Michael Giacchino: Veridical and Schematic Expectations, Fight!

S    ome of the most compelling film music of the past year (2004-5) appeared not on the big screen but on the small one. Michael Giacchino’s score for the TV show ‘Lost’—the tale of several dozen plane-crash survivors marooned on a vaguely supernatural, ‘Tempest’-like island—has unsettled millions of American viewers with an eerie array of orchestral sounds: fluttery four-note figures, shivery tones produced by bowing strings near the bridge, nasty glissandos on the trombone, and, at moments of maximum tension, a low plucked note on the harp. According to convention, harps are called upon to herald angels or other vessels of goodness. Giacchino makes the instrument gaunt and deathly, much as Mahler did in the last song of ‘Das Lied von der Erde.’ In general, Giacchino has done such a bang-up job of generating menace that the scriptwriters may have a hard time satisfying the expectations that he has created. Something mighty grim will have to crawl out of that lush jungle in order to justify those twangs of terror... Music can take control of the image; it can also suggest a world separate from the image, or expose the image as a lie... Giacchino’s music for “Lost,” in its own non-Marxist way, plays this same game of estrangement. Dispatching the ghosts of Schoenberg, Xenakis, and other twentieth-century sonic terrorists into an island paradise, it touches on the universal modern suspicion that surfaces are not what they seem, that the center does not hold, that it ain’t necessarily so. When the images themselves are terrifying, music can bring about an even trickier reversal, providing ironic reassurance or genuine compassion.”
  — Alex Ross, New Yorker, 27-JUN-2005.

T    he character of motion-picture music has been determined by everyday practice. It has been an adaptation to the immediate needs of the film industry, in part to whatever musical clichés and ideas about music happened to be current. As a result, a number of empirical standards, rules of thumb, were evolved that corresponded to what motion-picture people called ‘common sense’... a kind of pseudo-tradition harking back to the intellectual milieu of Tin Pan Alley, of medicine shows and covered wagons. These rules have now been made obsolete by the technical development of cinema, as well as of autonomous [ambient] music.”
  —  Theodor Adorno & Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films.

E  arlier this week I went to see Star Trek. The Michael Giacchino sound-track was, for me, superb—a powerful, seamless accompaniment to the action on the screen; more than an ‘amenity’.

Y  es, the scenes are held together by ‘leitmotifs’—the role that film music serves in virtually all commercial, mass-market films is one of ad hoc leitmotivic ‘glue’. The sonic clues/cues for the viewer/listener are meant to be ‘easy’, lubricious. Only in exotic art-film will you find soundtrack compositions that majorly subvert or compete with the ideas and emotions unfolding on the screen.

A  nd yet. And yet there are a number of places in this new Giacchino score where the edginess presages what is about to develop, subverting the prevailing expectations of that moment. The constantly changing scenes and sheer overload of action in Star Trek make it a little difficult to notice this. But it was the feature that most captured my imagination as we were leaving the theater and driving home. I thought I’d share a little about how I think it works here, plus a few links at the bottom that you might find useful if your own curiosity leads you to want to explore how it works.


    [30-sec clip, Michael Giacchino, ‘Star Trek, That New Car Smell’, 0.9MB MP3]

M  ost of the score is bombastic, galactic, symphonic stuff. But there are segments that engage in cross-genre ‘chamber music’ idioms. Conducted orchestra and/or software-based virtual instruments, but still ‘chamber music’. And these cross-genre moments tend to be places where subversion of our expectations happens.

• Star Trek
  
• Nailin’ the Kelvin [leitmotif & reprise]
  
• Labor of Love
  
• Hella Bar-Talk
  
• Enterprising Young [Men]
  
• Nero Sighted
  
• Nice to Mind-Meld You
  
• Run and Shoot Offense
  
• Does It Still ‘McFly’?
  
• Nero Death Experience
  
• Nero Fiddles, Narada Burns
  
• Back from Black
  
• That New-Car Smell (clip above)
  
• To Boldly Go
  
• End Credits

B  eautifully done! The decision not to couple the new film’s soundtrack more closely with the original series’s music (Alexander Courage, Jerry Goldsmith, James Horner, Leonard Rosenman, Cliff Eidelman) is getting some complaints from a few reviewers. But, by contrast, the new materials Giacchino lays down should be good for the renewed Star Trek franchise. The ‘identity’ of this soundtrack is recognizable and durable. A friend with whom we saw the film on Tuesday had already seen the film the day it opened, and commented on liking the music. But then she is also a fan of ‘Lost’ and other Giacchino projects.


