Amy Beach and the Boundary Composers

Amy Beach was an American composer from New Hampshire who lived between 1867 and 1944. I think her Piano Concerto in C sharp minor is outstanding, and she is quickly becoming one of my favorite composers.

I noticed that many of my favorite composers fall on the boundaries between the different periods of classical music (examples of boundaries are Late Classical/Early Romantic and Late Romantic/Early Modern). Is this just a coincidence?

Well, perhaps not. Those who come at the end of a period achieve an unsurpassed level of refinement in style for that period while taking adventurous steps forward in anticipation of the next. Those who come at the beginning of a period define the spirit of that period while benefiting from the refinement of the one that came before. Incidentally, one thing all boundary composers have in common is that they can at times be difficult to classify by period.

We should appreciate Beethoven and Debussy as innovators and also Mozart and Rachmaninov, who each composed some of the greatest swan songs for periods of classical music.

Edit: I was overly enthusiastic in my estimation of Amy Beach's piano concerto. It is a fun piece of music, but after further listening I would not call it "outstanding."

Where It All Began

A little past noon today, I turned on the radio and caught the last movement of Rachmaninov's Symphony No. 2, performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam and conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy. The music warmed my heart in a familiar way and interrupted the routine of my life.

I was introduced to Rachmaninov about eight years ago. If it were not for his Piano Concerto No. 2, Classical Music Breakfast probably would not exist. It was one night all of those years ago when, after listening to that concerto, I realized I had finally found confirmation that life could be as interesting as I had always thought it could be.

Over the next couple of years, I listened to Rachmaninov's music on a near daily basis, with a special emphasis on the piano concertos. Finally, I reached a point where I felt I had discovered in many of his works just about all I could possibly discover, and I noticed that I would get more from the music if I gave myself regular, lengthy breaks to help loosen my familiarity with it.

It was then that I started seriously exploring other composers, and I was able to gain an appreciation for Prokofiev, Tchaikovsky, Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, Saint-Saens, Elgar, Debussy, and others. For the most part, I now limit myself to chance encounters (such as today's) with Rachmaninov's music, and it is always interesting to hear his music on the radio or at the occasional concert.

Classicism

I listened to Haydn's Symphony No. 83, nicknamed The Hen, on Classical WETA today. It is so nicknamed because of a recurring theme in the first movement that brings to mind the image of a hen walking, its head bobbing back and forth. The symphony was great fun to listen to.

Haydn and Mozart composed around the same time, and their styles were similar. They are often referred to as members of the Classical Period of classical music. Given the name of the period, this would mean that they adhered to universal musical standards to an even greater degree than did composers associated with other periods, and I would say this is true. The main criticism of Classical Period composers is that they did not take many risks, meaning there were certain interesting forms of music that were off limits to them. Still, their music's beauty is something to behold.

When first exposed to classicism in art, I believe it is natural to experience awe, as was the case when, as a child, I first saw pictures of Michelangelo's David. Having grown accustomed to it, though, we tend to tire of it and seek out new forms. But still later, having seen what there is to see, we tend to arrive finally at a new, profound appreciation for classicism. This coming full circle is the experience I and others have had with the music of Haydn and Mozart.

Tragedy

Some of the greatest composers in history accomplished what they did despite dying at a young age. Mozart passed away at 35. Imagine what would have come after The Magic Flute, Piano Concerto No. 27, the Clarinet Concerto, and the unfinished Requiem, all of which were composed during the final year of his life.

And then consider Schubert, who lived to be only 31. What would have followed Winterreise, the String Quintet, and his Symphony No. 9?

Then there is Mendelssohn, who died at 38, and Chopin, 39.

The tragedies are ours, however, for these men lived full lives.

Identity

If I'm trying to refer to a work of music you've heard and you're unaware of the work's title, then how do I go about it? Do I give a theoretical account of the work, citing the harmonically rich opening, the rapidly changing textures, and the key change to B-flat major in bar 70? No, not unless we're playing a trivia game. Rather, I provide you with an actual sound from the music. Do I voice a percussive timpani part from the final movement? No, I am much more likely to sing some notes for you. OK, then do I sing the part of the cello line that oscillates back and forth between B-flat and A for 30 seconds? Again, no. I am much more likely to sing something melodic. Further, I would choose what I deem to be the most distinctive and memorable melody from the entire work.

