Blog/News

It strikes me that the world at large would just as soon pretend that the COVID 19 pandemic never happened – and people resist remembering the trauma of those years. Not me. As hospitals flooded with the sick, I sat at home writing music, my thoughts flooded with awareness of the pain of loss everywhere, death reaching out in every direction, all around the world. At the time, seeing the typical human responses to the unwanted hand of natural catastrophe (we have behaved just as badly, if not worse, in every plague throughout history) I thought about the 1918 flu pandemic from the last century. It was as I was exploring such thoughts that I discovered Ellen Bryant Voigt’s poignant book “Kyrie” – a set of sonnets about the 1918 pandemic and the world that existed in America at the time. This music sets five poems from that brilliant book.

The thought repeatedly occurs to me these days, as anger and anxiety are felt worldwide and war threatens, that much of that is a rebound from the internalized and repressed fear that lingers in the immediate aftermath of the pandemic. People may not want to remember – and certainly don’t want to relive such feelings. For such as those, don’t listen.

An insomniac, I often spend much of the night listening to music. In order not to disturb my wife, I put ear pods on and spend hours lying in the dark listening. Lately, I have discovered the pleasure of using a one-word search term on Apple Classical – the word “complete.” Not so very long ago, recordings were limited in their duration by the media they were recorded on – LPs when invented gave a certain meaning to the term “long playing” that has long since become outdated. CDs are limited to 80 minutes. But now, with streaming, albums can go on without limitation.

Apple Classical has become my go-to streaming platform for nighttime listening as there are a large number of albums with a duration that will last through most of the night. I enter “complete” and see what pops up. The complete symphonies, complete piano music, complete preludes, complete nocturnes, complete string quartets of just about any composer, streaming for hours on end. Recent listening has included the complete piano works of Satie, Debussy, Faure and Ravel (I was in a French mood for week or so); the complete string quartets of Haydn, Shostakovich and Myaskovsky; the complete symphonies of Franz Schmidt; the complete violin sonatas of Heinrich Ignaz France von Biber. And, yes, I often drift off to sleep in the middle, while the music goes on, often to delightful musical dreams.

It is regrettable that there is not nearly enough time in a lifetime to cover more than a small fraction of the great music that is out there.  But I’m working on it.

Another Grammy voting season is here. As usual, from every direction, email and social media, I am inundated by a tsunami of notices from musicians bringing their submissions to my attention.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t vote the same way as others do. It seems most do their listening before voting actually begins and then vote for whoever they’ve decided to support beforehand. I don’t do that. I don’t do any listening before voting starts. During the voting period, I go diligently through my 10 selected categories, giving a listen to most entries, on the hunt for any music that pops out to my ear as something different, where the music isn’t the “same old, same old.”

While there may be hundreds of entries in each category, one way I get through it is by skipping any new recordings of classical “warhorses” that have been recorded hundreds of times by others. If someone has decided to submit yet another recording of, let’s say, a Beethoven sonata, I just skip it. With the vast quantity of worthy music out there that is hardly known by the general listening public, why, oh why, do that? What are the chances that the artist, no matter how good they are, bring something new to that recording?

I yearn for music that stands out from the crowd and brings a very personal voice to the recording. Or that brings sounds from the past to the world that are deserving of a fresh look because, for whatever reasons, a composer has faded into undeserved obscurity.

Every year, and I suspect this year will not be any different, the pickings are slim. Most entries strike me as “same old, same old”. Yet the great pleasure of this exercise for me is that every year I find gems – composers or performers whose work I never heard before that is wonderful – and most deserving of recognition.

Seeing a mention on someone’s Substack post (I don’t now remember whose) of Stravinsky’s Harvard lectures, not having previously read them, I ordered a copy. The overall gist of the lecture series is that composing is the hard work of discovery within the boundaries of order, creating something sensible out of the endless possibilities of chaos, your tools being the basic elements of music.

He takes the elements of music and discusses them in turn. One quote which resonated with me was in his discussion about melody.

“The capacity for melody is a gift. This means that it is not within our power to develop it by study. But at least we can regulate its evolution by perspicacious self-criticism. The example of Beethoven would suffice to convince us that, of all the elements of music, melody is the most accessible to the ear and the least capable of acquisition. Here we have one of the greatest creators of music who spent his whole life imploring the aid of this gift which he lacked. So that this admiral deaf man developed his extraordinary faculties in direct proportion to the resistance offered him by the one he lacked, just the way a blind man in his eternal night develops the sharpness of his auditive sense.”

Just my opinion but I think he hit the nail on the head here. Beethoven’s music always struck me as a titanic struggle with the tools that he never quite mastered – melody and counterpoint. The results were extraordinary – but are rarely delivered with the ease, perfection and eloquence of those who naturally possessed those innate talents. Bach for one. The example Stravinsky gives as an opposite to Beethoven is Bellini, a man from whom melodies just poured out seemingly without effort. That’s not an example I would have chosen myself. After reading the paragraph I spend several hours listening to Schubert songs. Now there was a talent for melody.

Notwithstanding the above, while Beethoven is far from one of my personal favorites, his imagination was beyond compare and music (again just my opinion) such as the late string quartets, late piano sonatas, put him on the mountain top. But I always found much of his other music over reliant on scales, arpeggios and chords – without a gorgeous, heartbreaking melody to be found. In short, a great but uneven composer.

Off on a tangent, I was recently listening to the symphonies of Brahms and Gernsheim. The latter also wrote four symphonies, each one prior to Brahms writing his. If you were listening to one without knowing whose work it was, you might wonder to yourself “did Brahms write more than the four symphonies I know?” The sound fabric is so similar. Given that Gernsheim wrote each of his four symphonies first, perhaps calling his music Brahmsian is wrong. Rather, the reverse, Brahms’ symphonies are Gernsheimian!

It seems to me that of the two, Gernsheim was the better orchestrator and had a real mastery and control over form. But returning to the theme with which I started, Brahms had a greater natural gift of melody – and it is that which makes him the greater composer. His symphonies sing gloriously with unforgettable incomparable melodies.