S  o there are cross-genre features in some of Giacchino’s Star Trek pieces. Not to say that other video game and film composers don’t do this; they do. But the chamber-symphonic cross-genre elements in this soundtrack are, to me, more pre-meditated and ‘go for the jugular’ than normal.

C  ross-genre techniques exploit... a schism... between two kinds of expectations—what Hallam and others call ‘schematic’ and ‘veridical’ expectations. A genre-compliant piece of music contains few or no surprises. But cross-genre pieces violate our expectations, and, to the degree that intact expectations matter emotionally or aesthetically to us, such pieces usually generate interest with each listening or each performance.

W  e are fascinated by how they “push our buttons”, even though we often can’t quite put our “finger” on why or how they do that. Fascinated... in the way that continued to preoccupy me during our drive home from the theater. Is this a synthetic, heavily-signal-processed virtual instrument, or was it processed digitized human voice—or was it a meld of the two, part-doubling and dubbed, beginning predominantly with one and dissolving into predominantly the other? Is this a chamber passage whose floor will drop out from under us, into a symphonic chasm?

H  ow does this cognitive/emotional exploit work? ‘Schematic expectations’ are automatic—culturally received and ‘generic’; things in which we have maybe considerable investment, but maybe not. Schematic expectations are built-up passively over many years. We are often quite ready to reconsider our attachment to them; we may even resent that we have them, insofar as they do not feel like they are really our own.

B  y contrast, ‘veridical expectations’ are expectations about near-term future events in the story-arc or narrative we are listening to. They are truth-statements or beliefs that we have formed by our own direct experience; they are fully “ours”. We are reluctant to abandon them because much of our own effort has been put into processing the events, musical evidence, and story-arc that have led to the beliefs and expectations that we hold at this moment. We want not to let go of them because our making sense of the situation might have to start totally from scratch if we did.

S  o if veridical and schematic expectations that we have as we listen to or play a piece of music diverge—or if they diverge for awhile and then re-converge again—then we experience powerful drama and emotional tension.

H  uron says a bit about this, as does Bharucha. Have a look at the links below if you’re interested in this.


M  ichael Giacchino, born in 1967 in New Jersey; captivated as a kid by John Williams’s classic Star Wars scores; studied composition at Juilliard; worked for Disney and then Dreamworks; enlisted by Steven Spielberg to score music for the Playstation game ‘The Lost World’, followed by ‘Medal of Honor’ and its many sequels. Video games (VG) ‘Call of Duty’ and ‘Secret Weapons over Normandy’ for which he wrote game scores were massively popular. Giacchino also scored Spielberg’s network movie, ‘Semper Fi’, the series ‘Alias’ and the movie ‘Sin’. ‘The Incredibles’ (Pixar) was a big breakthrough, or, arguably, the television series, ‘Lost’. For your interest and ambient amazement, I’ve tabulated other of Giacchino’s hypernumerous accomplishments at the bottom of this post. Live long and prosper!

• Michael Giacchino website
  
• Giacchino page at Mounsey (U.K.)
  
• Varèse Sarabande
  
• Ross A. Sound and Vision. New Yorker, 27-JUN-2005.
  
• Amazon collection of Michael Giacchino Soundtracks
  
• Giacchino M. Star Trek. (Varese Sarabande, 2009.)
  
• Adorno T, Eisler H. Composing for the Films. Continuum, 2007.
  
• Bacciagalupo C, Plaza E, Donaldson J. Uncovering affinity of artists to multiple genres from social behaviour data. ISMIR, 2008. [1MB pdf]
  
• Barthes R. Image-Music-Text. Hill & Wang, 1978.
  
• Bharucha J. Tonality and expectation. In Musical Perceptions. Aiello R, Sloboda J, eds. Oxford Univ, 1994. Pp. 213-39.
  
• Bryant J, Vorderer P, eds. Psychology of Entertainment. Erlbaum, 2006.
  
• Huron D. Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. MIT, 2006.
  
