Chatting with Karlheinz

One summer in the late 1980s I spent studying at the "Mozarteum" in Salzburg, Austria. Probably the only music school in the world that is more famous than Julliard. I had a great time in the master class of Pepe Romero. Met a lot of interesting people like a soprano from Montreal, a flute-player from Prague and the most terrifying driver I have ever ridden with, a violinist from Poland.

Another delight was discovering that MacDonald's in Austria serves beer and that you can go up an alp in a gondola lift. I even saw these crazy guys who jump off the top of the mountain with special gliding parachutes.

Getting back to the music, Alfred Brendel was there doing all the Schubert sonatas, the Alban Berg Quartet were there doing all the Beethoven quartets--I had a wonderful opportunity to watch them rehearse. Witold Lutosławski was there conducting his violin concerto (I had actually met him previously on the occasion of a lecture he gave at McGill in the 1970s on aleatory and semi-aleatory music). Also there was Karlheinz Stockhausen who had brought his whole family/ensemble from Köln to do several concerts of his chamber music. All the music was performed from memory and I remember being charmed by the staging of it. One flute solo was rendered by a sylph-like player dressed as Robin Hood with a cute little hunting cap. Particularly noteworthy was her stretchy top, which was quite translucent. I had a very interesting conversation with Stockhausen afterwards about how well his music "travelled". In North America we tended not to get these kinds of performance subtleties. At that time we didn't get much opportunity to hear Stockhausen's music at all. He said that a mere recording of a piece like, say, Stimmung, was no more like an actual performance than a postcard is like an actual trip somewhere. After seeing their performances of his music live, I had to agree.

I think that the solo flute piece I heard in Salzburg was probably Amour, which I cannot find in YouTube. But here is a somewhat similar piece for solo flute, THINKI (1997):

Here is a recording of his piece for six vocalists, Stimmung (1968):

Gilles Trembley and Claude Vivier, both composers from Montréal, studied with Stockhausen. My composition teacher in Montréal used to say that Stockhausen was always five minutes ahead of what was fashionable, which is a neat trick if you can do it. That underlines one aspect of the 20th century avant-garde which is that it does tend to be a bit like the fashion industry. "Hey, this year let's all do electro-acoustic music."

I think that Stockhausen was a master of the business of being a composer in the 20th century. He was intimately involved in the process of publishing and presenting his music--much more than most composers. This is from Wikipedia:

From the mid-1950s onward, Stockhausen designed (and in some cases had had printed) his own musical scores for his publisher, Universal Edition, which often involved unconventional devices. The score for his piece Refrain, for instance, includes a rotatable (refrain) on a transparent plastic strip. Early in the 1970s, he ended his agreement with Universal Edition and began publishing his own scores under the Stockhausen-Verlag imprint (Kurtz 1992, 184). This arrangement allowed him to extend his notational innovations (for example, dynamics in Weltparlament [the first scene of Mittwoch aus Licht] are coded in colour) and resulted in eight German Music Publishers Society Awards between 1992 (Luzifers Tanz) and 2005 (Hoch-Zeiten, from Sonntag aus Licht) (Stockhausen-Verlag 2010, 12–13). The score of Momente, published just before the composer's death in 2007, won this prize for the ninth time (Deutscher Musikeditionspreis 2009)

In the early 1990s, Stockhausen reacquired the licenses to most of the recordings of his music he had made to that point, and started his own record company to make this music permanently available on Compact Disc (Maconie 2005, 477–78).

Stockhausen's huge output obviously will take many decades to come into perspective, but one thing seems clear. His early involvement with electronics predisposed him towards the sounds themselves, including all possible sounds, and away from connections with music history. Whether this makes his music more or less interesting is really not possible to say at this point.

Let's end with a piano piece by Stockhausen, the Klavierstück XI, which is a "moment form" piece, meaning that it consists of nineteen musical "cells" that you play in a random order. The piece ends when you have played the same cell three times. No two performances are alike.

Performance Clunkers

Thanks to Norman Lebrecht for this somewhat amusing clip:

Of course the first one is not a mishap, just Victor Borge, music's greatest comedian. The rest of the clips are examples of great pianists getting sloppy and playing some wrong notes. Call them inadvertent  acciaccaturas! Now if we had a similar video compilation for guitarists it would be much worse because the mechanism of the piano prevents you from a lot of the mistakes that are possible on guitar.

