Music at Menlo

[calimac]

Music at Menlo is an intense little 2-to-3 week chamber music festival that's not in Menlo Park, but in the adjoining towns of Atherton and Palo Alto. Last year I got sent to review two concerts in it - all Beethoven all the time those ones were - and also sampled plenty of its free and inexpensive offerings as well. With enough attendance one feels immersed, as one feels immersed in the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

This year I was not so lucky. Being out of town a lot, working half time, and without a car when I was not working, I got only to the one concert I was assigned to review, plus its associated free prelude concert, which was better programmed if not better played. I don't think putting a plainly beautiful Mozart piece after the deep spiritual questings of Olivier Messiaen was really a good idea. After such knowledge, what return to innocence?

I got a little of that into my review. At least the performers were really good.

Read also this week's principal article by Michael Steinberg. In it he says that other forms of music have their virtues, but that rock music simply doesn't delve as deeply as does the music we call classical.

With his comments I both agree and disagree. On the one hand I strongly disagree with the notion that "there are only two types of music, good and bad." I note that proponents of that view tend to be reluctant to enumerate the second category. I believe that there are different values for the word "good", and that a good Beatles song would make a lousy Wagner opera and vice versa. They're both good, but they're different types of good.

On the other hand I'd take towards rock as a form of music the same view that Scott McCloud does towards comics as a form of literature: the fact that it usually doesn't achieve the depths of older forms of art doesn't mean that it can't. It's just an observation on the state of the art. Steinberg is right to observe that there is technical language to describe the emotional effect of great music. But those technical means are open to any musician, and one reason the Beatles are great rock songwriters is that they discovered and used many such means. Are they as good as, say, the songs of Schubert? Well, for different values of "good" ... maybe they are. Schubert is not so profound as to be unanalyzable. But we can't really judge while the one has 200 years of patina and the other only 40.

Comments

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Possibly one problem with rock (and we'll forgo cataloguing everything I like here) is that it's designed for airplay. A song tends to be a bite, typically with one emotion on display, sometimes two. The dynamics are mostly at a single level, like TV commercials. (I can't see where airplay causes the tempo to be, as it usually is, one per song -- that's more likely a function of being danced to. I mention it here because it's one of the reasons I see that rock seems less satisfying than classical.)

To get around this, I suppose we can consider a song to be more of a cell than a movement, and let a set (formerly an LP side) be the equivalent to a movement. Of course, sets get broken up and reshuffled constantly by programmers (I was going to say DJs -- do they still have them?), which at least has the happy result of permitting songs recorded some time ago to have a degree of novelty as their nearness to other songs changes their emotional impact. Even with meticulously planned recordings, changing the order gives them some of the improvisational nature of jazz more than the structure of classical.

But considering an album as a whole, it's possible to get a lot closer to the depth of classical music, even without academic compositional standards, merely by virtue of the possibility of having changes in tempo, dynamics, and emotional content.

Note: it seems like almost any popular music shares the above limitations with rock. There's some jazz that escapes it, but it still seems to me that the usual standard is one [tempo/mood/volume level] per [song/track].

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I'd say that to judge the quality of a song, you can't just look at one performance/recording but have to look at a range of performances, preferrably by a variety of performers, just as with classical music. One of the interesting things about listening to Johnny Cash's version of Soundgarden's "Rusty Cage," for a very random example, is that some of the lyrics seem a lot more sophmoric when the vocals aren't reverbed, stretched, and echoed and otherwise made more pure-instrument-like, but the basic chord-structure and the tempo changes Cash (or his producer) chooses are, while fairly simple, still great.

Part of the appeal of popular music such as rock and jazz is that it can inspire radical reinterpretations. That may be where we can discern depth. After all, wasn't Shatner's version of "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" a revelation?

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

I think you're right on target here. As a counterexample, Cash's cover of Nine Inch Nails' "Hurt" was the entry point for me into a band which I had previously shied away from -- other than "Head like a Hole" -- because of their* overcompressed, wall-of-noise dynamic.

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* Well, his. NIN is basically Trent Reznor and whoever else is handy.
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Classical music does allow for interpretation, but it has a rather limited approach to it. Back in baroque days, it was pretty common to play the same piece on a variety of instruments; now, not so much. The composer's orchestration is just this side of sacred.