• Stevens C, Byron T. Universals in music processing. In Oxford Handbook of Music Psychology. Hallam S, Cross I, Thaut M, eds. Oxford Univ, 2009. Pp. 14-23.
  
• Zehnder S, Lipscomb S. The role of music in video games. In Playing Video Games: Motives, Responses, and Consequences. Vorderer P, Bryant J, eds. (Ch. 17) Erlbaum, 2006.

• Land of the Lost (2009)
  
• Partly Cloudy (2009)
  
• Up (2009)
  
• Fringe (19 episodes, 2008-2009)
  
• Lost (92 episodes, 2004-2009)
  
• Earth Days (2009)
  
• Glock (2009)
  
• Fracture (2008) (VG)
  
• Speed Racer (2008)
  
• Turning Point: Fall of Liberty (2008) (VG)
  
• Medal of Honor: Airborne (2007/I) (VG)
  
• Ratatouille (2007)
  
• Six Degrees (13 episodes, 2006-2007)
  
• Lifted (2006)
  
• Alias (105 episodes, 2001-2006)
  
• What About Brian (4 episodes, 2006)
  
• Mission: Impossible III (2006)
  
• Black (2006) (VG)
  
• Lost: Revelation (2006) (TV)
  
• Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World (2005)
  
• The Family Stone (2005)
  
• The Karateguard (2005)
  
• Destination Lost (2005) (TV)
  
• One Man Band (2005)
  
• Sky High (2005)
  
• The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz (2005) (TV)
  
• Vowellet: An Essay by Sarah Vowell (2005) (V)
  
• The Incredibles (2004) (VG)
  
• Call of Duty: Finest Hour (2004) (VG)
  
• The Incredibles (2004)
  
• Call of Duty: United Offensive (2004) (VG)
  
• Alias (2004) (VG)
  
• Secret Weapons Over Normandy (2003) (VG)
  
• Phenomenon II (2003) (TV)
  
• Call of Duty (2003) (VG)
  
• String of the Kite (2003)
  
• Medal of Honor: Frontline (2002) (VG)
  
• Redemption of the Ghost (2002)
  
• Medal of Honor: Allied Assault (2002) (VG)
  
• Semper Fi (2001) (TV)
  
• The Trouble with Lou (2001)
  
• Muppet Monster Adventure (2000) (VG)
  
• Los Gringos (1999)
  
• Warpath: Jurassic Park (1999) (VG)
  
• My Brother the Pig (1999)
  
• No Salida (1998)
  
• Legal Deceit (1997)
  
• The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) (VG)
  
• Donald Duck: Maui Mallard (1995) (VG)
  
• Gargoyles (1995) (VG)

• 2008 Grammy Award for Best Score Soundtrack Album for a Motion Picture, Television or Other Visual Media (Ratatouille)
  
• 2007 Film & TV Music Award for Best Score for a Short Film (Lifted)
  
• 2007 StreamingSoundtracks.com Award for Composer of the Year
  
• 2005 Emmy Award for Music Composition for a Series (Dramatic Underscore – Lost)
  
• 2004 IFMCA Award for Score of the Year (The Incredibles)
  
• 2004 IFMCA Award for Composer of the Year
  
• 2004 Game Developers Choice Awards for Excellence in Audio (Call of Duty)
  
• 2003 Game Developers Choice Awards for Excellence in Audio (Medal of Honor: Allied Assault)
  
• 2003 Interactive Achievement Awards for Original Music Composition (Medal of Honor: Frontline)
  
• 2001 Interactive Achievement Awards for Original Music Composition (Medal of Honor: Underground)

Chamber Music of Charles Ives: Authenticity Of, Necessity Of, Aberrancy Of

L   ong before his death in 1954, at 80, Charles Ives seemed less like the father of American music than an eccentric uncle whose antic behavior and uncensored opinions at birthdays and funerals conscript his relatives into manufacturing an endless series of apologies and disclaimers... During the past decade, the picture of Ives has metamorphosed from eccentric uncle into cagey impresario and entrepreneur, a process explained by Gayle Sherwood Magee in her aptly titled ‘Charles Ives Reconsidered’... Magee’s book is a model of contemporary musicology—sympathetically sober in its judgments and interdisciplinary in its methods… Ives may have experienced every sound he perceived and every emotion attendant upon those sounds … as music. If we imagine this differently-eared, alternatively-wired Ives, a lot of what critics have found problematic about his music and career falls away. He probably possessed an acute and unaccountable impulse to use sounds expressively. As he matured, he had to balance the need to acquire skills through musical education against the preservation of this impulse.”
  — David Schiff, review of Gayle Sherwood Magee’s Ives biography, ‘Charles Ives Reconsidered’, in The Nation 05-JAN-2009.

