Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Celebration of Successes in Dealing with Failures: Bender, Joachim, and the Joy and Suffering of Amateurs

Wayne Booth: For the Love of It
I t was in 1961, at the summer session of CAMMAC (Canadian Amateur Musicians - Musiciens Amateurs du Canada), upon the occasion of butchering Beethoven’s first Razumovsky String Quartet, Op. 59, when Joachim said, ‘Fritz, you are really an awful violinist.’ Fritz, without missing a beat, replied coolly ‘Yes, Otto, but I am a much better violinist than you will ever be a chemist.’ ”
  —  Robert Bender, reminiscence regarding his father, Fritz Bender (1906-2005), inorganic and medicinal chemist, inventor of process for fabricating aircraft-grade plywood (initially for Mosquito bomber planes), fled Germany, interned in New Brunswick in 1941, served in Canadian government in various capacities thereafter; accomplished amateur violinist and acquaintance of Otto Joachim.

CMT: Otto’s implication was that Fritz ought to quit trying? He was implying that, because Fritz’s playing would never be virtuosic, he should simply stop?

DSM: No, not that. It was simply a genuine expression of frustration—the burden of being bound by the limitations of the other players, including Fritz, was, in that moment, too much for Otto. He lost his patience. It was regrettable, in that the four played together regularly.

Otto Joachim
CMT: Joachim had his symphony chair, and he had his McGill professorship, and he had The Montreal String Quartet (1955-63) - Le Quatuor à cordes de Montréal (1955-63). He had the Canadian government commissions. And yet he routinely played in amateur ensembles as well. That is really remarkable. The Montreal String Quartet was composed of illustrious musicians—Hyman Bress and Mildred Goodman, violins, Otto Joachim, viola, and Walter Joachim, cello. Its early performances were mainly devoted to works of Canadian composers: Vallerand, Papineau-Couture, Betts, Morel, Archer, Freedman, and Turner. It premiered Glenn Gould’s Quartet (1956), Otto Joachim’s Quartet (1957), and Clermont Pépin’s Quartet No. 2 (1956) and Quartet No. 4 (1960). When it disbanded in 1963, the quartet was considered one of the finest in Canada.

Fritz Bender at 99
DSM: Fritz was a little older than Otto. The picture above was taken when Fritz was almost 99 years old. Both of them had fled Nazi Germany in the 30s. Otto Joachim was born in Düsseldorf in 1910 and became a naturalized Canadian in 1957. He studied the violin 1916-28 at the Buths-Neitzel Conservatory. In 1934, a year after Hitler came to power, Joachim left Germany for the Far East, where he remained for 15 years, performing and teaching first in Singapore and later in Shanghai. He eventually decided to settle in Montreal, where he became principal viola of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and of the McGill Chamber Orchestra. At the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal Joachim was in charge of chamber music, violin, and viola classes until 1977. He had a paradoxical interest in old instruments and modernist avant-garde electroacoustic music. As a modernist, Joachim wrote music in its various idioms: serial, aleatoric, and electroacoustic. In 1985, during a concert in Windsor, Ontario, to commemorate his 75th birthday, the Essex Winds premiered his Mobile für Johann Sebastian Bach, commissioned by the Windsor Symphony Orchestra, which he conducted. In 1990, his 80th birthday was marked by a concert of his works presented at the Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur in Montreal.

T  he terms ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’ are by no means opposites. Indeed, the distinction between them offers difficulties. E.T. Hiller (Social Relations & Structures, Harper, 1947) speaks of five variable attributes of professions:
  • long, systematic preparation;
  • the presence of norms of conduct;
  • an occupational conscience, that is, an emphasis on standards and services rather than material rewards;
  • recognition by the public of professional authority based on knowledge rather than mere credentials or powers delegated by the state; and
  • a kind of personal ‘bearing’ consistent with the value served by the vocation.
... The amateur, on the other hand, is ... free to choose, and can enter into his activity with the greatest of enthusiasm. He can be expected to contribute new ideas [but is not under a professional compulsion to do so]. In this sense, the problem of every professional musician is how to find a balance between freedom from his circle as an amateur in spirit, at the same time that he is supported by it as a professional in occupation.”
  — Max Kaplan, The social role of the amateur. Music Educators’ Journal 1954; 40:26-8.

CMT: Musicologist Robin Elliott has remarked that Joachim’s L’Éclosion and Concertante No. 1 and other pieces ‘exude a spirit of compromise. … [a trait that] has been one of the hallmarks of the Canadian psyche.’

M y deep-felt response to minor-third and minor-second dying falls ... Deryck Cooke rightly insists that our emotional responses to particular intervals and harmonies are partly cultural inventions and partly natural. Consider the half-dying falls Mendelssohn exploits so wonderfully in the quartet Op. 44 No. 2 (E minor) ... We were amateurs without—I suspect—even knowing the word.”
  —  Wayne Booth, For the Love of it: Amateuring & Its Rivals, p. 24.

