Category Archive: Musical philosophy

Who's That Guy Up There With Anne-Sophie?

Posted at 12:27 AM on April 23, 2006 by Valerie Kahler (1 Comments)
Filed under: Musical philosophy

MPR's library has a lovely box set of Beethoven Sonatas recorded by violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter and pianist Lambert Orkis - a souvenir of their amazing 1998 world tour. At each venue, they played all ten Beethoven sonatas over the course of 3 nights.

It's clear that Lambert Orkis is a phenomenal pianist and a gifted interpreter (of everything from Bach to Crumb, according to his website!) and yet, he is relegated to "accompanist" in almost every single web mention of the Beethoven sonatas. In defense of all those websites, it's probably because the CD cover has a huge picture of Anne-Sophie plastered next to the words "Beethoven: The Violin Sonatas."

"So what?" you may be asking. Well, let's have a look at Beethoven's manuscripts, shall we? Ten Sonatas "For Piano with Violin." It's extremely rare, however, to see that phrase on a published score these days. You can find a few versions "For Piano and Violin" and plenty "For Violin and Piano." And yet, when it's time for the recital or the recording, it's billed as a Violin Sonata.

I suppose I played too much chamber music in college to ever take a pianist for granted. (I was a little afraid of them in general. I think they like this.) I saw firsthand that the piano parts in a Schubert quintet or a Shostakovich trio were not "accompaniment." Why should the piano part in a Beethoven (or any other) sonata be classified as such?

Susan Tomes, writing for The Guardian, riffs on this very subject here.

Her hope is that we can begin to reclaim that lost territory for the pianists of the world simply by watching our phraseology.

Tune in Tuesday night at around 11:30 to hear Beethoven's Sonata No. 2 for Piano and Violin. Pianist Lambert Orkis with violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter!

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Note to Self:

Posted at 12:43 AM on April 19, 2006 by Valerie Kahler (1 Comments)
Filed under: Musical philosophy

"The task is not so much to see what no one yet has seen, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everyone sees." - Arthur Schopenhauer

As (almost) the baby of the MPR classical music family, even I have been doing the classical radio thing for nigh on 20 years. So, sometimes it's a challenge as an announcer to face that Haydn symphony or Beethoven quartet one more time. It helps that Rex & Melissa do such a loving job of crafting the playlists...and that I love the music. I wrote a fundraising spot about it a few years ago, as much to remind myself as to encourage more seasoned listeners to remember that someone's always hearing that "old chestnut" for the very first time.

My task, then? Not so much to hear what no one yet has heard, but to think what nobody yet has thought about that which everyone hears.

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The Cruelest Month

Posted at 12:29 AM on March 15, 2006 by Valerie Kahler (2 Comments)
Filed under: Musical philosophy

While TS Eliot said April is the cruelest month, City Pages’ restaurant reviewer Dara Moskovitz had this to say:

February [is] the cruelest month. Yeah, I know it's supposed to be April, but this is Minnesota, and our winter is so, so long that I've contacted the legislature about some updates. Let's call February the Cruelest Month, if only so we can call April "I'll Kill You, I Swear to God, If You Don't Give Me the Remote, I Am Not Even Kidding, You Are Just Like Your Mother, Just Give Me It, Quit, I Said, Quit It."

Given this week’s meteorological unpleasantness, I’m casting my Cruelest Month vote for March. I mean, it was FIFTY-SIX degrees last week. And then a foot of snow? That’s just mean.

Every winter, I make it through the first few months thinking, “Well, this isn’t so bad! Here it is February already – we’re almost out of the woods.” How can I forget about March EVERY YEAR? But forget I do, so the spiteful late-winter snows catch me unawares.

Ah, but there’s always a silver lining. Two, in this case. 1. Because snow shovels are SO last season, I was able to procure one at a steep discount. 2. A springboard, if you will, for a discussion of seasonal music. My husband and I were talking about this very thing a few days ago. Now, I don’t mean seasonal music like a Christmas carol or an Easter mass. I don’t even mean seasonally-titled music (Four Seasons, Summer Music, etc). No, what we’re getting at here is something much more ephemeral and subjective: music that feels seasonally appropriate to you, for whatever reason. For example, my husband said that every year as winter creaks into spring, he gets an itch to listen to the Rolling Stones. A teenage boy who was around for the conversation agreed, saying his fondness for techno was entirely winter-specific. An old orchestra colleague of mine always associated Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5 with summer gardening. For me, Bach is a year-round favorite but I usually reach for the Cello Suites in early spring. I also have a perverse need to listen to Duran Duran when I spring clean. I don’t quite understand it – I think it has something to do with my college years and operant conditioning.

What about you?