For this reason, while melody might not always be the most interesting aspect of a work of music, I would say it is usually the soul of the work, the aspect you associate with the work's identity. I believe this is a result of how our minds work.

Indeed, what would I do if I had to refer to a work of atonal serialism without being able to use the work's title? If I were to attempt to sing it aloud, it would make for one interesting scene. My only recourse would be to offer up some well-known piece of trivia related to the work. In my mind, then, I have represented the work not using melody or anything else musical but rather using words.

And indeed, what would I do if I had to refer to Beethoven's Ninth Symphony without using the work's title? Why, I would hum Ode to Joy, of course. And what beautiful, evocative music Beethoven makes when he takes that melody and lets us hear it in different contexts, on different instruments.

Words of Wisdom

"Without craftsmanship, inspiration is a mere reed shaken in the wind." --Johannes Brahms

"Neither a lofty degree of intelligence nor imagination nor both together go to the making of genius. Love, love, love, that is the soul of genius." --Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Timelessness

This is George Frideric Handel, composer of Messiah. His style of grooming is no longer fashionable, but his music still is.

Twilight

Here is an experience I've had a few times:

I am at a concert, and a moving performance is about to come to an end. I suddenly feel sad. The sun is descending on another world, a world I had only one chance to experience, and soon all will be dark. At the same time, it is the end of the performance I've been waiting to hear. Now, the moment arrives, and I feel sadness and joy at the same time.

I believe that all of the most touching experiences in life are tinged with sadness. Something happens when joy and sadness are combined; the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. The closest name I can think of to describe this combined emotion is "the feeling of being human."

The Nature of the Medium

This is the world we live in, one filled with dirt and cracks that give a unique character to every old building we look at, no matter how much alike they may be in design. What a joy it is to consider that renditions of music compositions are like old buildings and that each has its own unique character.

Now, that's what I call diplomacy!

During her final trip to the United Kingdom as US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, a classically trained pianist, performed music by Johannes Brahms for the Queen, at Buckingham Palace.

Over the years, Rice has shown a special appreciation for Brahms, several times complimenting him during interviews. She seems to prefer earlier German and Austrian composers like Beethoven, Mozart, and Brahms, who to her are more restrained emotionally and have more structure to their music.

Prudence

Even when a work or some aspect of a work has a universal meaning, the meaning can be elusive. It is always pleasing and sometimes of great importance to grasp something that is elusive, and so elusiveness is one of the many things for us to value in works of art. But, it, of course, is not the only thing, and I would say it is not the most important.

I believe we have a tendency to overvalue a work in proportion to the elusiveness of the work's meaning. Overvaluing can mean elevating a work from mediocre to good, from good to better, etc. Now, this kind of overvaluing happens for a few different reasons. Imagine yourself in the position of someone who has just managed to lift the (elusive) meaning from an obscure symphony (to get an idea of what I mean by the meaning of a symphony, see Gate to the Mountains and Moments). First, you might be concerned that others will not understand the work and so you promote it so that it will not be forgotten or underappreciated. Second, it would be a shame if you grasped something elusive and no one believed that you did. So, to make sure everyone is aware, you might say how outstanding the work is. This is not as bad as seeing the naked Emperor's new clothes, for the Emperor is wearing clothes in this case, only they are not as interesting as you let on. Finally, you might have a societal motivation for overvaluing the work, for by doing so, you might gain admittance into an exclusive club of sorts that prides itself on understanding the work whereas others do not.

