Schoenberg, Marquis of Granby

Schoenberg, Marquis of Granby
Originally uploaded by petemaskreplica.

Who knew?

Survival strategies for the average composer (3)

Great things are afoot at Defeatist Towers, but it's important not to let real life get in the way of procrastination, so here is the third in what remains for the moment a regular series.

3. It's not your fault... but you still have to deal with it.

Bobbins's comment on strategy no.2 raises some points that regularly come up if you're in the business of what we are pleased to call Contemporary Music, and just like a drunk in the pub, no matter how friendly the initial approach, when they appear you know in your heart that things are bound to turn nasty eventually.

But, like the lairy pisshead waiting outside the pub at 11 o'clock to deck you for looking at his pint or spilling his bird, there's no avoiding it, so we may as well pile in. There is, ahem, a debate continuing about what's happened in SCCM* since the turn of the last century, whether it's a valid development, whether it has any future or will ever attract a large audience, whether classical music is dead**, and whether the perpetrators should be dragged outside and given a damn good kicking by hoards of indignant Classic FM listeners.

Arnold Schoenberg, knocking up a few volleys in between alienating the masses

Now there are many arguments and counter-arguments here: Who abandoned whom first, composers or audiences (answer: audiences, as it happens, during the 19th century), whether it's allowable to write music not based on the tonal system (answer: of course it's "allowed", I'll write whatever the hell I like, thank you very much), and so on and so forth. As with the drunk man we met in the pub at the start of this post, an awful lot of this fractiousness is down to some misunderstandings, but that doesn't make the outcome any less violent. Except that it's down to a lot of misunderstandings that happened years ago, long before you and I were around.

The practical upshot of this is that as soon as you're outed as a composer, and just after the inevitable question is asked "Do you write modern music?", you'll be expected to be on the defensive about what your interrogator perceives as a century of atrocities that were perpetrated out of personal malice for them.*** The honest answer is that a) it was like that when you got here, b) yes, there is a lot of bad modern music about, but there's a lot of bad old music as well, it's just that we've had time to forget about that, c) not all modern music sounds the same, d) there's nothing inherently wrong, as it happens, in writing music with a limited audience, e) Hey, Schoenberg's really not that bad, have a listen to this great Hilary Hahn CD of the Violin Concerto! and f) actually this whole argument is at least 20 years out of date anyway, if you took the trouble to pay any attention to current trends. Unfortunately, such arguments will fall on deaf ears. Sorry, but as far as the world's concerned, everything's ruined, and it's all your fault, you composing bastard.


*SCCM: So-Called Classical Music.

**Classical music actually died in about 1827, of course.

*** I remember an occasion as a boy when a piece I wrote for a school music competition making limited use of serial techniques was denounced by my housemaster (yes, it was that kind of school) as "a sick joke". I argued back in a very cogent fashion, explaining the history of Schoenbergian technique and the long establishment and academic respectability of such methods, and was I think very restrained in that I never once used the phrase "you narrow-minded wanker". Or even anything worse.

Inobservant

Take a look at Anthony Holden's review from this week's Observer. Skip the bit about Strauss - Mr Holden doesn't like to stray too far from the opera house, so his reviews are usually about operas, especially expensive ones with big names in them. But occasionally he remembers that there are other classical music genres, and manages to get himself to one of those concert hall places. This week he's managed to navigate his way to Snape Maltings in Aldeburgh (probably relatively easy, as it was established by Britten, who of course was primarily a composer of operas). He's also aware of the current artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival, Thomas Ades (presumably because he's seen his name about the Royal Opera House advertising one of those high-profile opera commissions that stop Mr Ades writing something more interesting), although the sub who prepared the copy doesn't seem to realise that Ades doesn't feature in this concert. But the excellent French pianist Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who's due to replace Mr Ades as thge Aldeburgh Festival'sartistic director next year, does.

Consider this:

"taste-free modern slices of Schoenberg, Kurtag, Webern and Charles Ives amid some nourishing Haydn and Mozart."

Taste-free? I've heard the above composers accused of many things in my time, but blandness certainly isn't one of them. How anyone can think such things of The Unanswered Question, or Webern's Five Movements, is beyond me. And "modern"? Kurtág's still living and breathing, sure, but of the rest the most recently animate is Ives, and he died in 1954 (that's 54 years ago, Mr Holden). Those four composers represent a remarkably wide spectrum of twentieth century musical trends, and it seems unfair to brush them aside in this manner.

