for a brief moment, I thought they'd discovered something

[calimac]

*radio click on*

"... César Franck, and we've just heard his Third Symphony."

!!?!

"Ah, I mean the third movement of his Symphony in D Minor."

Oh well, one can dream.

This is the station that plays individual movements from longer works, probably because 12 minutes or so is as long as the announcers can bear to shut up.

For more elevated talk about music, I recommend an excellent article from a couple weeks ago by the NY Times' Anthony Tommasini. He brings up aspects of classical music that are central to my enjoyment of it but are rarely discussed as sources of aesthetic pleasure: its structure and its scale. I also like his attitude towards classical's relation to other music: it's not necessarily better, but it is different, and needs to be judged by different criteria. "Mahler’s Resurrection Symphony is no more profound than Eleanor Rigby," he says. "But it’s a whole lot longer."

I like that. And not just because Eleanor Rigby is one of my favorite Beatles songs while I can, frankly, live without Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. Part of what drew me to classical initially was the scale. Pop songs could be nice, but they just weren't big enough to be satisfying, even cumulatively. A symphony could be. And structure is what keeps me listening. Tommasini says listeners may not always grasp the structure in a large piece but they can perceive that it's there. This is exactly right.

Tommasini mentions Lawrence Kramer's book Why Classical Music Still Matters (University of California Press, 2007), which is on my reading list, but he's more incisive than Kramer. Kramer writes under the burden that, when you phrase your title that way, the answer to the question you're begging is almost certainly "no". Still, he tries to explain what hits him when he's listening to, say, Brahms, even if he can't explain it very well.

Also on the reading list, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening? by Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter (MIT Press, 2007), a book whose title scans perfectly to the opening phrase of "Winter Wonderland" and which discusses what the authors call "aural architecture" by which they mean "acoustic engineering". Highly verbose, but interesting on the aesthetic evolution of concert halls and its effect on performance styles and even composing. But when they write that musicians responded to the drier-sounding performance spaces of the early 20th century by increasing portamento (p. 111), I don't think that's what they mean. I think they mean vibrato.

Totally unrelated reading, old and probably impossible to find, but I'll mention it anyway: A History of the Kingdom of Denmark by Palle Lauring, translated by David Hohnen (Høst & Søn, 1960). The most thoroughly entertaining country history I have ever read. The Battle of the Ditmarshes in 1500 - I'd never heard of this, had you? - is, in this account, the most hilarious military debacle of all time. Here's one bit: "The Ditmarshers had prepared themselves for battle. In fact, in accordance with ancient custom, they had 'consecrated a maiden to God.' This did not actually involve a human sacrifice except to the extent that the girl was obliged to lead a pure and unmarried life for the rest of her days." The "except to the extent" is what makes the quote.

Comments

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

This is the station that plays individual movements from longer works, probably because 12 minutes or so is as long as the announcers can bear to shut up.

When the sole remaining classical station in Chicago went to this format, I saw it more as catering to the short-attention-span crowd, trying to attract younger listeners who didn't have the patience for all that stuff. Ironically, when I moved away, I discovered that the local classical station broadcasts their own programming primarily on weekdays between the morning and afternoon NPR news shows: the overnight music is simply a feed from that same Chicago station. (What's even weirder is that the announcer and I went to the same high school, and his voice is familiar from all the theater he did then.)

Gosh, this media consolidation thing sure is . . harumph. I miss the days when they'd play just Beethoven all day, one piece at a time.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

This very station once had, for its only announcer, an anonymous pre-recorded voice that would say simply, "Kiril Kondrashin conducts the Moscow Philharmonic in the Symphony Number Eight. By Dmitri Shostakovich. 1943." or something like that, and then they'd play it! All 65 minutes of it! And when it ended, the same announcement would be repeated in the past tense, there'd be a couple of sedate commercials and station IDs, and then they'd do another one!

Ah, those were the days.