It seems that newer works are more prone to being overvalued for their elusiveness, simply because they tend to depart more from familiar, established norms and hence tend to have more elusive meanings. (What once might have been just as elusive about older works is now more familiar and easier to grasp, for the world has had time to absorb it.) Whether initially overvalued or undervalued, as a work's debut recedes into the past, opinions on the work tend to grow more measured and sober. This is one good reason why the test of time is a good measuring tool for works of art. (The main danger I see in using the test of time is that the present generation might lose sight of the historical context in which a particular work appeared. However, the more timeless a work, the less of a concern this is.)

I believe that any loss of truth and honesty in art is regrettable, such is the importance of art. Let us then be prudent when offering our views. If a work's meaning is elusive, it is fine to say so, and people should appreciate that fact. But, as I have described, elusive is not the same as outstanding or great.

A Cup of Coffee

Schweigt stille, plaudert nicht! (Be still, stop chattering!), is a secular cantata composed by Bach between 1732 and 1734. It is also known as The Coffee Cantata. You will sometimes see it performed today in the style of a miniature comic opera.

The story revolves around a father and his daughter. The father, Schlendrian (which literally means Stick in the Mud), urges his daughter Lieschen to give up coffee. The daughter refuses and sings lovingly of her coffee. Next, the father starts issuing ultimatums, but none of these work until he threatens to withhold marriage. While the father is out looking for a husband, the daughter secretly tells potential suitors that she insists upon having her coffee, as a condition for marriage. In the end, the father comes around, and all proclaim that coffee drinking is natural to humans just as catching mice is natural to cats.

What determines whether a habit is good or bad? Well, we humans are all creatures of habit, and what ultimately determines whether one's collection of habits is good or bad is the degree to which those habits, together, promote the individual's well being. Now, for humans, being well is not as simple as just being physically healthy. A single term that captures the full meaning of "being well" in this context is the classical Greek word eudaimonia, which is best translated as "human flourishing." Aristotle discusses at length the concept of eudaimonia in his Nicomachean Ethics.

But, how can one flourish as a human if life is meaningless? To this I say: I highly doubt that anyone's life is meaningless, for it seems that each person has either openly or secretly identified, either consciously or unconsciously, a God that rules over his or her life. Thus, achieving human flourishing depends upon one's submission to the will of his or her God. It is this submission that allows one to deem habits either good or bad for oneself.

As for me, I have gone on and off coffee at various times in my life. Fortunately, for those times when I felt I would be better off not drinking it, it has proven to be not as difficult to quit as Lieschen would lead you to believe. This, together with its other virtues, makes coffee a wonderful drink, indeed.

Classical WETA, Part 2

In my last post, I talked about the Classical Countdown on Classical WETA. Let us now compare results from year to year. I made the following list the same way I made the last one (see the previous post), only I used the older 2007 Classical Countdown results as opposed to the 2008 results.

1. Beethoven 612
   
2. Tchaikovsky 387
   
3. Bach 366
   
4. Mozart 344
   
5. Rachmaninov 285
   
6. Dvorak 215
   
7. Vaughan Williams 141
   
8. Wagner 101
   
9. Brahms 97
   
10. Copland 93
    
11. Rimsky-Korsakov 88
    
12. Vivaldi 86
    
13. Gershwin 83
    
14. Saint-Saens 82
    
15. Pachelbel 79
    
16. Mussorgsky 77
    
17. Handel 77
    
18. Barber 76
    
19. Grieg 68
    
20. Bruch 65
    
21. Mahler 64
    

Membership in the top six, therefore, has not changed at all from 2007 to 2008. Below that point, there are significant changes. This is not surprising since the point totals are smaller the farther down the list you go. Beethoven, once again, achieved the number one ranking with ease.

Classical WETA

The Washington, D.C., area's classical music station is Classical WETA 90.9 FM. It is a wonderful radio station and is another good way to explore classical music. At www.weta.org, they publish the station's playlist every day so that you can plan ahead and also so that you have a record of what recordings were aired when. For example, today's playlist shows that the Philips 422.328 recording of Bach's Trio Sonata in D Minor (BWV 527) will air at 11:48pm. Both locals and non-locals alike should feel free to listen (if you're up that late), using the website's free Listen Live feature.