Just about every mistake we hear in the clip is caused by the pianist choosing a tempo that is too fast. The classic sins of the pianist are rushing the tempo and over-using the pedal to hide sloppy playing. The classic sins of the guitarist are weak, feeble tone and clumsy phrasing. The classic sins of the singer are singing out of tune. Of course, with the judicious use of Auto-tune this is no longer a problem in pop music.

Oddly enough, a search on YouTube does not reveal any compilation of classical guitar clunkers. I could probably put together lots from my own concerts, but that would be way too time-consuming. Thank goodness!!

Jack Duarte, the guitarist, critic and composer, used to tell this joke about a very common ornament that some guitarists used to play. In German it was known as the "schlippe" and in French (you have to imagine the accent) as "heuooops!" The ornament is defined as landing on a note near the note you actually wanted to land on and then quickly sliding to the correct note. If only I could find a nice example for you!

Instead, let's have a couple of examples of some nice clean piano and guitar playing. Here is Grigory Sokolov with "La Poule" by Rameau, originally for harpsichord:

Here is Manuel Barrueco with the prelude to the First Cello Suite by Bach. If you listen very closely you will hear a tiny mistake at the 15 second mark. But this is very clean playing.

Modern Audiences

Here is an interesting story. Kevin Williamson, critic, goes to a theater performance and the boorish behaviour of the audience causes him to snap. A lady seated next to him refused to stop using her cellphone during the performance so he grabbed it out of her hand and tossed it across the room. She slapped him and complained to the management whereupon Mr. Williamson was escorted from the theater.

There is an interesting contrast with a similar incident from a year ago that I posted on here. In that case, someone sitting in the front row had their cellphone go off towards the end of the last movement of Mahler's 9th Symphony. It was so destructive of the mood that the conductor stopped the orchestra and confronted the offender. The whole audience was outraged. After ensuring that the incident would not be repeated, the conductor re-started the movement.

In order to really understand what happened in the theater incident, we need some more reports as I don't regard Mr. Williamson's account as being reliable. It is very hard for me to believe that the audience could have been this disruptive without the performers and management taking appropriate steps. An announcement from the stage at intermission that any audience member causing a disturbance in the second half would be immediately escorted from the theater would seem the thing to do.

What Mr. Williamson did, tempting though it may seem, is really beyond the pale. It could only result in either him being tossed out, or, if he is joined by other audience members, the whole audience engaged in a civil war. Neither option is preferable to the original disturbance. Suppression of this kind of rudeness must come from the performers and management. If you don't like it as an audience member, just leave and be sure to communicate exactly why you left to the management.

Grabbing someone's cellphone--no matter how obnoxious they are being--is simply assault and theft.

Or am I missing something? Are theater audiences this intolerable these days? I rarely go to the theater so I could simply be uninformed. Any readers have any stories to share?

Let me see, what would be an appropriate piece of music? How about this:

The Art of Living Well

Sometimes I put up a post and worry that it will only appeal to a limited number of readers. Other times I put up something and worry that it is not sufficiently about music. This is going to be one of the latter. But hey, why worry! The great thing about blogs, and why they have more flavor than the mass media, is that everything isn't put through some kind of screen. I love the blogosphere because you never quite know what you are going to run across: a private rant that might offer a perspective you never thought of before, arcane technical details you never dreamed of, personal reminiscences or fresh analysis.

About ten years ago I cancelled my cable TV. I just couldn't stand the idea of spending one more minute listening to station announcements, commercials and hashed and re-hashed numbskull commentary. The blogosphere is a hundred times more interesting than television.

So what's the topic for today? Loosely, how to live well and, if I am lucky, I will tie this into music somehow.

I've talked before about how money is merely an instrumental good. What this means is that, while money is certainly a good and an essential one, it is not a good or end in itself. Money can buy you good things or bad things. It can be spent well or poorly. This is what it means to be an instrumental good. The interesting thing is that you can live well despite not having as much money as you would like.

