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If we reduce a great work of art or science to its historical context, we miss its universal dimension; apropos of Freud, it is also easy to describe his roots in the fin de siecle Vienna - much more difficult is demonstrating how this very specific situation enabled him to formulate universal theoretical insights. Such historicizing is especially problematic in the case of Wagner. It is easy to show how Parsifal grew out of timperial, anti-modernist, anti-Semitism - to enumerate all the painful and tasteless details of Wagner's ideological engagements in the last years of his life (his obsession with the purity of the blood and vegetarianism, Gobineau and Houston Chamberlain, and so on). However, to grasp the true greatness of Parsifal, one should absolutely abstract ideas from these particular circumstances; only in this way can one discern how and why Parsifal still exerts such a power today. So, paradoxically, the context obfuscates Wagner's true achievement.

Slavoj Zizek

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After a very extensive vacation from this blog I feel almost obligated to finally come back to it. I will make it a point to try to actually post things here in the future. I swear it.

I thought then I would mark my return with one of my favourite pieces by Bela Bartok, the Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta. This piece is an absolute smorgasbord of analytical details, and there really isn't a succinct way of summing it all up here, so I would instead point anyway looking for a detailed analysis of the piece to go here: http://solomonsmusic.net/diss7.htm

To at least attempt a bit of a summary though, I turn our attention to this awesome diagram:

First of all, yes, it looks like a kite. But more importantly it demonstrates how the concept of Phi, or the golden ratio, shaped Bartok's compositional process so thoroughly. The entire piece is structurally oriented around this notion, and the most climatic moment of the piece occurs precisely at the measures most closely associated with Phi at the largest level of the piece. Within smaller subsections, we can see that the analyst has found seemingly important events occuring at all these specific subsections - whether or not the events are particularly significant enough (such as the entry of a second violin) is most likely up to the reader's discretion. 

The undisputable fact does remain, however, that the piece builds towards its most climatic, heart-wrenching moment in bars 52-55, in the moment that is tonally at the furthest distance from the original starting point - spanning the entirety of the tritone through a progression that simultaneously ascends and descends by 5ths in the different registers of the strings. 

Although there are many more things to say (see the solomon article), it's also worth mentioning that this piece actually sounds awesome too. Give it a listen!

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A late conclusion to the Schoenberg trilogy - every great composer needs to have three periods, right? Right? The development of dodecaphony is the subject of this last piece, the Piano Piece opus 33a. http://crca.ucsd.edu/~ben/courses/2012-102B/12/openingRows.png Here you can find an analysis of the rows and transpositions of the row that Schoenberg used in the piece. It's particularly interesting to note that the main rows he uses are "hexachordally combinatorial"- which is a term that sounds fancier than it actually is. 

The primary row of the piece is: Bb F C B A F# C# D# G Ab D E We see it right the very beginning, divided in thirds, into tetrachords, respectively a 0127, 0258, and 0146, which are then immediately mirrored by the RI5: 0146, 0258, 0127.  

I5 is "hexachordally combinatorial" because its notes line up as follows:

P0: Bb F  C   B A F# C# D# G  Ab D E  I5: Eb Ab Db D E G   C   Bb F# F  B A 

If we separate the two rows into hexachords, we notice that the two rows compliment each other by filling out each others missing notes (to complete the aggregate): Bb F C B A F# + Eb Ab Db D E G = all 12 notes of the chromatic scale.

Thus, in measure 8, when I5 and P0 finally play simultaneously (in different hands), we hear (using the term "hear" loosely) the complete aggregate separated into hexachords, despite having two simultaneously occurring rows.

This is a very shallow analysis, only intended to give people who may not be used to this kind of Post-Tonal music a chance to see that it is actually quite interesting if you look deep enough into it.

Debate over the aesthetic quality of this piece (and all serialism, really) has been intentionally omitted. Don't want to open up that can of worms again. 

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TIL your profile picture is Schoenberg's grave in the Zentralfriedhof, Vienna (Photograph taken May 2005). He died on FRIDAY THE 13TH. THE END IS NEAR. THE KINGDOM OF GOD APPROACHES.

      DAWN OF

  THE FIRST DAY

-72 HOURS REMAIN-

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This is the continuation of my little Schoenberg appreciation week (which should be every week, really), in celebration of his 138th birthday this past Thursday. This next piece (or rather the entire cycle) actually saw its 100th anniversary this year and continues to be one of my favourite pieces of art ever. It is to me an indication of the powerful relevance of this music, that after a century it continues to incite such fierce discussion and polarizing argument.  Pierrot Lunaire's venture into unrestrained atonality (not serialism.) helps demonstrate the insanity of a poor clown's descent into insanity as he thinks the moon is out to get him.

This particular piece is called Enthauptung, or Beheading, and it represents in my opinion an almost perfect moment of how crippling paranoia, anxiety, and fear are most effectively expressed through music, not just through the chaos of the text, but through the sort of post-apocalyptic aftermath in the following section, which ends with a silence that somehow seems to unsettle more than the cacophony that preceded it. 

