The Travails of Habit - Beethoven Edition

I have been noodling around with Beethoven's 2nd Piano Sonata for about a year now, and have finally settled down to try to actually learn it by practising.

As many musicians know, there's an upside and a downside to playing through something - on the one hand, there's the whole sight-reading thing, that exhilarating sense of that first encounter of "playing" a work, which, especially for an amateur like me, typifies much of my playing. I have no concert to perform, so I have the luxury of screwing up and not worrying too much about it.

The problem with this kind of playing though is that by the time you sit down to actually learn a work, clean it up and make it performable, you find that all the little habits you've accumulated over time have become the barnacles that get in the way of a clean, thoughtful performance.

So it is with Op. 2 No. 2. For reasons that will remain mysterious, I have been playing (or more accurately, trying to play) the following with only the right hand (image taken from this score on the IMSLP:



This image happens to be the 1st edition of the sonata. If you take a look at the whole score, you'll see that this happens to be one of the few places where fingerings are marked, which is a pretty sure sign that those fingers come from Beethoven himself.

For some reason, I took these fingerings to mean that this was meant to be played with the right hand. After all, the marking are all above the stave, so they're for the right hand, right? But then it occurs to you that this is really, really difficult to pull of cleanly. So I practise and practise and it never really comes together.

Then it hits me - my left hand sits limp on my lap while I try to execute these octave arpeggios with the right hand! And then I take a good look again at my own score (the Henle), and realise that they've got some of the fingerings below (indicating use of the left hand), while also preserving Beethoven's own fingerings.

My apologies if this is too much inside baseball, but seeing this, I decided to grab my dvds of Daniel Barenboim playing all the Beethoven sonatas to see what he does - to my absent surprise, he uses both hands!

This takes quite a load off then, doesn't it? Playing these arpeggios over two hands makes them a lot easier, doesn't it? But there is a problem, and it's right there in that image of the 1st Edition:

Beethoven wants you to play this with the right hand alone!

Or does he? One could see this as economy on the part of the publisher, but knowing what I do about Beethoven, it seems pretty clear to me that he's taken the time to write in the fingerings because this is how Ludwig van frickin' Beethoven wants you to play this. If he wanted it played partly with the left hand, he would have pointed that out in addition to the fingerings, especially when this is the only time in the entire movement where he indicates fingerings.

So he wants it rough and tumble, maybe a bit insecure, but definitely with the right hand. Or does he? What do any of you think?

The Winter Olympics as State of Exception

Supposedly some people are upset that the season premiere of the tv show "Lost" could be interrupted the US State of the Union address. Michael Rolston does a nice takedown of the banality of this position.

But this story would be so much funnier to this smug Canadian if I didn't have to say to someone, like oh say those Americans we Canadians love to mock, that our Prime Minister shut down the entire federal government so that we could all watch the Olympics?

I suppose that given our transition to democracy was gradual and peaceful, it shouldn't come as a surprise that our transition to some kind of benign despotism wouldn't be the same way, but still...the Olympics?

I know that's not the real reason he did it, but seriously, that it's even a plausible talking point just blows my mind because a lot of people probably think that shutting down something they don't pay attention to would have gotten in the way of something they may pay attention to, because governments are always getting in the way of stuff!

Richard Stursberg was Right!

According to the NY Times, lots more people say they listen to classical music than actually listen to classical music. Turns out most of them are listening to soft rock.

I am certain that the folks at CBC Radio 2 feel vindicated in their programming change, although these trends haven't helped their ratings.

And we in the classical blogosphere now wait with baited breath for Greg Sandow's comments about how this relates to THE FUTURE OF CLASSICAL MUSIC, and how it MUST CHANGE.

Pre-posting update! Turns out Mr. Sandow blogged about this yesterday.

Go figure.

A Long Time

I'm slowly trying to listen to all kinds of symphonies, as per my last post, and in doing so, have finally found a piece I have been trying to recall for nearly 20 years - Alan Hovhaness' Symphony no. 2.

This little project is already paying off!

An Evening with Philip Glass - in Your Own Home!

Chris Foley at the Collaborative Piano blog links to a video that claims to show people how to play like Philip Glass.