Every year, Classical WETA listeners vote for their 90 favorite pieces from the last 400 years or so in the Classical Countdown. It appears that operas are not counted, although some suites from operas (and ballets) are. The results are published at weta.org. You can view the most recent results here: http://www.weta.org/fm/features/classicalcountdown/vote

I was not content with this list, so I decided to go a step further and determine who are the Washington, D.C., area's favorite composers, roughly speaking. To do this, I used a simple approach. If a composer's work appeared at place n on the countdown, then that composer earned 91-n points. Thus, a composer would earn 91-1=90 points for the #1 ranked piece, and 91-90=1 point for the #90 ranked piece. A total of 19 composers ended up with point totals within one order of magnitude of Beethoven's point total (Beethoven won easily). Here is the resulting rankings list of composers (you can compare this list to the list from Composers, January 2009):

1. Beethoven 732
   
2. Bach 388
   
3. Tchaikovsky 299
   
4. Rachmaninov 298
   
5. Mozart 211
   
6. Dvorak 206
   
7. Brahms 193
   
8. Grieg 119
   
9. Mendelssohn 119
   
10. Handel 100
    
11. Mahler 97
    
12. Vaughan Williams 90
    
13. Rimsky-Korsakov 86
    
14. Saint-Saens 82
    
15. Vivaldi 81
    
16. Chopin 80
    
17. Smetana 80
    
18. Mussorgsky 74
    
19. Gershwin 74
    

A Perfect Pairing

I was driving home the other night when John Alden Carpenter's Adventures in a Perambulator came on the radio. There are those moments in life when music is matched perfectly with environment, creating a magical music listening experience, and this was one of them. The impressionism of the music allowed my mind to drift just the right amount, and I was lead on a journey through some of the best areas of my subconscious, aided by the images moving past me.

Concert of Note

On March 26 of this year, Yuri Temirkanov returns to Maryland to conduct Prokofiev's Fifth Symphony (and Brahms's Violin Concerto). There are also performances on March 27, 28, and 29. The first performance will be held at Strathmore Music Hall in North Bethesda. The remaining performances will be held at Joseph Meyer Symphony Hall in Baltimore.

In 2007, I saw Temirkanov conduct Prokofiev's Fifth with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic in Washington, D.C. I would call it one of the best music listening experiences of my life. Temirkanov's nobility is something to behold, and his rapport with the orchestra, whether it be the St. Petersburg Philharmonic or the Baltimore Symphony, is evident with every note. (Temirkanov was Music Director of the Baltimore Symphony from 2000 until 2006, during which time I saw him conduct several times. It will be nice to see him conduct them again.)

I have written about this symphony before (see The Love for Three Oranges). I can not imagine another conductor drawing out the meaning of this work any more than Temirkanov does. If you are a fan of the work, then this performance is not to be missed.

Benefit of the Doubt

I will admit that until recently, my appreciation for Johannes Brahms was limited. I had enjoyed singing the tenor part in many of his Liebeslieder Waltzes (Love song waltzes) and listening to his symphonies, but I would not have thought of him as being anywhere near the level of Mozart or Beethoven. That is, until I listened to his Clarinet Quintet recently. It was then that I heard with my own ears what the more experienced critics had been hearing. From now on, I will give Brahms the benefit of the doubt, and by doing so, I am sure I will discover some great music.

Once you catch a glimpse of a composer's genius, the composer gains your trust. From then on, you know there is a profound substance to that composer's work. We can never bypass this process of discovery, lest we find ourselves in the Emperor's Court.

I am sure all of the Brahms lovers out there wish they could relive what I am just now experiencing.

Moments

Classical music works are full of moments. A moment can be anything from a certain sound that evokes an image in your mind to a convergence of multiple threads of development that finally declare the theme of a work in full force. It can be the reappearance of the main melody of Chopin's Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2, midway through the piece, or the first time the left hand begins to play arpeggios during Debussy's Clair de Lune, or the haunting melody that begins Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 3, or the fugato near the end of Mozart's Jupiter Symphony, or the first three notes of the finale of Beethoven's Fifth.

