Category: Music

What is music?  Don't worry, I'm not going to define it now.  In fact I'm probably simply gong to leave that question open and ask more questions still.  More exactly I suppose, what is the experience of music?

I don't have an answer, none of us do, truthfully, although we can and do experience music, and I suspect that the experience changes constantly.  There are no two performances that are alike, no two experiences that are alike, even if one is sitting at home in one's favorite chair listening to one's favorite recording.  Each time we come to the music, we bring something different with us.  The experience is always more than ourselves, more than the musicians, more even the air in the room, but all of these things combine for form an experience that, at its best is a kind of relationship with something both greater than and deeply essential to ourselves.

Wednesday I went to a small chamber concert downtown.  The hall was small, lunch was served and the audience was seated at tables around the stage.  The atmosphere was friendly and somewhat intimate.  I realized how much I missed this kind of small venue, the sense of being a part of the music that it entails.  And the concert was lovely.  The first piece, Beethoven's String Trio No. 3 in G major was lovely and performed with skill.

And yet there was a point where I distanced myself somewhat, where I was enjoying the music, but where I was also standing back from myself, watching the musicians.  They are all excellent, and the piece was well played, but what I missed at that moment was that sense of relationship that carries into the music when you hear it performed by some quartets and trios, by chamber groups who live by playing chamber music, who spend extensive time playing the piece together, and who play with a sense of attunement that adds another dimension to the work.  I didn't mean this as a criticism, just as a reflection on something I sometimes missed, a different kind of listening.  It struck me that the musicians never looked at each other, as if they were each playing their role, and the piece would come together, which it did.  There is nothing wrong with this, and yet all of life is a relationship, a relationship of experience, or being, of creation.  And I suppose, like life, there are different types of relationship, even in music.  Again, I'm not trying to criticize, only to explore, and explore my own understandings more than anything else.

I still enjoyed the concert.  Far from being sad, I was thinking how lucky I have been, how lucky that I have been privileged to hear such a wide variety of musicians, playing in such a wide variety of settings.  I was also thinking how playing as a member of a symphony orchestra is different from playing as a soloist, and as playing as a part of a quartet (or trio or quintet).  In both the orchestra and the chamber group it is not about you per se, but how you play and interact with the group, but the dynamics are completely different.   And great ensembles develop their own personality, their own space within the music.

Even then however, the experience involves more than the musicians.  Although the musicians are critical, either the musicians, or the audience, can make or break the total experience. Wednesday's concert became more than 3 or 5 people on a stage, playing music together.  The musicians were excellent, the audience was appreciative, and it was in this relationship between the two that the true music took place. 

During the second half of the performance, when the Wind Quintet was performing an arrangement of the Dolly Suite by Faure, my fingers could not stay still, instead they were rapidly seeking out the keys on the imaginary piano in my lap, experiencing the music audibly, emotionally, and physically. And so I listened to the music, but some part of me injected myself, rather than my mind stepping back, my fingers stepped in, and this changed the equation.  This change was not necessarily bad, or good; it simply altered my experience of the music.  But  don't we all react this way to some extent or another?  Something resonates, and some part of our soul runs toward that connection, dragging us behind willy-nilly.  And that is an essential part of the experience of music, why all cultures, all peoples, all times, seek it out and share it amongst themselves.

And that brings me back to my question: what is the experience of music?  And is any one experience any better, or more powerful than another?  What is the role of the listener in the equation?  The simple truth is no experience can be duplicated.  So shouldn't we enjoy each experience for the joy it brings, even when our minds wander slightly?  How has life changed my ability to listen?   Has my heart grown softer, or more hardened?  What perambulations will my thoughts take the next time?  How will I experience the music? How will you?

I have not forgotten Big Ears.  Nor did I really intend to drag my reflections out quite so long, although I should have anticipated that looking at my calendar.  At times I seem to suffer from a disconnect from reality, at least in terms of what I think I can do.  I knew the first two weeks of April were incredibly chaotic, and my rational, organized self would set the pace, reminding me to slow down and just get through these two weeks.  But my exuberant self still continued to believe it could do everything, including write, a task that requires some quiet, some peace, a certain absence of running about.  Obviously the running-about team is winning this race, and so I must beg your forgiveness for my far too rambling words and scattered attentions.