He also asks a question: "...is the ease with which one can imitate Glass' piano style a symptom of cliché-ridden gimmickry or a genuinely populist style that can be a springboard for young pianist/composers to explore in the hope of eventually finding their own voice?"

Although his commenters seem to react harshly to the video, finding it offensive or silly and nowhere near Glass' own work, Chris' question betrayed my own feelings as I watched the video - his noodlings do sound like Philip Glass!!

And the guy goes to some lengths to distance what he's doing from the authentic Philip Glass - it's an improvisation, and he makes it clear that he's not trying to poke fun at Glass. Rather, he's pointing out the obvious, namely that Glass' style lends itself pretty readily to improvisation.

One has to ask - why is this a bad thing? Isn't one of the things that the "classical" music world (with the exception of organists) has lost over the years is a high regard for improvisation?

My own feelings about Glass' music are mixed, but not because his techniques are somehow deficient, but because his stuff doesn't speak to me the way other composers have. I would prefer to listen to Webern or Beethoven, or his former colleague Steve Reich if we're to draw a closer cultural comparison.

So to more closely answer Chris' question, I would say no, Glass' music isn't symptomatic of a problem, and yes, it's probably a nice way for people to be able to emulate a serious composer. Indeed, after spending years wedded to the score, I'm learning to improvise.

If you were expecting something more insightful than that, my apologies.

Adorno on Highbrow/Lowbrow

A passage from a 1959 essay by Adorno on Schreker that problematizes the commonly held view that Adorno hated jazz, or hated for the reasons people think he did, namely, that he was a stuffy old German. From page 136 of my copy of Quasi una Fantasia (I've broken up the paragraph for ease of online reading):

The analogy with the 'mixed drink' which is sometimes applied rather blusteringly to jazz, fits Schreker's elixir exactly. They shimmer: the individual detail lights up for an instant and then subsides into the mass where it can no longer be distinguished, and barely even felt - the dripping of the harp, solo violins in a high register, a clarinet doubled by a celeste or horns dispossessed of their own weightiness. The association with jazz may give us a clue to the otherwise scarcely comprehensible fact that a famous composer should have been able to disappear in so short a time, not just from public consciousness, but that he should be buried by oblivion as if beneath a heavy stone.

The fermentations of the Schreker sound have been entirely absorbed by light music, whether because its matadors learned a thing or two from Schreker, or because his manner of simply sampling sounds is one which was itself moving in the direction of popular music and the latter spontaneously produced effects of the kind which had very different intentions in him.

But in the meantime the sharp dichotomy between highbrow and lowbrow music has been erected by the administrators of musical culture into a fetish which neither side may question. In consequence the guardians of highbrow music are shy of sounds that have found a home in lowbrow music and might discredit the lucrative sanctity of the highbrow variety, while the fanatical supporters of lowbrow music wax indignant at the mere suggestion that their music could have claims as art.

Yet Schreker cherished lofty ambitions for his confections. The intoxication they induce conjures up the vision of some lukewarm, chaotic effusion, like something from the age of courtesans. It is music without firm definition of any sort. It resists as if it were reification itself. It is art which resents its own purely musical materials, as if they were amusical, alien to art as such. It is this unruliness and nothing else that links Schreker with the avant-garde of modernism.

Does this sound like an Adorno who hated jazz? Is it just me or is he attempting to make a kind of aesthetic connection between Schreker's music and jazz?

That being said, his comment about the highbrow/lowbrow distinction as being one that has been "erected by the administrators of music culture" seems right in line with what I've been getting in recently, as well as why Joshua Glenn has made Adorno a "hilo hero" over at his site. The other great thing about this Schreker essay, as well as many of the others in Quasi una Fantasia, is that they are generally positive, which goes against the grain of Adorno as curmudgeon.

(My own pet theory for the darkness of his and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Englightenment - Benjamin was dead and the war raged on. What more does one need?)

The easiest way to put it is that Adorno didn't like industry. Unless one just admits that most jazz is industrial (his second essay in Quasi una Fantasia analyses "commodity music", and it's mostly what one would call "classical" music.

