Showing posts with label disenfranchisement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label disenfranchisement. Show all posts

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Chamber Music for Rome Burning: Brass Band and Pacifism

Foden’s Richardson Band
T he earth died screaming,
While I lay dreaming—
Dreaming of you.”
  —  Tom Waits, ‘Earth Died Screaming’.
I f you’re standing ‘outside’ [the community of brass-band players] looking in, [brass band] music could be misread as being aesthetically naïve. But those composers are fulfilling a function by providing well-crafted scores for a community that really wants them.”
  — Philip Clark, Review of Foden’s Brass Band ‘New Music for Brass Band’ CD, Gramophone, OCT-2008.
You may wonder what exactly Nero played while Rome burned. You may equally well wonder why he played it and what he was thinking and feeling as he did so. Sometimes there’s nothing that one can do. Never mind Nero and his nonfeasance. As the financial markets continue on their incendiary way, may I suggest that you will enjoy the unusual collection of ‘new music’ on the CD just released on NMC Records, by the Foden’s Richardson Brass Band, conducted by Bramwell Tovey? The 30-member ensemble explores fascinating territory that goes far beyond the idioms normally associated with ‘brass band’. And, in a way that I can only regard as ironic or clairvoyant or both, the music is perfectly matched to the ‘tropes’ that are in-play in the world of financial markets and central banking. Here on this superb CD is a kind of emotional catharsis that can only be found in brass band repertoire.

Bramwell Tovey
  • ‘While Rome Burns’ trope
    Something awful is happening. The world is ending, there’s an earthquake, there’re people leaping from buildings, there’s rioting in the streets. The ‘While Rome Burns’ person couldn’t care less. You’re still reading a book, playing or listening to music, posting and looking at blogs, whatever. Not that you approve of what’s going on—far from it; you just see the situation as futile. ‘While Rome Burns’ is the supertrope of ‘Dissonant Serenity’. Compare with ‘Holding Out For A Hero’ trope.
  • ‘Dissonant Serenity’ trope
    There’s maiming and killing afoot. Screaming and cursing, clatter of swords, bang of guns. Faces distorted with pain and hate, collective despair, fear and loathing. It’s terrifying, but it is to be expected. But you see peace in the middle of horror. You are smiling; not vicious, not insane, not stoic—but calm, gentle—almost enlightened. As the throats are slit left and right, you are in the eye of the storm, the calm center of destruction, and your serenity is so ‘off’ that it’s more terrifying than any fury. Villains and heroes can be dissonantly serene in battle mode, but it’s rarely the main character who does that. A closely related state of mind: the uncomprehending ‘Psychopathic Man-child’. The ‘Tranquil Fury’ trope seems similar but is very different in practice.
The Foden Motor Works Band was founded in 1902 and, phoenix-like, it has endured over the years under various and changing sponsorships, including Morris Motors, Overseas Technical Services Ltd., Britannia Building Society, Antoine Courtois Company, and Richardson Developments of Oldbury. To date, the illustrious Foden’s band has won the U.K. National Brass Band Championships twelve times.

This new CD has 14 wonderful tracks, with compositions by Richard Bennett, Kenneth Hesketh, and George Benjamin, Philip Wilby, Elgar Howarth, Michael Ball, Edward Gregson, plus Judith Bingham’s character pieces on Prague (St. Wenceslas Chapel, Wenceslas Square, Charles Bridge, Rabbi Low Creates the Golem). Righteous antidotes to our present societal terror.

Foden’s Richardson Band: New Music for Brass Band
Most interesting to me are the 6 variations on a theme by Michael Tippett—pieces composed by Philip Wilby, Elgar Howarth, Michael Ball, Edward Gregson, and Bramwell Tovey. These meditations reveal the astonishingly wide range of timbres and expressions of which brass band is capable. They reveal a surprising variety of communitarian and pacifistic views, for which Tippett was famous and which the composers of these variations/meditations here have honored. They additionally reveal a phlegmatic, unflappable attitude toward adverse events and toward authorities and elites that resonates deeply with the current state of affairs in the world. Having played in a brass band many years ago, I feel this is characteristic of idiomatic brass band literature—and of brass band members’ sociology and musicianship in-ensemble. Foden’s display this to the nth degree.

