sadness (A minor). Again, somewhat simplistic, but to me it contains an essential kernel of musical-emotional truth ... in this one bar, with three changing notes played against one unchanging, Beethoven sums up the ambiguous, bittersweet nature of life that all humans experience.

Let me state again: none of this sort of analysis reduces the emotional impact of the music, or diminishes its magic and mystery in the slightest, and, in fact, only serves to deepen these with an understanding of how it works. And as with the Brahms, I've noticed that this major/minor ambiguity is not only a pronounced feature of the music I love the most, music that moves me the most, but has become an essential component of my own compositional vocabulary.

Best,
Fred

quote:

Just trying to understand you clearly, George ... earlier you had written "words seem to me nothing other than an impediment in terms of the primordial emotional response" and "I honestly don't find [score study] has added one jot to my enjoyment of the music concerned." This seems to be a bit contradictory to your quote above that score study is worthwhile in terms of adding enjoyment, but yields diminishing returns after awhile, with which I mostly agree.

Dear Fred,

I was trying to discourage people from getting too fixated on score reading at the expense of simply listening in the earlier quotation.

The second one you made from my posting is exactly where my view lies!

As regards those late pieces by Brahms, opus 117, 118, and 119! I can think of no piano music that I prefer! I do not count the keyboard works of JS Bach as being piano works ...

I have no recordings, or scores, but have heard a recording of them played by Moira Lympany many years ago, and have never forgotten them, after only one hearing!

The trouble is that I cannot find a performance [I would love to find the Lympany recording again] of them that I think comes close to doing the music justice.

I have heard isolated pieces from these opera played by Edwin Fischer and Clifford Curzon which seemed to have the special, delicate, and rather gentle magic of them, but there seems to be no release from either of these great pianists that exists nowadays.

Pointless me getting the scores as without a keyboard - like Mike - I find the notation too dense to be helpful.

I prefer the open score of the orchestra in this respect. I might add that i have to use very powerful reading glasses to see any print at all these days, and even then it is a moderate strain, after a while.

Thus though a score might help me comprehend what I was listening to it would not clarify it for me without an aural prompt! Indeed it was my inability to unpick the print that was a major contributory factor in causing me to abandon the piano as the instrument in which I was given lessons. The piano itself - never my prefered instrument - certainly held my musical playing back ten years and convinced me that though I loved my music, there was in fact no music in me.

It would take a major act of courage on my part to broach a musical instrument again after the catastrophe that the piano proved to be for me. I finsihed piano lessons as a thirteen years old, and had my first bass lessons twelve yeards after that. I was so demoralliseed by the piano that on taking up the bass I was convinced that I would never be any use at all, and it would merely be for fun. Within four years I was getting paid work, and after seven I was teaching the instrument!

I never quite could work out why I would be chosen for good paid gigs, when there were others who definately had more years of experience, and seemed to me very good players. But I was regularly fixed for the ad-hoc orchestras which accompanied the wealth of long established choral societies in the Potteries [Staffordshire] and Midlands. The best of these was the Birmingham Festival Choral Society, which choir gave the premier performances of works by Dvorak, Mendelsohnn's Elijah and Elgar's Drean Of Gerontius, among other great pieces.

I once asked the "orchestral fixer" for the BFCS why he used to invite me to play, and he simply replied that it was agreed that the orchestra and conductor liked my playing, which to this day seems amazing to me who was always very full of awareness of the fraility and faultiness of what I did. I never ever gave a concert that I enjoyed as it went along, though sometimes the performances seemed to survive examination in the pub afterwards not too badly. I think the musicians were and are the toughest critics actually!

_________

One work I literalluy learned from the score was Bach's Saint John Passion, because I had to play the work as the only bass, with only one rehearsal. It was one of the first occasions where I was the only bass, and I was determined to avoid the possibility of of wasting time rehearsing the bass part in the short time that we had together in the combined choir and orchrstral rehearsal.

The consequence was that I did play satisfactorily enough! Six weeks learning the score and practicing, meant that it was simply a question of fitting with the orchestra and choir, which proved very easy. All other music I knew aurally from concerts or recordings, or from sight reading rather than learning a score, without even a keyboard to try out some of it!

I have never looked at a score of the Saint John Passion since, but I loved the work, before I ever actually heard it, at least in the physical sense!

I have never heard it other than playing in it in the live context, and I have a recording [Gardiner], which I find entirely not to my taste! No doubt one day I shall be overwhelmed by a great live performance attended from the audience perspective! Strangely my approach to the Saint Matthew Passion has been the opposite.