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Happy Birthday, Herr Arnold Schoenberg! To commemorate the birthday of one of my favourite composers, I want to showcase a few of my favourite pieces, and at the same time showcase the immense breadth he had as a composer. This first piece, the String Quartet #2 is one of my favourite of his "earlier" works, though it bridges straight into the atonal period even in the 4th movement. 

It's refreshing to see and know that Schoenberg was just as competent with a key signature as he was with a row. His manipulation of the Wagnerian, hyper stretched romantic idiom is excellent, and I feel like many people who "Shun the Berg" don't give his earlier music a fair try either. 

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Wagner Götterdämmerung / The Twilight of the Gods 

Opera de la Reina Sofia, Valencia Zubin Mehta, cond.  

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R.I.P. Dietrich Fischer Dieskau. Wieder ist eine Legende von uns gegangen, als wir langsam immer ärmer werden. 

Der Erlkönig ist unzweifelhaft mein Lieblingslied Schuberts, und keiner hat es schöner gesungen als Herr Fischer-Dieskau. Deswegen wollte ich dieses Lied teilen. Ich werde sein Vermächtnis nie vergessen. Danke für alles.

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We ought not to forget that we still must account for the tones actually sounding, again and again, and shall have no rest from them nor ourselves - especially from ourselves, for we are the searchers, the restless, who will not tire before we have found out - we shall have no rest, as long as we have not solved the problems that are contained in tones. We may indeed always be barred from actual attainment of this goal. But more certainly, we shall have no rest before we do; the searching spirit will not stop pursuing these problems until it has solved them, solved them in a way that comes as close as anyone can to actual solution. I think, then, contrary to the point of view of those who take indolent pride in the attainments of others and hold our system to be the ultimate, the definitive musical system - contrary to that point of view, I think we stand only at the beginning. We must go ahead!

Arnold Schoenberg

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There are two possible interpretations of the common complaint made by many listeners, "I just don't get that piece." First, they may have expectations when listening to music that the piece in question does not fulfill. Second, the piece may sound like gibberish - it may seem completely random to that listener, like a cat walking on a piano. The cure for the first ill is finding a way to free yourself from a single listening style, and the solution to the second is probably forcing yourself to listen more or more closely . In either case, though, "not getting it" is not about how much music theory you have studied. When you have listened thoroughly, often, and well there are ways not to like a piece, but no way not to "get" it.

Joshua Fineberg

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Beethoven Sonatas

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[Einstein on the Beach] is Glass's first and longest opera score, taking approximately five hours in full performance without intermission; given the length, the audience is permitted to enter and leave as desired.  Pfft. Challenge accepted.

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“There’s something wrong in this country when you can instantly modulate to a double chromatic mediant, but our composers can’t openly write parallel fifths.”

Rick Perry (or something)

BWV 232, III. Kyrie

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Rameau's Les Indes Galantes (1735).  4 Acts, each of which attempts to depict an "exotic" other. Les Sauvages, the fourth act, deals with Native Americans. Who apparently were quite familiar with the chicken dance. I'm pretty sure this number is called "Dance of the Peace Pipe." Yeah. This is awesome.

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Just...wow. All my skepticism against non-Nijinsky choreography just vanished.

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Arnold Schoenberg “Die Glückliche Hand” (1913) op. 18

“Music should not decorate, it should be true…”

Arnold Schoenberg: Problems in Teaching Art

“Art stands tensed in opposition to the horror of history. Sometimes it insists, sometimes it forgets. It cedes and hardens itself. It persists or it renounces itself in order to outwit fate… For the sake of the human, the inhumanity of art must over top that of the world. Artworks test their skill against the enigmas that the world devises for devouring men. The world is the Sphinx and the artist is the blinded Oedipus, and the artworks resemble his wise answer, which topples the Sphinx into the abyss…To give this response, to give voice to what is already there and fulfill the commandment of the ambiguous by the “one” itself ever contained in that commandment, is at the same time the new that goes beyond the old by fulfilling it. In this, in making schemata, lies the utter seriousness of artistic technique. This serious is all the greater because today the alienation inherent in the consistency of artistic technique itself forms the content of the artwork. The shocks of the incomprehensible - which artistic technique in the age of its meaninglessness dispenses -reverses. They illuminate the meaningless world. New music sacrifices itself to this. It has taken all the darkness and guilt of the world on itself. All its happiness is the knowledge of unhappiness; all its beauty is in denial of the semblance of the beautiful. No one, neither individuals nor groups, wants anything to do with it. It dies away unheard, without an echo. Around music as it is heard, time springs together in a radiant crystal, while unheard it tumbles perniciously through empty time. Toward this latter experience, which mechanical music undergoes hour by hour, new music is spontaneously aimed: toward absolute oblivion. It is the true message in the bottle.”  

Theodor Adorno: Schoenberg and Progress

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Accordingly, music today demands more than, say, tonality can offer. Atonal music, engaging both tonality and the immanent history it embeds, up-ends established convention, but at the cost of easy comprehensibility - which, ironically, is symptomatic of the very need the new music seeks to address, namely, that music with a claim to truth makes cognitive demands on listeners for which the prevailing social situation - mass consumer culture - has not prepared them.

Richard Leppert