Let me give you an example. I tend to eat out quite a bit through laziness and lack of time to shop. There are some good restaurants who reliably turn out a good meal, but one week I just got unlucky. My usual haunts were just not up to snuff and I went almost a week without having what I would call a good meal. So I went to the grocery and bought the ingredients for coq au vin, a French dish that is quite easy to make. The secret is to use a decent bottle of pinot noir. Here is a pretty good recipe, but you really don't even have to marinate the chicken. Just fry up some bacon in a big heavy pot, brown the chicken, take it out, sauté the vegetables, put the chicken back, pour the wine over and simmer for 45 minutes. I like to just throw in quartered mushrooms and simmer another fifteen minutes. That's pretty much it. Serve with little boiled potatoes. There really isn't anything difficult about it. But you rarely get good coq au vin in a restaurant because it takes too long.

So, one rule of living well is to know how to cook a few good recipes. Cooking doesn't demand a lot of complex skills. If you can chop an onion, you can cook. What it does require is a nose, some knowledge and taste--taste in the sense of "bon gout". What François Couperin said was required to play the harpsichord well. Knowing how to phrase, how to deliver elegant ornaments, how to roll a chord and how to choose the right tempo. In cooking it is knowing when something is just done and not overdone (very important when cooking fish), knowing how hot to have your frying pan, knowing how much salt to add. I said "nose" above, because you can tell a lot by smelling the food as it is cooking. The "taste" part comes in partly from, yes, tasting the food as you cook, but even more in knowing what to cook. Knowing that you can throw together a decent coq au vin.

Partly it is having the right ingredients and the right tools. You have to have a good sharp chef's knife. A cast-iron frying pan well-seasoned is good. I just bought a Belgian waffle iron. But really, you don't need to spend much money to have what you need. The most important thing is knowledge of what you could cook and how to do it and also good taste. Bon gout.

Here is where I can cross over into music aesthetics, because it is really the same thing. Being able to recognize a decent meal and a good piece of music are not so terribly different. You can live well in terms of food with knowledge and taste and the same is true of music. To push the metaphor to where I want it--right over the top!--listening to the kind of stuff that is blared out at you every day from the mass media is like always eating at MacDonald's, Burger King, KFC and Taco Bell! Salt and fat, salt and fat, salt and fat! And carbs, let's not forget carbs.

You can develop both knowledge and taste and learn how to eat much better by cooking for yourself and being more discriminating about where you eat. Again, it's not a question of money. It is not expensive to cook a good meal at home and there are excellent modestly-priced restaurants just about everywhere. The same with music: a bit of knowledge and taste can lead you to music that is far more satisfying than what is blasted out at you.

Ah yes, that is the real goal of this blog! I know that a lot of very knowledgeable people read this blog, but it is really aimed at those who want to know more and develop their taste.

Knowledge and taste are intimately connected. You need to know some music before you can develop a taste for it. You need to develop enthusiasms and dislikes. Have opinions! But recognize that all opinions are no more than that. Allow your opinions to develop and change as your knowledge and taste grows.

Learning how to have satisfying musical experiences also doesn't need to cost much. It used to be that you needed a pretty decent stereo and a record collection. But now? A computer, even a laptop, with some reasonably good speakers is all you need. YouTube contains more music than you could ever listen to in a dozen lifetimes. If you have a desktop iMac, the built-in speakers are pretty good. Otherwise, you can buy external ones starting at $12! If you want really good quality, Bose speakers start at around $100. Compared to what a good component stereo used to cost, that's cheap.

And if you want to learn about music, just go to the Internet. There are a lot of good articles in Wikipedia including ones on every composer you can think of. If you get very interested in a particular composer, you are going to have to buy some books as what is on the Internet is limited. But it is a good place to start. And it is absolutely free.

I think I have made my point. Living well does not require a lot of money. In fact, I am pretty sure a lot of rich people lead pretty miserable lives. Living well means eating good meals and that means knowing where to find a good meal or how to make it yourself. It also means being able to appreciate art, including music. Otherwise, you live your live at the mercy of hucksters, frauds and commercial interests. Fast food franchises fulfill an important role, but you should not mistake the food they offer for real quality. Commercial popular music also fulfills an important role, but again, you should not mistake that kind of music for real quality.

