Classical Convert

Thoughts From Last Nights Concert

Last night, total lunar eclipse night 2008, at a concert by the Alban Berg quartet:

Pre-concert: Are these chairs made from wood or cunningly crafted plastic? They’re too precisely curved to be wood I think but.. OW. The lamps under the soffit of the armrest are a) hot and b) grounded, and all the dry air has shoved far too much static on me for that not to hurt in two different ways at once. Oh, here we go…

During Haydn Op. 77 No. 1: Sonata form, you cheeky devil, you sonofagun – I can hear you the first time through now! You’re marchy today, too. I just saw you repeat the exposition, and now look at you all developing. 2nd movement: your start brings to mind in me Shostakovich SQ 13, and the rest of you is exceptionally lovely, I like your rising ripples. Huh, rising ripples sounds surprisingly filthy. The rest of you is sturdy and wonderful to watch as everything gets thrown back and forth but, sorry Haydn, you just didn’t quite do it for me this time.

Berg Op. 3: Uh-oh, 2nd Viennese school, my classical music mostly nemesis, but… oooo… this stuff sounds rather different when it’s being performed live, it’s suddenly far more appealing, why is that? I wonder if it’s because it’s more shocking to see that these are actual people, playing actual music, on instruments of all things! It’s not some kind of electronic device whirring and chirping away and generating all those odd sounds. It’s wood and guts. You lose that through a CD, don’t you? You almost forget that once upon a time, someone actually played the stuff you are listening to. The live effect is particularly overpowering during the really dramatic sections. Watching those players batter their instruments has an intensity that recordings just cannot match.

Beethoven Op. 132: I know you. You’re the string quartet that starts out like the Grosse Fugue. Then you have that bit in your first movement which sounds like Schubert’s Trout. The third movement is the really good one, this is spiritual stuff, and deliberately so. It’s amazing during a movement like this to watch the faces of those watching the performers. Us, the audience. So many heads turned upward and sideways and all heavy with contemplation and concentration. Eyes lightly lidded but clearly alive, active below. The fifth movement is almost a song, lyrical but certainly not saccharine. Stubborn. Resilient. And the ending kicks about ten kinds of arse.

Coda: Huh. the moon’s all red.

Tags: alban berg quartet, beethoven, berg, classical music, concert, cornell, haydn, review, string quartet

Webernification (or: Me vs. Atonality, Part 10,243)

After reading the section in The Rest Is Noise about Webern I was immediately inspired to grab a copy of the 6 Pieces, despite my current dislike of truly atonal pieces. What grabbed me so much from the pages?

“It is an incomparably disturbing work in which the rawness of atonality is refracted through the utmost orchestral finesse … arguably the supreme atonal work”

Man I love ellipses. And how could one not love to sample the opus after that knife-edge of a summary? Happily, pinched pensioners wireless access down here in the South, in combination with my not-canceled eMusic subscription results in instant musical gratification. The 6 Pieces are just a few clicks, taps and shufflings around the room to optimize stolen borrowed signal strength away.

So how do they strike an atonal unfan? Well, after only almost a couple of listens (initial impressions here, currently) I feel a stronger connection than with either Berg’s Violin Concerto, or Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra or Serenade. This is surprising to me, as previously my misconception was that Webern was going to be ultra-astringent, like each of his opuses would be one viciously plucked tone-row with a 10-note chord thrown in at the end for discordantly good measure.

I’m finding quite hard to identify why this is. They are certainly murkier than I had imagined, they sound sometimes plaintive, lost. Often  scary. Shimmering notes lying over wandering ostinato depths. Basically I’m a sucker for melancholic music, hence the Shostakovich lust. There’s more though, what? They are almost… not tonal exactly… but less abrasively atonal than the Schoenberg, and more depressively atonal. There is something about the tempos, also. I feel like with other atonal pieces the speeds are scattered around as much as the notes are, in a deliberate, unemotional fashion, as if the composer is trying to use each speed equally just as he uses each note. Here, however, the variation feels more emotionally driven.

More listening is required to get thoughts somewhat straighter on these areas. What really puzzles me is why these seem to make more sense to me than the “emotional atonality” of the Berg Violin Concerto. Doesn’t that fit the description above even better than Webern?

PS dear reader, one more quick thought before I pretend to go to bed: I like the vague, muttering percussion/percussive background he sometimes uses.

Me vs. Atonalism, again

Okay… people seem very convinced of convincing me that there are rich and fertile sonic grounds to be discovered in the land of atonality. For a bit of a recap we have: firstly, me claiming that strict twelve-tone atonalism is too much and too academic. Secondly, me defending myself a bit from the criticisms of (a) being overly dismissive about the genre, and (b) insisting that late Shostakovich really does use tone rows.

So what do we have this time around? Well, wishniak says:

As with anything challenging, one might have to invest some time in it, get used to some new aesthetic values…

And Chris Culver says:

It’s odd to pitch standard repertoire classical music as good for nerds since it’s fun to figure out how it works, while at the same time deploring modernism as too “academic”.

Both are making the point that I’m not necessarily giving the serialists a fair go of it, which, since this site is all about trying to get people to listen to a genre they have negative preconceptions about, is a bit hypocritical. I kinda have to agree – a bit reluctantly – although in my defense it’s not as if I haven’t tried it.

In fact, JF brought up the Berg Violin Concerto, which I am actually quite partial to (and I’d also quite like to see Wozzeck). I think it’s a striking piece, especially when you know the full, morbid, background (a memorial to the young death of Manon Gropius, and also Berg’s final work). However, I think the reason it is so striking (and also why it is popular amongst people who do not in general care for atonalism) is that it inextricably linked to the tonal system. Berg’s tone-row is a tonal tone-row: g-minor, d-major, a-minor, e-major, Es ist genug. This is what I’m getting at when I claim that atonality is only truly satisfying when balanced against tonality.

JF comments that:

What you’re really talking about, I think, is not atonality but degrees of dissonance in the harmony, one “degree” being how long the dissonance lasts, and note-sequences you can or can’t recognize as melodic shapes.

Which I sort of agree with. I’ll write more about this another time. the thing that bugs me about serialism is the forced nature of it, the insistence that you have to give every note equal importance. While Berg’s violin concerto pulls this off while still being emotionally touching, I think it’s because he pushed the overly strict twelve-tone system almost into tonality. What I like about late Shostakovich is similar – he’ll take a twelve-tone melody, which is bloody hard to hear as a melody the first ten times you listen to it – and then develop it without the restrictions of the twelve-tone system.

I like difficult melodies, I like working on a piece before I understand it, but serialism seems scarily restrictive. Rob Schottland agreed:

Personally, I feel that the serial/twelve-tone movement of the 20th century was too limiting a format to survive in its strictest form.

I think I concur. But, I’m willing to give it another ago – I just ordered a CD from Amazon featuring Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, recommended to me in a previous post. I’ll let you know how the listening goes.

PS – This is a great radio broadcast about the Berg violin concerto.