W   hy do I work in this way and get all upset over what just upsets other people? No one else seems to hear [the music] in the same way [that I do]. Are my ears on ‘wrong’?”
  — Charles Ives, response to violinists’ criticism of his Violin Sonata No. 1.

T he current issue of The Nation has a wonderful review by David Schiff, of the Charles Ives biography/musicological analysis by Gayle Sherwood Magee. Magee’s book is a delight. Schiff’s review is a delight as well.


A t its best, good criticism genuinely returns the [Foucault-ian/Adorno-ian] ‘gaze’ of the subject whose work is reviewed. Not content to merely be constructive in explaining or characterizing what the work is/was, the best criticism is deeply original in its own right. It is no way ‘derivative’ or predictable or fashionable, nor does it parasitize the reviewed work by way of using the review as an occasion to massage the egos of others.

F  ashion is fraud.”
  — CrimethInc, Recipes for Disaster.

D avid Schiff’s essay is a wonderful example of excellence in criticism. He commends Gayle Sherwood Magee for her musicological scholarship and explains in detail the merits of her new book and the rationale for his judgment. These are not so much features of a distinctive authorly ‘voice’ but of an engaging authority—the friendly and well-tuned mind behind the voice.

W   hat has been lost [in journalism in recent years] is the authority of the critic - his/her strength of voice. In an age where every opinion is valid, there are no more great critics in the mould of Bernard Shaw, Tynan, and Toynbee.”
  — Mark Ryan, former Director, Institute of Ideas, London.

W   ell, only if you ignore the work of David Schiff, Arthur Danto, and quite a few others.”
  — DSM.

S chiff goes (in the last page of his essay) well beyond the idioms of ordinary ‘review’ or criticism to reflect on the problems of doing biography and biographical musicology, including the vagaries of elusive personalities—subjects who [deliberately, cagily] left fragmentary and conflictual evidence, as a means of manipulating their own legacies and public personae. He poses additional novel possibilities that might account for Ives’s unusual career(s) and compositional output—stimulated in part by David’s recollections of his own father’s idiosyncrasies. He suggests entirely new avenues for medico-musicological exploration. He does this casually, in a three-page review, with a conversational style that reads like a letter from a friend or a transcript of a conversation in your living room.

In other words, Schiff’s review starts out reading like an excellent-but-conventional piece of criticism but gradually takes on some of the qualities of a Borges short-story—with conjectures that may or may not be feasible to pursue but are nonetheless captivating in their intriguing ‘No rules! Question everything!’ possibilities.


    [50-sec clip, Bekova Sisters, Ives, Piano Trio, ‘I. Moderato’, 1.2MB MP3]

Ives pallido ci dice di iniziare ‘ma deciso a non mollare’ ... Okay. We begin playing decisively but mezzopiano then, as instructed, and without ‘letting go’. Wow. What an amusing notation in the first bar!

Ives’s 4 violin sonatas (1908, 1910, 1913-?14, 1906-?16) and 3 piano sonatas (1905, 1909, ‘Concord’ 1915) are well-known. There are good recordings of them; the pieces are relatively often performed—more often in conservatory recitals maybe than other programs or concert series, but still... The San Francisco-based Ives Quartet and Blair String Quartet do regularly perform Ives’s string quartets, as do others. The Miró Quartet will perform Ives’s Quartet No.1 on Friday 23-JAN at Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie in NYC...

T   he Second Quartet is Ives in his early maturity, written between 1911 and 1913. The perplexing and sudden conjunctions, conflations, revelations, quotations and miasmic cuts are all firmly evident. But the somewhat tersely romanticised opening doesn’t quite prepare one for the fulminous writing to come: unceasingly powerful chromaticism. Here the quotations abound in tense, often hallucinatory rapidity... The [Blairs’] playing is involved and involving and conveys Ives’s journey from late Romanticism to modernism with conviction.”
  —  Jonathan Woolf, Musicweb International, FEB-2007.