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Signatures

Posted at 3:32 AM on March 13, 2006 by Valerie Kahler
Filed under: Musical philosophy

Ever wonder what occupies the mind of a radio host at 3 in the morning? Read on:

Alfred Hitchcock made a cameo appearance in almost all of his movies, and after the birth of his daughter Nina in 1945, caricaturist Al Hirschfeld began hiding her name in each of his drawings.

But - even without these obvious and characteristic insertions, we would still recognize the stamp of these artists. You’d probably know a Hitchcock film from his camera angles or the way he used shadow. The fluid, spare lines of this illustration spell out Hirschfeld clearly enough.

What about Sergei Rachmaninov? He worked the Dies Irae into a surprising number of his compositions...but what about when he didn't? Can you recognize a Rachmaninov from its angles, shadows, lines?

I’ll never mistake a Stokowski transcription for anyone else's. I know Tchaikovsky when I hear him. Same for Satie and Vivaldi and Bach. Beethoven? Does he have a “signature,” or have I just learned which stuff is his?

Lexicon

Posted at 12:40 AM on March 8, 2006 by Valerie Kahler
Filed under: Musical philosophy

Whether you're an artist, a musician, a computer programmer, a mechanic, a chef or a housepainter, you become fluent in a certain language – one that has its own vocabulary, shorthand, even slang. My husband speaks Art fluently, while Music is my second language. Often, applying one lexicon to the other's medium leads to revelation for both. I'm unable to describe an art piece in artists' terms of light, composition, color, etc., but it's natural for me to think of it in terms of music. For example, the stark dissonance of Picasso’s "Guernica," or Gerrit van Honthorst's "The Denial of Saint Peter," which feels as though it's almost in a minor key, but tempered…sweetened by the sympathy of the handmaiden. Dorian mode, then? And so on.

This crossover of lexicons led to an interesting conversation at our house the other night…

My husband has long been a fan of Arvo Pärt, but had a watershed experience listening to a Pärt CD a few days ago. He described it so lovingly and thoroughly and evocatively that I wanted to stand up and applaud.

Using his artist’s lexicon (which in itself co-opts writers’ vocabulary) he described the music in terms of its "narrative structure." There are tropes: here’s the heroic bit, here you have pathos, etc…but how they’re connected is completely unexpected, unique, unfamiliar. He went on to talk about how Pärt laid down a layer of flute, and then brought the cello in, "tapping" on the flute with its different timbre and gentle dissonance. How he used silence - the space between notes - like an artist uses white space. How it became clear to him that Pärt creates his works with the same consideration of materials and placement and palette that an artist does.

He's decided that Pärt is a painter…and it's hard to disagree with his thesis.

And the Laminees are...

Posted at 1:28 AM on March 6, 2006 by Valerie Kahler
Filed under: Musical philosophy

I’m riding the Oscar wave with my own nominations for The Laminated List (see John Zech’s post of 3/3).

JS Bach: Six Suites for Unaccompanied Cello. Okay, yes, I’ve already mentioned Yo Yo Ma’s 1998 recording of the Bach Suites this week, but I can't help it. Talk about dishy! It’s the perfect soundtrack for road trip or river trip...the perfect background for sweeping the floor or foreground for clearing out the mental cobwebs...the perfect companion to ibuprofen and lavender eye-pillow for migraine relief.

Mahler: Symphony No. 4. Bernard Haitink conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Soprano Roberta Alexander. There’s always a hint of fairy dust to Mahler, in my reckoning. How else can jingle bells sound both whimsical and vaguely sinister?

Barber: Violin Concerto
Vaughan Williams: Tallis Fantasia
Vaughan Williams: Five Variants on Dives and Lazarus

Pretty much any recording of the above can take my breath away. Case in point: I wondered why I was crying as I watched “Master and Commander” in the theatre, then realized I was swimming in a Dolby ocean of Tallis Fantasia.

It bears repeating

Posted at 2:04 AM on March 1, 2006 by Valerie Kahler (1 Comments)
Filed under: Musical philosophy

Recently, a friend approached me with a request. He said he’d become obsessed with Debussy’s Claire de Lune, had been working his way through all the recordings of it he could find…and could I recommend my own favorites?

I threw the question out to my colleagues at MPR and got some lovely responses. Rex Levang and Brian Newhouse suggested Ivan Moravec (unfortunately, hard to find), and Melissa Ousley chimed in with Zoltan Kocsis and Samson Francois. Rex also mentioned that the recent Leon Fleischer recording (which marked his return to 2-hand repertoire after a forty-year struggle with focal dystonia in his right hand) was pretty special. Michael Barone added that organist Virgil Fox’s “organization” of Claire de Lune is beautifully nuanced.

This conversation led Brian to ask: why ARE there so many versions of this piece? What is it about Claire de Lune - or any piece - that inspires such attentions?