I am beginning to wonder if much of the criticism of Adorno's stance really just comes down to different post-war reactions to the war. Wouldn't be the first time...

Symphonic Completism

Like books, I think most of us have more music than we have time to listen to. So I'm going to leverage the benefits of the blogosphere and ask it the following:

If I were to listen to a complete series of symphonies, whose should I listen to? I've listened to Beethoven's and Brahms' many times, as well as Mahler's and Shostakovich's, but any suggestions as to whom might be worth taking a stab at their entire symphonic oeuvre? Thanks!

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That being said, I'm wondering if it might be possible to organize the musical equivalent of a book event, where we pick a composer and/or some works, find some scholars/musicians who might be willing to contribute, and let it unfold over a number of blogs?

If any of these questions prompts you to answer, please do so in the comments!

The Rise of the Ampelmännchen: Thoughts on the Fall of the Berlin Wall

The Berlin Wall was a teenager when I was born, and I was a teenager when it fell. When the thing was up, it sat there, carving Berlin into two, immutable, eternal. And then it was gone.

The Berlin Wall, known to most Germans simply as “die Mauer” opened 20 years ago today, allowing East Germans to cross freely into West Berlin for the first time in 27 years without being shot. It is difficult to successfully articulate today how strange and exhilarating it was to watch this event unfold - watching all the programming that reflects on it 20 years later, many of the people who were there are still baffled by why it happened.

But perhaps more shocking still, is the fact that, 20 years on, East Germany simply disappeared. The Wall fell and took an entire nation with it. And East Germany did not just disappear politically – its very existence has disappeared from the minds of most people in the English-speaking world. To many, a unified Germany signifies an expanded West Germany, and not the coming together of two nations with very different paths, ideologically and existentially opposed to each other, and yet now one.

There are many reasons for this mass forgetting, but part of it has to do with, surprisingly, commodities.

The recent film Das Leben der Anderen rekindled popular interest in the former East Germany. Highly acclaimed, it was praised for its authenticity as an accurate representation of the Ministry of State Security, or the Stasi. However, in the film, the moment the Wall falls is more reflective of the current view of the former East Germany than the euphoric days and months following November 9, 1989.

Das Leben der Anderen captures the fall simply and brilliantly – when the principal character discovers the Wall has come down, he, who had been consigned to steaming open East German mail after helping a well-known playwright subvert the state, gets up from his chair and walks out the door.

This silently taking leave of his work implies to the viewer that the principal character knows more than he possibly could have at the time. It signals that the entire promise of East Germany is no more. The socialist mission, the way of life, is gone, forever. This moment identifies less with the jubilation of 1989 and more with German unification, the absorption of communist East Germany into capitalist West Germany, and the nearly 20 years of high unemployment in the former East Germany.

That East Germany is no more is further evinced by Ostalgie, the nostalgia for East Germany – what is nostalgia but a longing for something irretrievable? And yet, even the symbol of the Ostalgie movement, Ampelmännchen, the old East German crossing signal figure, is ultimately more representative of the new reality of a unified Germany than an expression of the concrete past of the East.

Signalling his own transformation from a symbolic point of difference between East and West into a commodity that unites them, Ampelmännchen is now available on a wide variety of consumer products. There is even an Ampelmann Restaurant in Berlin.

The figure still occupies a role in traffic control, yet this has been superseded by his role as a design icon who can hold a pencil or adorn a mug. As the website devoted to his products notes:

“Now they (Ampelmännchen) can be found again, mainly in the new federal states on secondary roads and municipal streets. Only the west or euro traffic light man is allowed to glow on main roads, in accordance with the Traffic Signals Directive. In the meantime there are selected crossings in a few West German towns where pedestrians are directed by the East ampel men. But this should be viewed as no more than an act of solidarity, because despite the advantages, a general change over in the other direction has never entered the discussion."

In other words, Ampelmännchen is an anachronism, no longer the standard; the figure is no longer a functional representative of the country that birthed him. His meaning has changed, and with him the meaning of what it is to be East German. Through the power of capitalism, Ampelmännchen, with his restaurant and fashion shows, has never been less East German.