B ut Ives’s piano trio does not receive so much attention as it deserves.

A nd if your taste runs to the exotic or experimental, then there are other pieces of Ives’s chamber music that you may like to be aware of. Ives’s throw-down Fugues in B-flat and D; his bombastic Fugue in phrygian, hypolydian and dorian modes; his contemplative Largo for violin, clarinet and piano, for example.

O r his ‘Largo for piano quintet’, subtitled ‘Law of Diminishing Returns’? Quirky finance inspiration for an insurance-man-cum-composer! What the heck does that sound like, I wonder? Go to the Yale University library and check out a copy and find out! Or go to PeerMusic Classical who publish these unusual Largos Risolutos Nos. 1 & 2.

I   ves in his last works finally regained his undiluted, uncompromised, uncontentious, and un-ironic compositional voice—the voice of innocence that he had left behind so long ago.”
  —  Gayle Sherwood Magee, Charles Ives Reconsidered, p. 162.

S chiff exposes impolite tastes, judgments and ideas for what they are. He lets the reader infer how unjust or ill-founded our received prejudices may be. In Schiff’s elegant 3-page essay, the indeterminate nature of Truth is laid a little barer than it has ever been, barer even than Magee has done. Without doubt, bare, original Truth is more beautiful than pretty verisimilitude. It is especially beautiful and surprising to find such beauty in a short review/criticism article in a publication for a general audience. Bravo!

M agee’s efforts to debunk the medicalization/psychiatrification of Ives’s emotions are praised and synopsized in Schiff’s essay. But [‘It takes one to know one’] composer Schiff goes still further in normalizing Ives’s experimentality within the diversity of mainstream-composer personalities. To Schiff, every last one of us has his/her own unique ears and inspirations and obsessions, each her/his own skills and gifts and blind-spots. Not one of us is exactly like Ives, Schiff says, but neither was Ives any more aberrant or less aberrant in the spectrum of humanity than any of the rest of us is, lest auld acquaintance be rudely forgot.

H appy New Year! Peace!

D   on’t pay too much attention to the sounds, for if you do you may miss the music.”
  —  George Ives, remarking to son Charles about the proper way to conduct hymns at a revival meeting.

• Schiff D. Ives’s ears. The Nation 2009; 288:30-3.
  
• David Schiff at Reed College
  
• David Schiff website
  
• Magee G. Charles Ives Reconsidered. Univ Illinois, 2008.
  
• Gayle Sherwood Magee at Univ Illinois Urbana-Champaign
  
• Journal of Music & Meaning website
  
• Music & Politics journal at UCSB
  
• Doctoral Dissertations in Musicology Online (DDMO) at Indiana Univ
  
• American Musicological Society website
  
• Empirical Musicology Review
  
• Blair String Quartet webpage at Vanderbilt
  
• Blair String Quartet at Vanderbilt Univ
  
• Blair String Quartet. Charles Ives: String Quartets. (Naxos, 2004.)
  
• Bekova Trio. Ives and Clarke Piano Trios. (Chandos, 2000.)
  
• Bekova Trio website
  
• Critics’ role in creating the artifacts of ‘history-as-exchange-economy’
  
• Ives Catalogue at Yale Univ
  
• The Charles Ives Society
  
• Adorno T. The Jargon of Authenticity. Routledge, 2006.
  
• Danto A. Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life. Columbia Univ, 2007.
  
• Roth M. Difference/Indifference: Musings on Postmodernism, Duchamp, and Cage. Routledge, 1998.
  
• Schiff D. The Music of Elliott Carter. Faber & Faber, 1998.
  
• Sinclair J. A Descriptive Catalogue of the Music of Charles Ives. Yale Univ, 1999.
  
• Smallman B. Piano Quartet and Quintet. Oxford Univ, 1996.
  
• Tuttleton J. A Fine Silver Thread: Essays on American Writing and Criticism. Dee, 1998.

The Uncertain Lateness of the Hour: ‘Periods’ and the Musical Self

E  dward Said’s book [published posthumously, following his death in 2003 of leukemia] is a series of dazzling case studies exploring the idea of ‘lateness’ in a range of composers, writers and artists.”
  —  London Review of Books.