Let's end with a great piece of music. This is the second movement of the Symphony No. 3 by Henryk Górecki:

I highly recommend the Wikipedia article on this symphony that I linked above.

Interval Training for Guitarists

I'm not sure how long interval training has been around, but I recently read an article reporting on research that indicates it is an extremely good program for fitness. I can't even find the link now, but the researchers have come up with an intense daily workout that is supposed to be the best. You do brief, 30 second, exercises interspersed with ten second rest periods. Here are the exercises:

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I've just started doing these every morning replacing my old routine which was based on a martial arts warmup routine. Very demanding! So far I can only get through two-thirds of the exercises.

The reason I bring this up is that I realized after doing this for a couple of days that long ago I developed something similar to maintain and improve my guitar technique. I have limited time to practice so I needed a very concentrated technical routine that would keep me in shape.

Here is what I do:

• Left hand finger crossing exercise. This is one that I learned from Pepe Romero. It consists in starting on the 6th string first fret with the first LH finger, then the 2nd LH finger directly below on the first fret 5th string, then the first LH finger on the 4th string first fret, second LH finger on the 3rd string first fret and so on to the first string and returning to the 6th. Then the 2nd and 3rd fingers walk across the fretboard on the second fret and finally the 3rd and 4th fingers on the third fret. Here is what it looks like:

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• Then I do some kind of LH independence exercise. Here are some of the possibilities:

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This example is from my technique book.

• Next I do some form of scale exercise, either an ordinary three octave scale in different rhythms (slow quarter notes, triplets, dotted, two sixteenths and an eighth, four sixteenths and so on) or a chromatic scale. The version I usually do is triplets (or sextuplets) going back and forth. You can do it on a single string, here is what it looks like on the third string:

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or on all the strings. I usually start on the sixth string and keep going up on each string. On the first, I go all the way to the 19th fret, then return.

• Next I do a couple of slur exercises where I hold some notes down while slurring other notes. Here are some examples:

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• Then I do a right hand rasgueado exercise which is very good for loosening and strengthening the RH. Here are several and I usually just pick one and do it for a minute or two:

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• Next is another LH exercise. I do this one all the way up to the twelfth fret and back. This is another exercise I learned from Pepe Romero:

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• Finally I do a right hand exercise for tremolo starting with the reverse, PIMA:

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This is another excerpt from my technique book. What I mean by "G major in 3rds" is to ascend to the 12th fret with a G major scale in thirds. I usually do this with PIMA, then the flamenco version of tremolo, PIAMI and ending with the conventional tremolo, PAMI.

That's it! It takes me fifteen to twenty minutes to do and keeps my hands in pretty good shape.

Now if all you oboists, pianists, violinists could comment on what you do?

Chopin: Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52

I've written several posts on Chopin, including two where I discuss the Ballade No. 1 in G minor. Today I want to have a look at the last Ballade. The ballades, a form very nearly invented from scratch by Chopin, are related to Romantic ballad poetry, which contrasts with lyric poetry in that there is a narrative. It is in the ballades that Chopin comes closest to the Romantic interest in 'program' music, music that tries to tell some kind of story. Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt both excelled at this. But Chopin avoided any specifics in his music, keeping secret the exact inspiration of particular works. Robert Schumann tells us that the Fourth Ballade was inspired by the poem The Three Budrys by the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz which you can read here. Decide for yourself if knowledge of the poem is crucial to listening to the Ballade.

What does seem relevant are things like meter: all Chopin's Ballades are in 6/4 or 6/8 meter which gives them a lilting forward movement. There may be some influence from opera where 'ballade' indicates a narrative song. But what Chopin succeeded in doing was adapting some of the principles of sonata form, which gives music a structure through harmonic tension and resolution. This allowed Chopin to create coherent forms and to give them a drive to a conclusion, something that has a narrative-like feel to it.