Mr Holden also seems confused at the difference between conducting and directing from the keyboard. He describes Aimard's conducting of Haydn's Symphony No.22 as "sprightly", and specifically states that "All went well until Aimard attempted to conduct from the keyboard." And yet his conclusion is that it's

"Just as well, perhaps, that Aimard has disavowed any ambition to give up the piano for conducting."

Huh? You just said his conducting was good! It was his directing from the keyboard in the concerto that went wrong, you said. So not only is that little dig at the end nasty and petty, it's also factually wrong.

So there you go - three paragraphs which say next to nothing about the music, and are a set-up for a punchline that doesn't work.

If someone's got a narrow viewpoint, I can put up with it (well, just about, as long as you don't ask me to talk to them for any length of time). But if you're going to be a narrow-minded music critic, you'd better write with a Swiftian level of wit and be prepared to back your opinion up rather than just casually dismiss the past century of music. Maybe if you didn't gorge your palate with late-romantic opera you'd have taste buds clear enough to appreciate other flavours.

Removing the safety net

Alex Ross (whose excellent book The Rest Is Noise I'm reading at the moment) calculates that today is the centenary of atonality. This of course is something you can argue about until the cows come home, and is probably a bit arbitrary, but I like the idea as today is also Beethoven's birthday, and happenstance always appeals to me.

Beethoven these days is rather less controversial than he once was, but atonality still has a power to annoy, which pleases me greatly, as those who get annoyed are on the whole small-minded people who deserve to be annoyed.

Atonality has a special significance for me, as it was those school exercises in listening to and repeating an atonal melody, and later writing one (which I found quite easy to do, despite its being trailed as a more difficult exercise than the similar tasks we were given with tonal melodies) that really first put the idea in my head that composing wasn't necessarily just practised by dead people, but was something I might have a go at myself.

Schoenberg didn't actually like the word, preferring to talk about pantonality. It's a significant distinction, as it makes it about extending and enriching something rather than removing it, which is what you can hear happening in Schoenberg's music leading to his break with key signatures. It was something that was in the air (Schoenberg wasn't the only composer moving in this direction), but he was the first to stand up and say what he was doing (and more importantly the first that anyone took any notice of). It wasn't the action that was radical, so much as speaking its name.

Tonal oder atonal?

Dodecaphony 2.0

Given the way most composer estates and publishers seem determined to keep their copyrights so firmly under lock an key that it would seem they actively want to discourage interest in the music, it's heartening to see the Schoenberg family taking a much more enlightened approach. The Schoenberg website is an exemplary resource, bringing an immense archive online and available to anyone. Everything from manuscripts to home movies of the great man playing tennis is there.

(Link from the estimable Alex Ross.)

Prom 45: Schoenberg, Knussen, Henze, Stravinsky

A great bear of a man with a proudly bushy beard, Oliver Knussen reminds me more and more of Brahms. He and the BBC Symphony Orchestra open this concert with Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, once the future of music, now almost a century old. Schoenberg is one of those blamed by those who think it all went wrong at the turn of the last century, although if they bothered to listen properly they'd notice the Viennese part of the Second Viennese School. Nostalgic memories of older Austrian music is an integral part of Schoenberg's aesthetic, and Knussen and the BBC SO brought this out beautifully in a delicate, poised performance.This is wonderful music, passionate, urgent and beautiful (yes, beautiful). It's probably too much to hope at this stage that Schoenberg will ever be popular, but isn't it about time people stopped being scared of him?

It's obviously a day for lookalikes, as with her long blonde hair and blue and white dress, violinist Leila Josefowicz reminds me of no-one so much as Alice. Quite appropriate, as it turns out, as Knussen's Violin Concerto (as all his music) is filled with a quicksilver wit that seems to breathe much the same air as Lewis Carroll. I've long admired Knussen as a composer; he's far from prolific, but everything he produces seems so beautifully judged, expertly crafted and heartfelt without ever becoming overwrought.

I've only started really listening to Henze's music recently, so this was a welcome part of the programme. Sebastian im Traum has the same Tippett-ish feel to some of it as I've previously noted (though considerably more tautly argued than that composer's somewhat more diffuse music), and for a brief moment there even seems to be a hint of Elgarian wistfulness there, which leaves me to reflect on how curious it should be that a composer so much in his own tradition should sound so English.

What can be said about The Rite of Spring? Everything and nothing. It's one of the lodestones of the past century, the last piece that everyone agrees about, as someone wiser than me said, and casts a shadow over anyone who wants to write this stuff we inaccurately call classical music. But really, in the face of it, it's better to shut up, as a good performance leaves discussion unnecessary. This was one of those performances, rugged, rough, violent, full of that contradictory sense that this is the birth of Modern Music, and also a monument that defies all who stand before it.