L  ateness doesn’t name a single relation to Time but it always brings Time in its wake. It is a way of remembering Time, whether it is missed or met or gone. … The quality of Time alters then, like a change in the light, because the present is so thoroughly shadowed by other seasons: the revived or receding past, the newly unmeasurable future, the unimaginable time beyond Time. The conversion of Time into Space.”
  —  Edward Said, ‘On Late Style: Music & Literature Against the Grain’, p. xi.

Edward Said, literary theorist and Columbia University Professor of Comparative Literature, had not expected to die when he did, in early Autumn, 2003, at age 67. He had had chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) for more than 10 years. It was an acute infection related to CML blast crisis that took him away. His last book, ‘On Late Style: Music & Literature Against the Grain’, was unfinished at the time, and was completed by Michael Wood at Princeton University. There is both irony and poetic beauty in this fact.


The intimacy of chamber music genres provides unusually apropos means to express lateness—the irreconcilabilities of it; the private amusements and perplexities of it—perhaps better than other genres. Lateness: the idea that one is not getting out of this alive, that one cannot go beyond the [terminal] idioms and stances to which one has finally arrived.

Edward Said asserts that ‘lateness’ has to do with ‘the sentiment of Being’ and ‘the sentiments of Art’. But there are plenty of specifics beyond such colorful hand-waving. The book was the result not only of his own drafts of material that were intended to become a published book but also lecture-notes and detailed outline materials that he used in his course on Late Style in the Dept of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia. Lateness: inculcating and sustaining the unity and integrity of the self—its dignity and freedom—like Jane Austen and her judgmental stance toward the selves of her characters.

W  ith an unexceptionally Arab family name like Said connected to an improbably British first name, I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport and no certain identity at all.”
  —  Edward Said, London Review of Books interview, 07-MAY-1998.

Lateness: embodying the quality of self-sufficiency and, in anticipation of the finiteness of life, a measure of abandon and acceptance of the human condition. Said’s is a visionary normative stance, just as the qualities we refer to as ‘late’ are likewise visionary and normative. Lateness is the reaching of a new and final level of expression—Titian’s late-period discovery of the all-penetrating light that transmutes human flesh to reveal the soul and an alterior unity (Hermann Broch, quoted by Said, OLS, p. 137). It is the arrival at a state of ‘nothing-left-to-prove’ [to others], a renunciation of ambition.

A  mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one’s self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in moral life—and the further cultural shift which finds that place now usurped by the darker and still more strenuous modern ideal of authenticity.”
  —  Jacket blurb for Lionel Trilling’s book, ‘Sincerity & Authenticity’.

Lateness’ is not about impoverishedness or loss or despondency. It is not about resignation or desolation. It may touch upon these, but it is not ‘about’ them. It is instead about parables and testaments. It is about exile and unashamed subjectivity. It is about the acceptance of life’s contradictions and irresolvable and irreconcilable differences. It is about the sadness of Life and the joy of Life all at once, as Elliott Carter has said. The longing and the fervency of expression may be, if anything, greater than ever in one’s ‘late’ period; just less concerned with coherence than before.

W  hat gripped Adorno in Beethoven’s late work is its episodic character: its apparent disregard for its own continuity … seemingly unmotivated rhetorical devices like trills or appoggiaturas whose role in the work seems unintegrated into the structure … the caesuras, the sudden discontinuities … the work still remains ‘process’ but not as ‘development’; rather as a catching-fire between extremes which no longer allow for any secure middle-ground … the vestige of an individual human sorely aware of the wholeness that has eluded it forever.”
  —  Edward Said, ‘On Late Style: Music & Literature Against the Grain’, p. 10.

The notions of poetics and lateness imply at least some self-awareness. And whenever descriptive representation of a feeling or idea is planned and realized (composed; performed), poetics is met by analysis and interpretation. Composers, especially, cannot help projecting themselves and their own poetics into the analysis and interpretation by which their ideas are realized. Pierre Boulez’s analyses of Debussy and Berg are an example, as, too, are Adorno’s analyses of Beethoven and, now, Said’s analyses.

