Schoenberg and Slightly More Than 100 Years of Wilful Ignorance

Schoenberg; Table tennis because Wimbledon starts tomorrow (table tennis and tennis are basically the same right? What? You mean I have to look it up?)

I suppose the great man wouldn't be surprised, over 100 years on from his (partial) break with the tonal system and people still think he's 'difficult'. So much so that often they don't even bother to do basic research when passing comment about his work as is unfortunately the case with a recent article about John Williams Luther Adams in The Observer online.

According to Peter Conrad (a teacher of literature apparently which makes his gaffe somewhat more forgivable I suppose)...

As a young man, John Williams Luther Adams upset the sedate peace of American symphonic music. His scores pulsed as relentlessly as the bass in a rock band, his noisy riffs repeated themselves to the point of madness. He enjoyed being childish: in Harmonielehre, a 1984 symphony that alludes to a crabby atonal textbook by Schoenberg, he imagined his infant daughter, Quackie, riding on the shoulders of the German mystic Meister Eckhart.

As is commonly known amongst people who know, stuff, about 20th century music Schoenberg's Harmonielehre is certainly not an 'atonal textbook' and Conrad wouldn't know whether or not the tone of the work is 'crabby' as he obviously hasn't read it. Not exactly an honest or learned beginning to an article.

Disappointing for the Guardian/Observer, if Tom Service were dead he'd be turning in his grave.

I'll shoot Chiggi a message about it, perhaps they can change the article and give Conrad one of those slaps on the back of the head that makes a satisfying 'thwap' sound.

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New Series! : Guess The Score! : No1 (!)

Oh yes, it's 2010 (it has been for a while apparently) and it's time for a new series of posts. The title is fairly self explanatory, I'll present a fragment of a full score and you can try and guess what it is.

It's almost like sport only without all of the physical exercise, expensive outfits and potential injuries, what's not to like?

A fairly easy one to start with (don't all rush in at once with guesses everyone). Click on the image if you want to see it more clearly.



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Free Stuff: Sketch Scores On Your Smartphone!

A mobile phone, and some manuscript paper, amongst other things.

Yes that's right. Unfortunately I can't claim to have programmed some natty 'app' I've actually included here a very simple, almost stupid solution to something that arguably wasn't a problem in the first place.

Ever been out of the house and had a musical idea you wanted to jot down but didn't have a pen or any paper? (I did at a birthday party last night as it happens, hence my 'invention' this morning).

Well, now there's no need to worry as by using a touchscreen smartphone, a free paint package and the blank manuscript .jpg I've included a link to here you can sketch away at your leisure. You can even pretend to be Stravinsky and use different colours, and you know, stuff.

I've got a Nokia phone which uses the Symbian OS and I've been using the Paint Pad 'app' which allows you to 'paint' over a still image. I edited some blank manuscript paper to a convenient size (4 staves, didn't bother with clefs or systems etc for reasons that should be obvious) and now use that to sketch notes on top of (if you wanted to you could of course give yourself more staves or extra details, easy to do in photoshop).

Obviously it's a bit fiddly to use and sometimes accidentals and grace notes etc can be a bit tricky to draw but it does work quite well for basic sketches while you're sitting on the bus and so on.

One day perhaps your phone will play your sketches back to you (any programmers out there?)

The iPhone has a scoring 'app' available, not sure about Android or other platforms but this Paint Pad way of doing things is A: Free, B: Simple, C: Means I actually have a use for the stylus that came with my phone (this was my primary motivation obviously).

So there you go, get to it (or not).

Here's an early attempt at a sketch I did today, not exactly neat but I think you can work out what's going on. Extra brownie points for anyone who can tell me what 'piece' this is a fragment from.



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Free Stuff! Streams of Feldman

Morton Feldman: Ready to pounce on a small insect perched on Db4.

Spotted this link in UbuWeb's rather useful twitter feed where all manner of interesting things pop up (like this Derrida interview on religion I just saw, I hope it's in English. I speak French fluently of course, just not right now, ahem).

Here are the details then...

Morton Feldman (1926-1987)

1. Chorus and Instruments (II)
   
   
   
2. Christian Wolff In Cambridge
   
   
   
3. The King of Denmark (7:23)
   Realzed by Max Neuhaus.
   This recording should be played at very low volume - "so that you almost don't hear it."
   