Why do these moments affect us the way they do? Because composers prepare you for them (in the case of a beginning, it, too, bears some relation to the rest of the piece and is better appreciated during subsequent listens). By the time a certain moment arrives, you subconsciously perceive its significance, which is usually more than onefold. That is, a single moment can play many roles all at once.

Imagine a moment in a movie where a man walks slowly toward a house to open a door. When he reaches the door, it is the completion of his walking. You notice the gentle way he reaches for the doorknob and also the complex emotion his face shows while doing so. The door is the one he placed there himself when he built the house 20 years earlier. Now, the sun peeks out from behind a cloud and shines light on his face, revealing scars. You notice consciously for the first time that he is carrying a small package, even though he was carrying it the whole walk up to the house. The door opens onto a familiar room - it is the room from the dreams he had been having. Standing on the other side of the door are his wife and children. He has not seen them for four years, during which time he was away at war. He extends his hand, package inside, to his wife, and she grabs hold of him, forcing the package to fall to the floor.

Novelists, screenwriters, and film directors like to create moments like this in their stories, and so do composers. In this movie moment, there are many points of significance, but you would not consciously enumerate each one while watching. Rather, you would simply feel all of the significance, perhaps somewhere in your chest. You would be aware of all the things going on in that scene on a subconscious level. The same type of thing happens while listening to classical music, only everything is more abstract, having the effect of invoking your imagination. Along with all of this, there is also the mathematical aspect of classical music that helps make the music sound good and can help create some moments that satisfy your mind's craving for sense and order.

Now, many moments can be experienced only in proper context. Consider a dramatic movie. You cannot just watch one 2-minute scene and expect it to have the same emotional impact as it would have had had you watched the whole movie, especially if you are not already familiar with the story. Likewise, when listening to Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, the triumph you feel at the opening of the last movement depends on your having experienced the previous three movements. This is why it is often recommended that you listen to a work the way the composer intended it to be listened to.

A concluding remark: There is a philosophy in art that says that a work should have only one main theme; otherwise, the work should be divided into multiple works. Thus, every part of a work should have some relevant and necessary relationship with the main theme. Sometimes, there is a single moment in such a work that expresses the work's theme forcefully, revealing the meaning of all of the moments that came before. An example is during the finale of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony when the chorus sings Ode to Joy. In my opinion, this kind of moment is one of the most amazing things to experience in art.

Reverence

The word reverence means "a feeling of deep respect mixed with awe." It is a very human word. Various composers throughout history each have been motivated by reverence for something, whether that something be God, nature, or maybe unrequited love, and they have sought to capture this feeling in their music.

Bach's Air from Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major (BWV 1068) is full of reverence, and as always with Bach, the scope of the work is as large as the universe. Air expresses a serious respect for existence and for human beings in particular and projects for all to experience a peaceful world in which you will find only the best of human nature.

Liberal Rewards

The average duration of a track of classical music is around 8:26 (8 minutes and 26 seconds), based on the website www.naxos.com/workman, which features a reasonably good representative sampling of classical music. Compare this to the average duration of a pop song, which is around 3:43, based on my own digital collection. On average, then, classical music tracks are more than twice as long as pop music tracks.

That is point one. Here is point two:

In The NPR Guide to Building a Classical CD Collection, Mstislav Rostropovich, the famous cellist and conductor, provides an illuminating introduction, titled "On Listening to Music." In it, he brings up the point that getting distracted while listening to classical music is akin to reading a novel and skipping over pages.

So, not only are classical music works long, but you have to pay close attention to them, too. For these reasons, it is not surprising that newcomers to classical music may feel intimidated. What is worse, in my experience, many people innocently approach classical music the way they would approach pop music (after all, it's all music, right?), whereas an approach more like the one people use for watching movies or for reading novels is in fact appropriate.

Listening to classical music requires effort on the part of the listener, there is no doubt. Granted, sitting quietly in a room for half an hour listening intently to music might feel less natural than sitting quietly in a room watching a movie. But, for those who enjoy classical music, they have learned that all of their effort is liberally rewarded.