This was one of the major values, for me, of the music of the '60s and '70s -- starting with "Switched-On Bach," and moving to bands like Emerson Lake and Palmer and Manfred Manns' Earth Band, musicians reinterpreted classical music in (sometimes) radical new ways. Others (Genesis, Yes) took the tools of classical composition and applied them to writing music specifically intended for rock instrumentation.

One could accuse the Beatles of having "started it all," and there would be some truth to it, but there was a lot more to it than that...

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

As yet another example, I always found Johnny Cash's Dylan covers to be a bit amusing. It's too bad he didn't revisit those later on, but I guess he didn't have the same motivation he had in recording them, to give a hand up to a promising artist. Maybe he would have done them just the same. Well, it's a digression.

Reinterpreting the classics has been going on for lots longer than 50 years, of course. Even before ragtime versions of Chopin's "Minute" Waltz or "the" Rachmaninov prelude, there were quadrilles based on opera themes. More recently, there are stunning recordings like Freddy Martin's "dance" version of the Nutcracker Suite (and what is ballet, Mister Martin?) and Skip (any relation?) Martin's jaw-dropping "Sheherajazz" of 1960.

Similarly, because of the change in instruments that occurred in his lifetime and the open notation some of his music is in, Bach has always been ripe for reimagining by later hands. There are many keyboard treatments of his music, as well as orchestral settings (some as regrettable as Stokowski's gaseous inflations) and arrangements for everything from pennywhistle to quartet to electronics. W. Carlos got in early with a memorable name ("Switched-on...") and genuine musicianship.

Emerson Lake & Palmer ran a gamut, from very tight and exciting versions of Copland to the "in name only" versions of Mussorgsky.

Drat, I have to take something to Sarah at school. I hope to continue this, and maybe even develop a rudimentary sort of point (or point-like object), later on.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

That's a point, and to respond to it, I'll momentarily have to pretend sturgeonslawyer didn't already say some of what I'm thinking.

Rock does partake of different natures, with more of a component of performance/creation than classical, largely to the extent that more classical composers now don't perform their own music. I don't know to what extent songwriters provide material to bands, but some large portion perform their own material.

Classical music is more precisely notated than rock, and even if a rock composer spells out fairly precisely how something goes, there is no guarantee that some or all of what they say won't be disregarded. In classical, the music is -- I was going to say "a recipe," but the more assured a chef is, the more a recipe becomes "more of a guideline than a rule," to echo Bill Murray in Ghostbusters.

Different pop interpretations have so much leeway, it's really more of a comparison to the variations a classical composer writes on the themes of another than it is to how different classical artists interpret a piece. A composer can (and often does) write great variations on a less-than-great theme, just as an inspired performer can put new life into a cardboard song. (And by stating at the outset that one is performing variations or some sort of modified version, a classical performer gains leeway they wouldn't have if they were simply playing a piece and introducing changes that are contrary to the specific directions given by the composer.)

I'm not sure that covers what I had in mind when I first read your comment, but it was food for thought, and that's some of what it inspired.

Oh yes, Shatner's "Lucy" certainly is a revelation, in the Biblical sense. Inspired, as it were.

[(Anonymous)]

Excellent points about precise notation and variations on a theme. Now I'm trying to remember the word for the instrumental solo in a concerto that could either be improvised or just copied from a previous (transcribed?) improvisation. Your comments on variations on a theme also made me think of hip hop or acid jazz, which frequently samples a theme from a prior recording and puts it into a new context. What would that be called? Variations on a ground?

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Yes, yes, it was I, the butler!

[(Anonymous)]

"Cadenza" is the word you're describing. "Variations on a ground" seems somewhat like sampling, or versa vice. With the footnote that I know more about the variations than I do about how sampling is used nowadays.

In the jazz improv class I sat in on years ago in Georgia, I learned that a lot of jazz improvs are based on the chord structure of an existing song, and that credit is often not given to this song. I've naturally forgotten all the examples, but well-known jazz solos were founded upon equally well-known songs. To me it's unfortunate that credit isn't given, but I guess that would have necessitated giving more money to music publishers, so I can understand it, anyway.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I swear I was logged in already! Jeez!

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

Interesting! That may be why sampling and jazz were a natural fit, since they both play around with and rearrange existing musical structures.

And yes, "cadenza" was the word & concept I was after. The rock star solo of an earlier era.