   See accompanying text and score.
   Track 1, 2 from Extended Voices
   Track 3 From Aspen No. 5+6

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A Brief Autobiographical Technical Encounter, In Lieu of Anything Else

Not Jamie and I discussing something, I've no idea who these people are but if they keep talking much longer they're going to get wet feet. Or are they? Perhaps the tide is going out in the picture? I've no idea but I think the purpose of this picture caption is fulfilled and I'll end it here.

Given the lack of any decent 'original' content on m'blog of late I thought I might post a brief 'discussion' about harmony which occurred on that popular 'social networking' site recently.

The two protagonists are my fine self, and the most distinguished Jamie Bullock. I lead off with a 'status update' about material from a string quartet I'm currently writing...

EL ('status update' 17/04/2010): how can two different transpositions of the same rotational array produce different pitch class sets? I must have made a mistake. Hopefully the decent bit of music I wrote using one array is the correct one of the two. Good times.

EL (comment on 'status update' 17/04/2010): Fixed. Got one line wrong when transposing to the second array somehow. Thought it was odd as the sets were of a different cardinality. Decent bit of music saved then, all is well with the world (apart from war and poverty and disease and old age and, stuff).

JB (comment on 'status update' 18/04/2010): Your compositional techniques sound so much like computer programming (or maths). (Absolutely no implicit criticism intended, BTW). Out of interest, do you ever keep stuff that works musically, but breaks the process you are using?

EL (comment on 'status update' 18/04/2010): It is basically maths I suppose. Set theory a bit but it's more like combinatorics (from what little I understand of higher mathematics anyway).

Also geometry plays a role. I plot every set on a clock face so it's mod 12 arithmetic. Transposition becomes rotation, inversion becomes reflection etc.

Re keeping stuff that isn't justified within the system, no. But more specifically I wouldn't find that material as I don't use my 'ear' for generating material. Only for auditioning material I make via the pre-compositional procedures outlined briefly above.

I have so many ways of generating material from a basic line or set I have no need to use pitches from anywhere else, and it sounds better that way to me. I don't trust my ears any more, I never think 'that would sound better if it were a semitone or a tritone' or whatever, I just accept the results of the system and if I don't like it I use different basic material.

It might sound a bit rigid or dogmatic but if you think about it tonality is just as 'restrictive'. It's only because it's an ideology that many don't see it that way, history becomes nature as Foucault might say.

You wouldn't go from a II-V- progression to a dense chromatic cluster for instance, you'd use tertiary harmony and would consider the root progression. If you list the 'rules' of tonality there is nothing 'natural' or 'free' about it.

The same process applies, one auditions the available material (an output from the system) and one chooses the 'best' stuff.

Same could also be said for our western tuning system. It's sort of amusing that we have a sort of romantic noble savage popular music culture that suggests one can 'invent' or 'create' new music 'freely' by 'ear' as a product of 'inspiration' without any 'training', when in fact the harmonic system employed is just as rigid and limited as any other and the only reason the untrained can write songs/music easily is because of the hard work of many theorists and musicians over hundreds of years.

Oh, the irony.

(this discussion continues in the comments section, feel free to join in).

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A Quotation Because It's Been Rather a Long Time

Susan Bradshaw

'The ultimate aim of any technical system must be to establish a number of stylistic premises, sufficient to liberate the composer from the need to identify himself afresh with each new work and so to free his imagination by removing the burden of absolute choice. Or this is the theory.'

Susan Bradshaw (1931-2005) The instrumental and vocal music; Pierre Boulez: A Symposium. (pg128-129)

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A Quotation, Because It's Nearly Christmas.

Stravinsky; courtesy of Pablo Picasso.

I did not and indeed could not, count on any immediate success for this work. It is devoid of all the elements which infallibly appeal to the ordinary listener and to which he is accustomed. It would be futile to look in it for any passionate impulse or dynamic brilliance.

It is an austere ritual which is unfolded in terms of short litanies between different groups of homogeneous instruments.

I fully anticipated that the cantilene of clarinets and flutes, frequently taking up again their liturgical dialogue and softly chanting it, did not offer [the public] sufficient attraction.

Stravinsky writing about Symphonies of Wind Instruments; Chronicle of My Life pp.156-7 (quoted in Stravinsky by Roman Vlad pg. 80)

For US readers, Chronicle of My Life and Stravinsky by Roman Vlad Complement.Inversion.Etc store links (UK store links above.)