Yet, I continue to think about the music; it continues to haunt my dreams.  Still, I want to write.  And therefore since I started at the end, I shall continue to work backwards, exploring the meandering paths of musical memory, which is of course influenced by things that have been heard, or have happened since.  I suppose the only way to avoid that confluence of events and thoughts would be to write immediately, and then to preserve those thoughts, inviolate.  But of course life doesn't happen that way. We are always evolving, our thoughts and memories always shifting in the sands of experience.

In many ways, my contemplative frame of mind on Sunday, and my willingness to release myself into the more meditative aspects of Inuksuit, was probably primed by what had gone before, particularly the Saturday morning performance of Morton Feldman's Crippled Symmetry, and the ongoing performance of John Luther Adams' Veils and Vespers, in the same performance space, the sanctuary of a former church, appropriately named "The Sancturary" on the big ears schedule.

Before attending Big Ears, if you had asked me to compare the music of  Feldman and John Luther Adams, I would have said they were nothing alike.  Adams' music seems focused on nature, evocative of the earth, whereas I somehow have always thought of Feldman as a composer with a very urban sensibility. But of course this is merely surface illusion; both composers use sound in a very precise way to create a specific musical experience.   Feldman and Adams both create worlds with sound.  One does not so much listen to the music as enter into it and begin to inhabit its space.  Given my own contemplative inclinations, these works seemed to take on a certain meditative qualities, qualities that were amplified by the peaceful setting, truly a sanctuary of both space and sound.

Crippled Symmetry is written for piano, flute and percussion.  If contemporary critics of Mozart could complain that his music had "too many notes", the opposite could be said of this particular piece.  The notes are few, but they are precisely arranged and very well modulated, sometimes simultaneously, at other times seemingly slightly off, but with such minute gradations of tonal color and subdued dynamics, that they seemed to flow together in a way that felt simultaneously simple and yet complex, slowly meditative, and quite beautiful. 

The music began quietly,  with a series of soft, seemingly symmetrical statements that softly, tentatively even, appear to be seeking  some kind of harmonious union that never quite materializes.  Somehow, although there were nothing that I would classify as "nature-sounds" in the music,  I imagined myself lying in a field on hot July afternoon, letting my mind float in the heat, hearing the periodic sounds of insects and birds.  I felt the stillness, the occasional sounds, much like the occasional bird, or locust or the buzzing of a fly, seemingly separate and yet in concert.  I felt my breathing slow, assuming that luxurious laziness of a summer afternoon, the sounds lulling me into its own world.  Slowly, my breathe would align itself to the pace of the music, tune itself to the chirps and rings.  For  breathe or two I could maintain the illusion of symmetry, of perfection attained.  But of course Feldman does not allow that.  And in fact nature's harmony is not our harmony, and our impulses are not always so easily aligned.

About 2/3 of the way through the piece people were beginning to leave so that they could go to the next concert.  I briefly interrupted my reverie, in an attempt to decide if I should go or stay.  I knew that my next choice, Mary Halvorson, would fill up, and if I did not leave, it would be unlikely that I would get in, and yet I felt pulled into the performance.  I felt as if something would be lost if I left at that point and decided to stay. And although my understanding was correct, and I did not hear Mary Halvorson, I have no regrets.

At some point soon after that brief interruption in my attention, there was a subtle shift in the sound, a fracture line almost, perceptible, but only barely so.  It seemed faint and distance, as if I could not quite put my finger on it, like a subtle shift in the barometric pressure, a subtle tremor, so faint that one could easily convince oneself that it did not in fact occur, a niggling little voice in the back of the head that one can easily push aside, except that its memory lingers, subtly altering one's perceptions.  Then, before you are even certain you have heard anything at all, that controlled rhythmic music, the slow sustained phrasing, that attempted coming together returns. Perhaps it was but a dream after all, a trick of the mind.  But wait, there has been a shift; that almost-symmetry that was present before has become ever so slightly more dissonate.  It is more difficult to find that yearned-for unity of breath and sound.  The percussion becomes slightly more insistent, the flute slightly more shrill. 

There is a growing sense of unease listening to this music, and yet I cannot quite pinpoint the source of the disturbance.  In many ways the specific pattern of notes, the pacing of the music, seems the same; and yet it is increasingly obvious that it is not.  There is more echoing, the modulation has shifted, the sustained notes wobble slightly, just enough to reflect off each other without finding any harmonious synchronization. The precision of the pacing, the sustained holding of a note, so exact and measured, adds to the depth, and just as this precision once yearned for harmony, that attempted harmony now seems to be falling away, fractured.   The piece ends in what seems to be simply a vibration or a ringing, like a tingle of unease running up one's spine.  Impossible to ignore.  Impossible to forget.  It was a work of incredible manipulation of sound, of beauty, silence and space, and of human emotion, if one was willing to slow enough to lean into it.