Once I played the bass-line for "Erbame dich," in a recital concert, have attended live concerts half a dosen times, and have Leonhardt's recording which I find very fine indeed! I have never looked at the score, but have studied the bass part in detail as it is some of it very demanding!

It is so lovely sharing thoughts with you, Fred! As you probably can tell I am not a musical intellectual! I understand the business of theory, structurel form, harmony, scoring, and so forth, but none of these aspects interest me as much as say a great aria from one of the Passions of Bach reducing me to tears. Only usually could happen when listening to a radio concert or recording at home, though ...

ATB from George

Interesting, George ... I can read symphonic scores, but find it much more difficult keeping track of all the vertical stuff spread across all those staves and systems, than with piano scores where it's all in one place, not to mention right under my fingers.

By the way, I highly recommend Glenn Gould's recordings of the Brahms Intermezzi ... they are relatively early recordings of Gould, and he said his intent was to play them as though they were being improvised, which is exactly how I think they are best played.

As far as trading the piano for the bass, well, if there are any musicians who work nearly as much as pianists, it's bass players.

I'm not convinced you are "not a musical intellectual" as you claim ... you clearly understand (or I hope you do!) that the intellect can't be completely divorced from emotion, it's a symbiotic relationship.

The thing that so many folks fail to realize is that although there is certainly mystery and magic in our experience of music, the way in which that mystery and magic is achieved by the composer is, in fact, not magic ... the idea of the composer being visited with faerie dust is a myth. That's why it's such a revelation to me to look at something like the 2nd mvt theme from LVB's 7th and investigate exactly how he brings me to tears with that series of three chords: A sus4 - A maj - A min.

Best,
Fred

quote:

Originally posted by GFFJ:

If I had to make a choice of my favourite post 1945 composer, it would be between Sir Malcolm Arnold, and Leonard Bernstein.

Speaking of these mid-to-latter 20th century composers, it seems you would also enjoy the works of David Diamond.

Best,
Fred

Dear Fred,

Thanks for pointing out David Diamond as a modern composer whose music I might enjoy!

On the issue of scores, I am moving this weekend, and for the first time in three years will have my library of them in my room again! This is very existing as in the interval, I have only had a set of the Brandenburgs in a pocket score by me most of the time!

Very happy, I shall be to be able to dive between the covers of these great pieces again, if the need strikes me!

In the new place, I shall also be be slightly less stressed in money terms so may be able to start to treat myself to more music on records and go to the occasional concert again!

Thanks for such a nice exchange,

ATB from George

PS: On the mystery of music, I think the mystery is in the genius to conceive of unique and great musical ideas [like the examples you have made above], but the nuts and bolts of music, the notes, the intervals, the strain of getting them down on paper, are nothing other than the perspiration needed to bring out the inspiration! The score helps us understand the magic that is genius!

I tend to think that if the mystery was more easily solved of how to invent compelling music, then we would have more great composers than we do. I actually have only one unfulfilled ambition - or at least one that I really care about - and that would be to write one really good clssical form piece, such as s string serenade in four or five movements like the Dvorak or Tchaikowki. It would not be earth shatteringly profound music, but just nicely crafteed ideas in a pair quick sonata form movements [first and last] a slow sonata form slow third movement, with a pair of dances as the second and forth movements. but most of all it would have to have strong melodies, rather than necessarily be a work based on the kind of terse invention of a Beethoven-style of composition!

Also and slight at a tangent. The very first concert I played in as only one bass in the orchestra was given in 1990 in the Church where the poet and composer Ivor Gurney is buried - Twigworth near Gloucester. The second half was Beethoven's Seventh. And it is a wonderful place to be in the orchestra, playing the bass! All the wonderous modulations above affect the way the bass must play his notes - volume, tone colour, articulacy, sharpness of attack! I remember exactly working out how I would play that slow movement, "precisely," and before the rehearsal! Again with only a single rehearsal, and not one word from the conductor to me, but a rather nice one to the celli: "Listen to the bass, he is phrasing that line so beautifully!"

Thinking about this, I have just dug the recording of it out - one of the few that I have of performances I was in - and it is not too bad even now, apart from some fairly vile wind playing! Oh, the nostalgia of it!

In fact I had studied the score as a form of practice! That is possible as a useful way of making the rehearsal less a question of being told what to do. Bring score based imagination to the table and the conductor can leave you alone and deal with others who have not been so diligent!