And yet, perhaps this was all to be expected. If one watches 1950's DDR films like Meine Frau Macht Musik, or peruses Taschen's DDR design, it quickly becomes apparent that part of what killed East Germany, beyond its truly lousy government, was that it attempted to offer West Germany to its citizens while rejecting the economic system that West Germany was founded upon.

The fall of the Berlin Wall took East Germany away. But tearing down a wall does not build a country, nor does celebrating the Ampelmännchen. Throughout all the celebrations, there are deep fissures which have yet to be filled, in part because the discourse in which people operate in Germany can contain only one side.

The long and painful process of cultural and spiritual reintegration between the Germanys continues, 20 years on, and will likely still be going on when my own son becomes a teenager.

Composition Studies

A.C Douglas has responded to my posts about classical music over on his blog. I will address his concerns in the near future, but please go and read his post and let me know what you think of it.

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On a recent visit, my father gave me a digital SLR camera. He is a photographer, (his pictures have long graced the top of this site) and so I grew up around nice camera equipment. However, like many, I have long used a point and shoot digital for regular use. My point and shoot died (while I was in Newfoundland!) and so my father graciously gave me one of his cameras to use.

The funny thing about using an SLR again is it showed me just how much I have forgotten about taking pictures. I grew up taking photos on a Nikon F1, where the metering was automatic, but that was about it. Getting an SLR, even a fully automatic one, has been a real eyeopener for me, and how much different forms of technology can radically transform our skills, and not always for the better.

In that light, I decided to go out today, an unseasonably warm day here in Toronto, and take some photographs. Here they are. I should note that they are untouched and uncropped, the only change being that I had to rotate some of them!

Wiping my Brows

Looking at yesterday's post, with fresh eyes, I realise now that there are aspects of it that are pretty unclear. Rambling is an occupational hazard in blogging and I see that I'm pretty guilty of it.

I should also point out that this analysis works a lot better in North America than it does in Europe, and given much of what I'm getting at is North American, I'm not even going to begin transposing it to a European context.

I feel I'm carrying the "brow" heuristic too far, but it seems to be working and it's kind of fun, so (again, my apologies to Joshua Glenn, any errors in my analysis that refer to "brows" are mine and neither his, nor Russell Lynes', nor Hazlitt's...

So, what was I trying to get at yesterday? Some theses (feel free to disagree).

1) The idea of "classical music", as popularly conceived by both classical music lovers and those uninterested in classical music, is premised today on the idea that classical music is a form of highbrow culture. This is false. It is, with some exceptions, a predominantly middlebrow preoccupation, as much as indie rock, techno or jazz are today.

2) For all kinds of reasons, such as the development of recording technologies and the ensuing commodification of musical tastes, a bifurcation emerged which posited classical music as "highbrow" and popular music as "lowbrow", and while these on some levels reflected social and economic stata, they were also tied heavily into the marketing of music in the early 20th Century (for see Caruso).

3) At some point during this time, a cognitive dissonance emerged in people who enjoyed classical music. On the one hand, they enjoyed classical music, which, from a broad cultural perspective, was seen as elitist and highbrow for marketing reasons (I believe this in part to be because classical music was, generally more expensive to produce and lent itself less readily to the recording technologies of the time - a jazz standard could be made to fit on a single side of an LP- a Beethoven sonata, was not so forgiving), and so classical music lovers identified themselves as "highbrow".

However, given the middlebrow weight of interest in classical music, the middlebrow desire to impose their values on the highbrow and lowbrow populations led to the emergence of the desire to proselytise classical music to the lowbrow, chastising them for their lack of self-improvement. At the same time, the "highbrow" were chastised for not listening to popular music, a situation which sounds strangely familiar, doesn't it?

4) This has led us to where we are today, which is that we have a false dichotomy between high and middle in the bulk of North American classical music culture, where people identify themselves as highbrow but, for the most part, behave like middlebrows.

OK, I think that's clearer than yesterday. I suppose the question remains as to whether or not this is a good or a bad thing. I instinctively want to say it's a bad thing, but I'm not fully there yet, because I do enjoy the idea of exposing people to Beethoven and Bach even though they may not think they'll like it. Why?

Because that's how it happened with me. But then maybe I was destined to be a highbrow...I kid.