After leaving The Sanctuary, I walked back up Gay street thinking I would attempt to hear Mary Halvorson, but I stopped frequently to take pictures, to let my mind wander.  As anticipated, it was a lost cause.  I stood in line for half an hour, and got within 10 people of the door, but alas there was less than 10 minutes left to the concert at that point.  Had I walked faster, the outcome would have been different.  Others who left at the same time as I were admitted, but perhaps I was best left to my thoughts. I abandoned the line and wandered back to the former First Christian Church, where I had begun, and where my car was parked.  I stepped inside for a while, to hear a part of John Luther Adams' Veils and Vespers, another piece of profoundly meditative music, perfectly pairing sound and place to create a meditative space I can only describe as holy.  But I did not stay, and I regret not returning.  Busyness had resumed its control of my mind, and I needed to get home to walk the dog before my evening music marathon.

Walking across the almost empty parking lot at my church on Sunday morning, I heard the birds singing and thought for a moment that they almost sounded like the opening notes of John Luther Adams' Inuksuit.  That I heard music was not surprising.  I hear music everyday, hear music in the every day sounds and noises that shape and reflect life around me.  That I thought of Inuskuit was also not surprising, as I was on my way to Ijams nature preserve to hear exactly that, John Luther Adams' Inuksuit, the concluding event of Big Ears Festival 2016.

And so I entered the grounds in that continued reflective mood.  The sun was warm, the air was crisp, the crowd good hearted and cheerful.  It was a perfect spring day, perhaps a little cool, but I am inclined to prefer things a bit on the cool side.   I found a spot for waiting and settled in listening to the overlapping melodies of children playing, conversations, birdsong, and the muted comingling of new leaves rustling in the wind blurred by footsteps and blankets swooshing.  In this its own symphony, one could have missed the opening of Inuskuit, except of course it was introduced, so that we were primed for that soft and subtle beginning.  I closed my eyes and listened, the soft sounds becoming more frequent, more enveloping.  The occasional whoosh crossed my aural threshold:  wind? the sound of a car on the road? No, that wouldn't be it… or would it? An airplane passes overhead.  A child's giggle mixes with the tinkling and the whooshing, and it becomes difficult to distinguish between the place and the music, or the way the place and the music dance together, to create a separate space.

The songs become richer, enveloping.  The air is filled with song, or is it noise? No it is song, and it reminds me of that  joyous cacophony that greets me in the hour before sunrise each morning, the air filled with the sounds of birds and crickets, chirps and hums, chatters and tweets.  Eyes closed, the sun on your face, the sounds of joyous song surrounding you, you feel at peace.

Until…

A wall of screeching, roaring, thundering noise assaults you.  Stunned, you are overwhelmed by an urge to flee, to run for cover. Your heart leaps in terror and you open your eyes only to see the startled looks of those around you and remember that you are safe, that the sun is shining and the air is soft.  Children pause, wide eyed, then laugh and continue on, listening for the specific sounds, pointing, marveling. The world is not coming to an end.  But you are no longer comfortable.   Close your eyes again and you have gone from idyllic mother nature to the fury of nature, fierce and terrifying.  A child nearby whimpers, and inwardly you cry out in sympathy.  You must battle your own conflicting emotions, the almost instinctual, visceral fear, and the calm voice of reason in your head, the voice that keeps repeating that it is only music, and you are, indeed, safe.   Open your eyes.  Safe, yes.  The world goes on, and we watch it, secure.  Or are we?

Close your eyes again. Is this what a trapped animal feels like?  You hear a shrill whirring noise, like the screech of a siren, or is the shrieking vortex of the wind?  You no longer know the difference.  Is this nature's fury? or the fury man has wrought?  Is that distant rumbling thunder? Or is it the rumbling of bulldozers come to destroy your verdant home into acres of concrete.  As you continue to sit, eyes closed, the music washing over you, the chill in he air becomes more noticeable.  You imagine nature reshaping the earth, uprooting trees,  creating mountains, and you imagine man uprooting trees, reshaping the earth, creating cities, and you quiver in terror as those very trees that were your home, those very cities that were your home, are shattered in the wind. 