To my mind, the drive home from Moraga is permanently associated with hearing Shostakovich's 8th this way on it, many years ago. A couple years ago as I set out on a grueling 70-minute drive from Chester to Stafford, I turned on the radio and the BBC was just about to launch into the tape of a recent Proms performance of Shostakovich's Eleventh, an equally long work. Perfect timing, and I couldn't have been happier.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Did you read Richard Taruskin's 20,000 word book review in The New Republic, which dissected Kramer's book and two others? It is well worth the time.

That Danish history sounds fantastic.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I did, some time ago, before I got the book. Fly, elephant gun, usual Taruskin.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

And did you read Joseph Kerman (!) reviewing Alex Ross in the same magazine? Thinks the history too scattershot, the clever writing better at shorter length, but praises the superb critical vocabulary.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I did not, and obviously must, but after I've read Noise. Did he call it a "shabby little shocker"?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Maybe if someone set the book as an opera he might. Hmm, there's a thought. A new opera with lots of allusions to older music in it: could be a 21st-century Rosenkavalier.

[kate-schaefer.livejournal.com]

I could live without any of Mahler, myself. Every few years I check to see if my tastes have broadened, the way that my tolerance of asparagus turned into liking asparagus in late adulthood, but so far Mahler has remained okra or perhaps turnips.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I like his First Symphony, and have heard MTT and the SFS play it fabulously. But in other works, even they cannot overcome his terminal sludge.

[wellinghall.livejournal.com]

But can't a pop album have the scale and structure of a classical / orchestral piece?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Tommasini mentions Sgt. Pepper approvingly in exactly that context.

To my ears, that helps, but not enough. A concept album feels to me as if it has about as much large-scale integration as, say, a ballet score. For my best listening, I'm looking for something more profoundly integrated than that.

[ellen-denham.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the link to the article. As an educator, I think more people would be interested in classical music if they were just exposed to it, or had even a little bit of music education.

While I admire Mahler and don't mind listening to certain pieces, I couldn't take a steady diet of it. As my Mom always says, regarding Mahler, "Just when you think it's going to end, he goes around again!"

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I had some early encounters with music, but they didn't take, at least at the time. I think I was just too young. When I was 12 I dipped into it again entirely on my own initiative, and this time it stuck immediately and permanently.

What your Mom says about Mahler translates as large-scale structural problems. His music has no coherence; his supporters even define this bug as a feature.

[sajia.livejournal.com]

Hi, I'm a lurker at Roz's journal. So it's not just me that it seems weird that CBC plays excerpts from western classical pieces and not the entire pieces. Mind you, I have the attention span of a butterfly on icing sugar, so it's probably just as well for me.
I wonder, is it fair to compare pop songs to Western art song as opposed to symphonies? Obviously opera and lieder are much more demanding vocally on average, but then again it's customary from what I've seen as a music student in North America for folk songs like "Sally Gardens" to be included in the curriculum. One of the reasons why Bollywood singing is of such a high quality is that it's practically mandatory for even pop singers to study either Hindustani or Carnatic light classical song. And of course opera for the longest time was the pop of its time (correct me if I'm wrong.) And another thing to remember is that in Western pop (not in Bollywood, however) elaborate singing has a way of leading into American Idol territory.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

It certainly isn't fair to compare pop songs to symphonies: my point is that they require different kinds of listening, and while the one can be enjoyable, only the other satisfies my soul.

As for pop songs and classical art songs, they too are written to two different artistic sensibilities. You will notice I wasn't listening to art songs; don't tell my wife (she's a singer), but I don't care for most lieder that much. They're like miniature three-minute operas; I don't like opera much either. Operas are longer than symphonies, yes, but their aesthetic purposes, in general, vastly differ.

My advice for lengthening one's attention span for music is to pick a favorite piece - something late Romantic, by Tchaikovsky, or perhaps Dvorak's New World, is a good choice for a classical beginner, if you are one - and listen to it a lot, as casual background music as well as listening carefully, until you find you start to know what's going to happen next. Then you're ready to hear it in concert.