DSM: According to Udo Kasemets, ‘Joachim’s treatment of the tone-row is at once quite conventional and undogmatic ... his rows are easily recognizable and tuneful.’

T he accidental blessing of the sense of total leisure—that precious freedom to go until ‘worn out,’ utterly drained, totally possessed: that freedom to be an amateur without qualification. How rarely in life do we stumble into anything like that!”
  —  Wayne Booth, For the Love of it: Amateuring & Its Rivals, p. 33.

CMT: Amazing to ears unprepared to believe that 12-tone music can be lyrical, he used tone-rows to achieve phenomenal lyrical and tragic effects. Joachim’s way of creating unusual sounds from traditional instruments also shows the influence of Varèse—the intersection of old instruments and new music.

A ll of this presupposes that you have available other players who are better than you are. It also assumes that you have no insatiable need to shine. Many professional cellists and violists don’t enjoy playing pieces that give them little to do beyond do-sol, sol-do. We don't need any testimony from them—the absence of compositions like that from professionals’ programs tells it all. When was the last time you heard a first-class group doing the early Haydn piano trio? The cellists have just backed off.”
  —  Wayne Booth, For the Love of it: Amateuring & Its Rivals, p. 45.

DSM: Joachim’s String Quartet presents an intricate and cleverly worked out balance between twelve-tone techniques and tonal procedures. Sensible, listenable textures—with ‘Webernesque frailties’ according to Kasemets.

CMT: Each of the instruments has important solo passages—you see, he was concerned with the balance of personalities and voices in ensemble playing. These are not compositions of a pianist but instead the creations of an inspired and knowledgeable string player.

I  s a [music] teacher teaching for the love of music and the teaching of it? It’s always hard to tell. A few of my teachers have taught, like my present one, as if even winning a fortune would not stop their teaching; more of them made it painfully clear that they were simply eking out a living. When Signora X spent several minutes complaining because I’d bought my cello without using her as a paid go-between, I felt that music had long since left the room. But when Kim Scholes moved over to the piano, began to play the piano part of the cello sonata I had just dragged out, and shouted, ‘Come on—dance it with me!’ he was a passionately engaged teacher.”
  —  Wayne Booth, For the Love of it: Amateuring & Its Rivals, p. 91.

DSM: Joachim’s String Quartet’s mixing of non-serial and serial techniques achieves a convincing synthesis of twelve-tone techniques and compositional techniques from earlier periods.

W e are scheduled, according to Phyllis’s calendar, to play the Schubert cello quintet this coming Sunday—a favorite—and perhaps one of the Boccherinis—with Mary and Zeke and two of their friends. So Phyllis and I practice our parts together on the wonderful Schubert—me on cello, as usual—and even run through the famous Boccherini, with me for the first time ever doing pretty well on the colorful solo of the fourth movement. But since the Boccherini is really a bit boring I decide to go to our university library and see if there are other two-cello quintets—I’ve been told that there is at least a Glazunov. Lo and behold, there’s a foot-high stack of them! I check them out and carry them home on my bicycle. She and I try out bits of each of them, and find that they’re either boring (the Borodin) or too difficult (the Milhaud). Then, late Saturday, we phone the Jacksons about time of arrival, but Mary begins by saying, ‘We’re looking forward to those sextets.’ ‘Sextets?’ So it’s the Brahms sextets; but we’ve spent hours working up the quintets!”
  —  Wayne Booth, For the Love of it: Amateuring & Its Rivals, p. 101.

S ince my musical life provides no coherent progression from Mozart to Bach to Bartok to Haydn, to follow mere chronological journal tracings won’t make sense. What will? Some sort of plot line is required. What can it be? The plot line of playing, of laboring at thumb position in your eighth decade, is unavoidably double. Considered as a struggle to get better all the time, it would inevitably trace, twenty years from now, a trajectory from rising to falling, from hope to failure—even if we leave death aside. The moment will finally arrive when I have not only failed to become a really good cellist but am getting worse and worse all the time. ... On the worst days the plot turns into something even more pathetic than the cello tragedy. Yet sometimes, writing after a blissful quartet session the night before, the undrawable plot line rises beyond tragicomedy to become almost a divine comedy: rising, falling, rising—though ever more slowly—to peaks never foreseen but at last coming into view. The always-poor cellist experiences unimaginable ecstasies, and, though he knows that no prosaic account can capture them, he also knows that the aspiration is quite different. It must become a celebration of success in dealing with failure, an account of why failure in climbing one mountain, whether in music or prose, may be success in climbing an unforeseen neighboring peak.”
  —  Wayne Booth, For the Love of it: Amateuring & Its Rivals, p. 119.