You open your eyes, and the sound is the same yet different.  People are gathered 'round.  Some are quiet and still, others talking, children are playing guessing games, trying to find the sources of the various sounds.  Eyes open, the disconnect is more obvious, vision rules.  You see a musician playing the drums, you hear the echoes of sound off the rocks, off the water.  Shimmering and distant.  The leaves of the tree next to you still rustle gently in the breeze.

And then it fades.  The thunder grows more distant.  Occasionally you hear a softer whoosh; occasionally you hear a single note, a song about to be reborn. You close your eyes again and your pulse stills.  Your own breath becomes softer and the songs become more clear.  Beauty has reclaimed the earth, is reclaiming the earth, will reclaim the earth. 

And you open your eyes.  It is a sunny day in April, a bit cool.  People chatter and laugh, gathering themselves and their families together.  There is a sense of awe in the air, of shared awareness. You walk back to your car and you notice, perhaps more closely than when you arrived, the tender green leaves, some nascent, some still tightly curled, others slowly unfurling their soft delicate skin to toward the sun.  You cup an embryonic leaf gently in your hand and feel the softness, knowing that in a couple of days it will be crisp and green. And you give thanks for the safety of your life even as you also beg forgiveness for all the harm that you, that we, that the collective we that is the species we call humans, has done to this earth, even as you know that we will continue to simultaneously treasure beauty and cause harm, sometimes intentionally, but not always, in our own struggle to survive.  You recognize that this too is the true nature of our existence, of existence at all.  We all just want to get by, to survive, but we also all seek transcendence.  And yet there can be no transcendence without terror, even though we can only stand the weight of that terror for a short time, even though we can only stand the joy of transcendence for a short time. 

And you are reminded of those sentries, the inuksuit, standing watch, reminding us of how small indeed we are against the forces of the world.  Solitary and alone.  One of the marvels of the musical piece called Inuksuit is that each of the musicians is part of a group, but each is also a solitary figure, a soloist performing a prescribed thing, but in concert with other soloists and with the environment around him or her; acting and reacting.  The music draws our attention to the kind of polyphonous harmony that surrounds us every day, in which we often unwittingly participate, a harmony to which we are often all too oblivious.  The music asks us to slow, to consider, to hear….and to heed.

Sunday evening Friends Of Music and the Arts presented a concert featuring Igor Stravinsky's Mass and John Rutter's Requiem.  I had been looking forward to this particular concert for some time, as the Stravinsky Mass is one of my favorite pieces.  Admittedly I was also feeling slightly apprehensive.  It was an ambitious and difficult program, and although I knew many people who had been working hard to master the music, I also had heard some say that the Stravinsky was simply not beautiful.  I know this is not the case, it can be a breathtakingly and profoundly beautiful piece, but I also appreciate that learning new music can be difficult, especially when that music plays with accents, stresses, and the layering of chords that in unusual or unfamiliar ways.   I would say that Stravinsky's sacred music is not nearly as atonally shocking as his secular music, and, in fact, is quite melodic, but it does not follow the familiar mold that we have come to expect for sacred music.  There may be something quite insightful in that.

The Mass is scored for chorus and wind instruments.  Stravinsky wrote it as a piece of music intended not as a concert piece, but for liturgical use.  To accomplish his intent, Stravinsky draws on very old techniques used in Medieval and Renaissance liturgical music, but not so commonly employed today in Western liturgy. There is a strong rhythmic focus very reminiscent of the old style of Gregorian Chant, with its complex mixed meter before the emergence of complex polyphony.  I also hear echoes of the Russian Orthodox in this music, but this could be my own imagination. The Mass was specifically written for the Roman Catholic Liturgy as the Russian does not allow for the instrumentation, but at the same time, Stravinsky was familiar with the music of the Russian Orthodox church and it is not odd to think some influence is present.

I am going to quote from the program notes here:

"The mass that resulted is indeed spartan but also evocative of chant, especially the syllabic chanting of the Orthodox Church.  The unusual orchestration, consisting of ten wind instruments, provides a cool, sonorous, and usually independent accompaniment to the four-part chorus.  As Robert Craft, Stravinsky's music assistant and friend, once observed, "The orchestra which Stravinsky says "tunes" his choir never plays quite the same music.  It adds tones, sounds different root tones than appear in the vocal parts, stresses, underlines, imitates, counterparts, sets off and augments the chorus".