T  he most meaningful analysis of a symphony is another symphony. [And, at the end of life, there will be no more symphonies, no continuations of re-thinking things, no more replies.] ”
  —  Luciano Berio

What else? We often see an expressive prolixity in earlier compositions, while in ‘late works’ there is expressive economy. Given just enough notes to sustain the idea, ‘late’ pieces are often harmonically or rhythmically sparse and sometimes lapse into monody, then silence. Sometimes a piece is open-ended, simply vanishing. Early exponents of the practice of ending (‘abandoning’) a work in mid-passage include Frederic Chopin, Robert Schumann, and Franz Liszt. But there have been many since, including Elliott Carter—who spoke of this during his interview with Richard Dyer at Tanglewood last week.

An harmonic adventurousness, a radical chromaticism, a tonal ambiguity? Not necessarily. Those sorts of stylistic artifacts can arise at any age—early, middle, or late. Instead, what’s new in late compositions or late performances is a pervasive ‘worldliness’—not bitterness or cynicism or resignation. The musician has accumulated what business people jokingly call ‘scar tissue’—psychological grit; metaphysical emery. It doesn’t blunt the expressive edge; to the contrary, the lapidary effect sharpens all of the expressive edges.


One of the facets of ‘lateness’ that Said does not address in his book is the age-independent psychological aspect of how a piece comes unexpectedly to be ‘late’ or have qualities that we associate with ‘lateness’. The composer may have bipolar depression from early on in life, for example. Or the early onset of strokes or Alzheimer’s may fundamentally alter the composer’s or the performer’s perspective while not extinguishing the ability to continue. Or serious events happen in a person’s life that situationally yield the mien of advanced age. All of those can creep into the music. All of those can determine what and how much is left, and how ‘late’ the output that does follow is.


For example, in the late 1950s, the Neo-Classicist Finnish composer Einar Englund experienced a personal crisis and stopped composing. Modernism, which he termed “a mockery of the composer as a serious artist,” had irrevocably changed what was getting commissioned and performed. He said that in that milieu he felt he no longer had anything to say; his Neo-Classical idioms were no longer welcome: the ‘river’ had changed course, and he was left ‘high and dry’ on the old riverbank.

In his autobiography (1996), Englund confided another, more serious reason for the crisis: the tragic death of his wife in 1956, when Einar was 40 years old. Englund didn’t resume composing until 1971. His most productive period in terms of sheer musical output was the 1980s—and those of the ‘later’ Englund pieces that I’ve listened to do manifest some of the desultory attitude or ‘scar tissue’ I’m referring to. Englund died at 83, in 1999.

W  hat of artistic ‘lateness’ not as harmony and mature resolution, but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction; as anachronism and anomaly; as a special ironic expressiveness well beyond the words and the situation?”
  —  Edward Said, ‘On Late Style: Music & Literature Against the Grain’, p. xiii.

Mahler and Schnittke and many other people have had health conditions that conferred a precocious ‘lateness’ early in their lives as composers. Schubert’s last three string quartets, the String Quintet in C (D 956), the last three piano sonatas (Sonata No. 19 in c (D 958); Sonata No. 20 in A (D 959); Sonata No. 21 in B-flat (D 960), and the ‘Schwanengesang’ cycle are yet another species of lateness that Said does not address. That is, lateness and apprehension sometimes impart a tense, hemmed-in-èdness—an amenability to expediency of orchestration and compositional cliché borne partly out of haste: compromises of the Eleventh Hour; contractions from the radical inventiveness that Said’s treatment of lateness dwells on.

If you haven’t previously seen them, have a look at Edward Said’s books, ‘On Late Style’ and ‘Music at the Limits’. They contain valuable insights for all musicians, with regard to age-appropriate style. And they are, inadvertently, eloquent auto-elegies for Said himself. Touching and, maybe, life-changing for the musician-reader.

A  s one can see in the early and the late ‘Goldberg Variations’ performances that eerily frame his career—one at the very beginning, the other at the very end—Gould excavated the contrapuntal as well as chaconne structure of the work to announce an ongoing exploration of Bach’s inventiveness through and by way of his own virtuosic realizations … crafted resolutely against the negation and disorder that surround us on all sides. In enacting it on the piano, the performer aligns himself/herself with the composer, not with the consuming public, which is impelled to pay attention not so much to the performance as a passively looked-at and heard presentation, as to a rational and transcendant activity being intellectually, aurally, and visually transmitted to others.”
  —  Edward Said, ‘On Late Style: Music & Literature Against the Grain’, pp. 130-2.

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