F ay ce que vouldras!” (Do what you like!)
  — Rabelais.

T radition of a different nature is the backbone of Otto Joachim’s work. Strict dodecaphony—that is, straightforward serial writing—underlies his String Quartet ... The extraordinary talent of this composer shows already in the basic tone rows. Compiled of a succession of intervals which enable the creation of sensitive melodic curves and intense harmonies, they establish an element of thematic power which never relaxes during the various manipulations of the total form ... Often he employs two-part counterpoint between outer voices while the inner parts articulate rhythmic pedal points or ostinati. Canons over fragmentary rhythmic punctuation in the Quartet ... are not mere mechanical constructions, but inspired formal complexities with enormous inner power. Webernesque frailties appear in contrast to multiple-stop rhythmic orgies ... A performing artist himself, Joachim makes no errors in scoring. Every detail is worked out with meticulous care and consideration for clarity and balance.”
  —  Udo Kasemets, New Music: Canadian Study Scores I, Canadian Music Journal 1960; 1: 65-7.

CMT: Kasemets’ analysis is a good starting point for looking at Joachim’s quartet. The label ‘strict dodecaphony’ is, I think, a misnomer—that’s not really what Joachim’s quartet is. The opening of the work establishes a tonal centre on D, and much of the harmonic and melodic center of mass of the quartet is without a doubt D. And the dramatic tension in the quartet is created by the contrast between the unfolding permutations of the row and the repetitions of the note D. D is also used in a pedal point in the second movement. But Joachim’s String Quartet isn’t truly ‘in D’ or even ‘on D,’ but this pitch is used to articulate several important structural moments. The choice of the pitch D as a stable reference point seems to result as much from considerations of string quartet scoring—the note resonates richly on string instruments, whether played as a stopped note or open string—as from any pre-compositional decisions about tonalaty and twelve-tone techniques. More melodic than strict, Joachim’s row is made up exclusively of minor and major seconds and thirds:

Joachim, String Quartet, 1956 “Row”
DSM: The structure of the row gives a homogeneous character to the melodic material of Joachim’s String Quartet—fourths and fifths are never used melodically except in a few places where the row is used vertically instead of horizontally. The oddity in Joachim’s String Quartet and Paean and other pieces is that he forces old and new together in uncomfortable arrangements. We get the impression that past and present have not been reconciled but are in constant tension and confrontation. This is what I feel when listening to this piece.

A lthough it seems beyond belief, there does not exist a single piece of music composed within the last forty years that is regarded by the learned as worth hearing.”
  —  Johannes Tinctoris, Liber de arte contrapuncti, 1477.

CMT: Like the tensions in the string quartets of Elliot Carter or Brian Ferneyhough … for as long as there has been an avant-garde in music, there has been a vociferous and at times vehement critical opinion in staunch opposition to it. I suppose Monteverdi was judged as harshly in his day by Artusi or other contemporaries, or as harshly as Boulez was judged by Ligeti.

DSM: Joachim’s chamber works include:

  • Music for Violin and Viola, 1953.
  • Sonata for cello and piano. 1954.
  • String Quartet. 1956.
  • Interlude ‘Quartet for Four Saxophones,’ 1960.
  • Nonet, 1960. (wind quartet, string quartet, piano)
  • Divertimento, 1962. (wind quintet)
  • Expansion, 1962. (flute, piano)
  • Dialogue. 1964. (viola, piano)
  • Illumination I, 1965. (speaker, chamber ensemble, projectors)
  • Kinderspiel, Aleatoric Music for Children, 1969. (narrators, violin, violoncello, piano)
  • Twelve 12-Tone Pieces for the Young, 1970. (violin, piano)
  • Six Pieces for Guitar, 1971.
  • Requiem, 1977. (violin, viola or cello)
  • Four Intermezzi, 1978. (flute, guitar)
  • Night Music, 1978. (flute, guitar)
  • Tribute to Saint Romanus, 1981. (organ, 4 horns, 4 percussion)
  • Paean, 1989. (violin, cello)
  • Stacheldraht. 1994. (speaker, solo flute, and chamber orchestra)
  • Trio, 1996. (guitar)
  • String Quartet, 1997.

M y recollection of my father, Fritz, as a violinist was that what he lacked in skill he made up for in both enthusiasm and knowledge: whenever he missed a passage or a page was dropped in turning, he was always able to ‘get back in’ and could in fact play most of the chamber repertoire from memory. As a chemist, he was well regarded by a fairly impressive group, as I came to appreciate late in my youth; even in his late 70s he attracted post-doctoral fellows from a number of international sources.”
  — Robert Bender, personal communication.





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