I am very glad I went to this concert.  The choir performed fairly well, and at times with ethereal beauty.  They did not capture the magic of this piece, its deep liturgical flow and meaning, but I am sure with more time and more practice, were they so inclined, they could.  The orchestra itself, generally needed more work.  There were moments that were good, but generally there was too much horn.  It seemed to me they took that phrase "usually independent accompaniment"  to heart, although it simply could have been a lack of familiarity.  Music is something we never master completely, even with pieces we know intimately, and there were moments where the horns reminded me of a recent piano recital, where the children were happy just to hit all the notes, loudly and with no inflection, but at least hitting the notes. In a truly good performance we get something closer to what Craft describes at the end of the paragraph above, and the horns are softer and the effect far more subtle.  True the orchestra does not play quite the same music, but the overall effect is one of harmony, of subtle wave-like shifts in sound that build and add shadings to the meaning of the words, the words being Stravinsky's primary focus.

In the Kyrie, the horns and woodwinds set the tone, and aside from volume, there were lovely moments where, in the simple rhythmic recitation of the simple phrases, the choir achieved a kind of ethereal beauty, enhanced by the way Stravinsky manipulates the stresses of the meter, placing the normally unstressed syllables on the stressed beats, a technique that woks well with this music and brings focus to the words themselves and their meanings, and actually acts as a foreshadowing of what will come later in the text.  Unfortunately, but also understandably, there were also parts of the Kyrie where the choir slipped back into the more common, meter-centered inflection, with the unfortunate effect that the listener would be startled out of the beginnings of reverie. 

The second movement, Gloria, was a more successful conversation between instrumentation, chorus, and soloist,  with a clearly articulated pulse and a sense very reminiscent of the kind of early polyphony, or parallel organum, found in Medieval sacred music.  In the third movement, the Credo, the choir alternated between great beauty and a bit of a stumbling sense of disconnect, again probably due to changes in meter. The stumbles did not help the rather stark, sonorous coldness of this movement, meant to be a serious statement of faith, but generally that sense was present. 

The work concluded with the grandness of the Sanctus, even if the horns were a bit heavy handed, and the ending a bit more dissonant than it should have been.  This final chord of the sanctus uses a system known as Pythagorean tuning, again a technique used in Medieval sacred music, which relies on using perfect fifths and a major third.   In this case, the chord is G.  The point is to sound the fundamental first (G) then the perfect fifths — D, A, and E accordingly, culminating with C#, a major third, which completes the sound. Successfully rendered, each pitch plays on the pitch below it, in the way the ear wants to hear it, forming a kind of complex consonance with great depth.  Misplayed and dissonance runs rampant.  I suspect this color shift is more natural for the choir, as they came far closer to achieving it, than it was to the orchestral accompaniment. I suspect, for the horns, all that was necessary was the subtlest shift in color rather than full shifts in pitch, the end result being that, rather than being lifted to the heavens, the audience was jarred back to earth.

I do think the audience was very grateful that the concert ended with the Rutter, which may be one of the most beautiful Requiems in regular performance.  The form of the music was certainly more comfortable for both the musicians and the audience.  Unlike Stravinsky, Rutter is known primarily for his sacred music, and also unlike the Mass, this piece is intended to be performed in a concert setting.  Aside from the composers marked difference in style, this makes for a wide difference in the flow and sound of the music overall.  Whereas the focus of Stravinsky's Mass was on the words themselves, and the music was meant to move one into and through the words to the meaning behind them, with the Rutter, the music itself is the point, and it is the music that is meant to be transformative.  Stravinsky was also a composer who was perfectly capable of exploring darkness in his music, whereas Rutter's compositions, for the most part, are lushly beautiful and markedly avoid the darker sides of the human condition.

The piece was very lush and beautiful and mostly well performed.  Rutter writes music that is very easy to listen to and this piece was indeed soothing and uplifting for the audience. My personal favorite was the second movement "Out of the Deep", which is a setting of Psalm 130, with heavy reliance on the music and cadence of Spirituals to begin the movement in darkness and gradually arise to hopes for glory.  The echoes of the second movement, which continued throughout the work, also brings an underlying hint of sadness to the work, although this sadness is far from the dominant theme.  Overall, it was a beautiful work, and a lovely performance.

I would conclude by saying that there is a part of me that wishes there was any likelihood that there could be greater exploration of the Stravinsky.  I acknowledge that it is not likely to happen.  Even if the musicians were interested in devoting more time and effort to the piece, I am not convinced the audience would be willing to give the work a second chance, at least in the near future.  I am nonetheless happy to have heard this concert, happy that the group took on such an ambitious program, and I can hope that someone, other than me perhaps, will have discovered something heretofore unknown, and this discovery will lead them to destinations as yet to be revealed.