And, tangentially, what does it say when the same performer RE-records something? I’m thinking of Yo Yo Ma’s releases (1990 and 1998) of the Bach suites, but there are many other examples.

Anyone care to weigh in?

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Film music--a strong maybe

Posted at 10:04 AM on February 24, 2006 by John Zech
Filed under: Musical philosophy

I listened to Andy Trudeau's excellent piece on Oscar-nominated composers Alberto Iglesias and John Williams, (see Don Lee's previous entry) and I was struck at what excellent music it was--for the movies!

I kept missing the pictures, though. The textures and sounds and the wistful waltz by Williams were nice, but I didn't feel like they said much, as music, on their own. We have quite a number of film score albums in the library, and it's pretty hard to even find excerpts from a lot of movies that actually hold their own if you haven't seen the movie.

Some of the exotic instruments and textures used so well by Iglesias in his score for "The Constant Gardener" would probably fit better on "The Current" than on a classical format.

So let me ask this: Should the home for New Music and new composers be on "The Current?" A lot of people would say it already is, and that the new music coming out of the many bands they feature is really as thoughtful and important as anything coming out of the American Composers Forum.

Are the two equal? Is a composition by Libby Larsen commissioned by a symphony orchestra of any greater intrinsic value than something by, say, Iggy Pop or Fifty Cent? Depends on the piece, I suppose, but I would say it is.

Dumping history

Posted at 7:41 AM on February 20, 2006 by John Zech
Filed under: Musical philosophy

When I was in my teens and 20s I was discovering all aspects of the audio world, from hi-fi stereo (and Quadrophonic Sound!) to the oldest 78s, a quarter inch thick and cut on only one side. I loved the connection these old recording provided to the past, and I especially loved hearing programs of "historic recordings" on public radio in those days. The cramped audio spectrum and surface noise was part of the charm of those old discs.

These days, there are a lot of recordings from the 50s, 60s and 70s which are becoming "historic" in the worst sense of the word, I think. A lot of them just don't sound that good, either sonically speaking, or from a performance standpoint (e.g. the Haydn Symphonies recorded by Antal Dorati with the Philharmonia Hungaria on London/Decca, or a lot of the Maurice Andre and Jean-Pierre Rampal recordings).

Should we still plays these discs as examples of the best of the their time, or should we let them be and give our listeners the best of OUR time?

I think there's plenty of new/recent material on the shelves which would make for a more consistent, more exciting and more engaging sound for our listeners.

New Blood at the Met

Posted at 2:11 PM on February 14, 2006 by Don Lee
Filed under: Musical philosophy

Over the past couple of days The New York Times has run stories about soon-to-be General Manager Peter Gelb’s adventurous plans for the Metropolitan Opera. Times article Gelb plans to commission new works from two of today’s most talked-about composers: Osvaldo Golijov and John Adams. He also intends to hire directors known for their work in other media: Academy Award-winning film director Anthony Minghella will stage Puccini’s Madama Butterfly and choreographer Mark Morris will do Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice.

In themselves, the plans are not especially startling. They’ve earned headlines because the Met is a pretty conservative place; many of its longtime patrons are wary of change. Gelb’s history with crossovers may make them especially wary. One of his signature accomplishments as head of the Sony Classical record label was the soundtrack for the movie Titanic, a cash cow he seemed not at all embarrassed to milk.

While we may not consider Titanic classical music and we may suspect the purity of Gelb’s motives at Sony, we should be open to efforts to expand and contemporize our definition of classical music. Puccini and Gluck will survive. It’s their successors we need to worry about.

Enough Mozart?

Posted at 12:11 AM on February 12, 2006 by Valerie Kahler
Filed under: Musical philosophy

In response to Don's musings about Mozart...

One of my old friends heard me on the air around Mozart's birthday and sent me an email:

Do the people you work with know that you once said you don't much care for Mozart? Don't worry; your secret is safe with me. Or perhaps Mozart bashing is a badge of honor among your colleagues and that's how you got where you are today -- by pretending not to like Mozart.

I'll tell all y'all what I told him.

To clarify: my anti-Mozart stance is as a cellist. I still maintain that orchestral Mozart is boring as heck to play. Kind of like the mortar in a lovely stone wall - it holds everything together but it's not compelling on its own.

His chamber music, though, is fun. I've played the same book of Mozart quartets over and over for decades and I never get tired of them.

And as for listening? Well.

There are meals that are everything I expect - pleasant, sturdy and satisfying, but not the kind of thing I'd get a fierce craving for. Then there are meals where I THINK I know what's coming and then the first mouthful just knocks me out of my seat. Like the first time I had a wally waffle from Al's Diner in Dinkytown. It was unadulterated, completely unexpected bliss.

To wit: Mozart's music is everything I expect - pleasant and satisfying, but I never get a fierce hankering for it.