The Fourth Ballade, like the First, seems to coalesce out of nothing, as if we come upon someone telling a story that has already begun. At the beginning, much is ambiguous. What is the melody, what the accompaniment? Here is the opening:

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The repeated Gs on top seem to be accompaniment with a melodic figure in the left hand below. But no, it is the G that takes on melodic function as it descends to F and E natural. But it turns out that all this was just laying out the dominant harmony. The real melody starts in the third line, with the fermata. Rather capriciously this melody wanders into G flat major territory after a couple of phrases. If you read my post on the First Ballade, you might recall that A flat major was important there. Both of these are remote harmonies from the tonic. In the First Ballade, A flat is just a semitone above the tonic and, hmmm, this is interesting, in the Fourth Ballade, G flat is also just a semitone above the tonic F minor. These seemingly remote harmonies have been used by composers for a long time. Usually chords built on the lowered second degree, the "flat supertonic" are found in first inversion: bII6. They have the nickname the "Neapolitan Sixth". Typically they are used as a particularly strong preparation for the dominant. Here is what it looks like in C minor:

It works as a dominant preparation because it shares two notes with the subdominant. In C minor the subdominant is spelled F Ab C. To turn it into a Neapolitan you need only change the C to a Db.

Before we go any further, let's listen to the Ballade. Luckily there is a wonderful performance by Arthur Rubinstein that includes the score:

As that theme continues, Chopin keeps transforming it with subtle decoration and harmonic shifts. Sometimes he ends a phrase with a half-cadence on the relative major, Ab major, but then continues in F minor. Around the 2:15 mark we meet a new, slower theme. Here it is starting in the last measure of the first line of the excerpt:

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This theme is set in C flat major, a tritone away from the original tonic, F minor. Right after, the first theme returns, intermixed with the new one. Throughout the piece we will see Chopin masterfully mixing together the practices of sonata form and variation technique. There is much more counterpoint there than in the previous three Ballades. Notice how a new countermelody is introduced around 3:12. As the music progresses there is the feeling of hastening to a climax--this is the narrative element. Around the 4 minute mark we move to the key of Bb major and what seems to be a new theme, though one that is really a transformation of that second theme in Cb. Here it is, where it says "a tempo primo":

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Finally, at around the 6 minute mark, we return to the theme and textures of the opening. What makes this different from a typical sonata form recapitulation (apart from the fact that it comes too soon) is that there is no exact repeat. We are hearing variations on the original themes in all dimensions: melodic, harmonic and rhythmic. The rushing brilliant variations are interrupted by this mysterious passage in chords:

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Traditionally, after the recapitulation, if there is going to be a coda, there is often a movement to the subdominant which lowers the tension--it is kind of a harmonic denouement. I think what Chopin is doing here is something similar. We have had so many rich and remote harmonies that he wrenches us back to the dominant of F minor and then underlines that with these chords, all of which merely outline C E natural G Bb, the V7 of F minor. This gives us a breathing space and sets up the coda, which will give us a brilliant conclusion to the piece. The only thing to do now is listen to it again!

Space Oddity

Back in the early 1980s I fell back in love with some popular music after ignoring it for more than a decade while I worked on becoming a capable classical guitarist. After the release of Abbey Road I never heard anything of much interest until the 80s. Then, by chance, I heard a song by the Australian Group Men at Work and got intrigued with their sound. Soon after I got acquainted with the music of Talking Heads and The Police. I also got to know David Bowie with the album Let's Dance, though one of the things that attracted me was the guitar-playing of Stevie Ray Vaughn. I also owned a collection of Bowie's greatest hits which included his early 1969 song "Space Oddity". Here is the original version:

There's a new version out, with a new video, recorded by Chris Hadfield. Who's that? Well, he is really better known as a fighter pilot and astronaut. He was born and raised in Ontario and had a twenty-five year career in the Royal Canadian Air Force. Since 1992 he has been an astronaut with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA. Right at this moment he is in space, commander of the International Space Station. He is also a singer and guitarist and good enough to do his own version of "Space Oddity" recorded, on location, in the International Space Station. Here it is:

Fellow Canadian musician Emm Gryner helped create the backing track. From the final credits we know that the piano, bass, drums and what is probably a synthesizer track were recorded on Earth. The vocal and guitar were recorded in the space station. He is playing a Canadian guitar made by Larrivée and using Shure microphones. Apparently he has, in his spare time, recorded an entire album!

I just thought this was pretty cool...