N o one could have guessed from looking at the score—and thinking of the thing [dismissively] as a ‘toccata’ for brass band—how beautiful and serious this work is, as abstract music.”
  — George Bernard Shaw, remark to Edward Elgar, upon hearing Elgar’s Severn Suite in competition on 27-SEP-1930.
So turn off the sound on your CNBC or BBC or whatever, and put on this disc at high-volume as you watch the financial catastrophe ‘crawl’ across the bottom of your television screen. Foden’s Richardson Brass Band is just the thing to ‘buck up’ your spirits.

Rome, Burning
During his lifetime Sir Michael Tippett (1905–1998) composed 5 string quartets, 4 piano sonatas, a sonata for 4 horns, and several other chamber works. He also composed a number of oratorios and cantatas. As a composer, Tippett was a late bloomer; he completed his compositions slowly. At age 30, he studied composition with Reginald Owen Morris at the Royal College of Music (after Morris’s return to London from his stint at Curtis Institute in Philadelphia).

Tippett was imprisoned as a conscientious objector/pacifist in WWII. Tippett’s mother was a charity-worker; her influence led him to have a lifelong identification with oppressed people and suffering. Tippett’s gayness probably figured in there as well...

Melismas—ones more ornate than are reasonable or practicable for voice, but entirely feasible for brass—plus rapid mensural/rhythmic changes where the metre is continually cast and recast—outside the norms that are set up in the rest of the work: these are here in abundance.

Mikhail Bakhtin’s dialogical conception of language—conceits like a ‘polyphonic novel’ and ‘double-voiced discourse’? In this wonderful Foden’s Richardson Brass Band CD we find that all of our utterances must be polyglot—syncretisms of every language that we’ve assimilated since birth. Just as the least stable kind of tonality has the strongest anti-tonal tendencies, so the least stable atonality is the kind that’s most inclined to abandon sound-mass totality in favor of a lyrical, neo-tonal individualism. Redefinition, deconstruction, and reconstruction of language out of its ashes. Bingham’s apocalyptic ‘Prague - St Wenceslas Chapel’; Wilby’s elegiac ‘Shadow Songs’.

Brass band repertoire is, I have felt, frequently conflictual—at the boundary of ‘us’ and ‘the other’; the music often explicitly points out this boundary. But brass band music is also frequently pacifistic or communitarian—displaying the emblems of class identity and ‘tutti’ solidarity with community. (Frank Bridge; Benjamin Britten; other pacifists? Granville Bantock; Harrison Birtwistle; Arthur Bliss; Derek Bourgeois; Arthur Butterworth; Simon Dobson; Edward Elgar; Edward Gregson; Hans Werner Henze; Gustav Holst; Herbert Howells; George Lloyd; William Mathias; John McCabe; Edmund Rubbra; Robert Simpson; Phyllis Tate; Ralph Vaughan Williams?) The ensemble may be ‘instrumental’, but its gestures and social behaviors are essentially ‘choral’…

T ippett has everyday words ‘Let’s go!’, sung by the disenfranchised Man and Woman characters, interrupting the madrigalian setting of lines borrowed from Milton’s Paradise Lost (‘This was the everlasting place of dreams.’). [And Tippett’s compositions for brass came from the same pen and they manifest this same world view. dsm].”
  — David Clarke, Music and Thought of Michael Tippett, p. 162.
As Julian Johnson has written, the Enlightenment, which conferred autonomy on humans, also produced a “model of man that was cut-off from the world around him,” alienated “by the mechanistic and atomistic implications of Enlightenment theory.” Was Tippett cut off? (Am I feeling [financially] ‘cut off’? Is brass band repertoire necessarily the language of aesthetically capable phlegmatic stalwarts?)

David Clarke (see book links below) holds that Michael Tippett was composing in a post-Enlightenment mode, embracing a ‘romantic, humanistic agenda’ not unlike that of Kant, Hegel, and other philosophers who aimed to restore a oneness with Nature. But Tippett, according to Clarke, also engaged in life-long relentless self-criticism and, in his operas and other compositions, created parts that enabled ‘post-humanist’ voices to speak—uniquely highlighting the limitations and failures of romanticism. Tippett repeatedly collides classical ideals with materialist realities.

Music historian Arnold Whittall once referred to Tippett as a ‘post-romantic modern’ (‘Is there a choice at all?: King Priam and motives for analysis,’ in Tippett Studies, Cambridge Univ, 2006, p. 77). But, in this Foden’s-Bramwell Tovey outing, maybe Tippett is closer to a ‘post-modern anti-romantic’. Yes, that is why this music feels so compelling, so poignant and timely right now.

W   hile we would need to be cautious about positing a postmodern dimension to Tippett’s thinking, the kind of connections I have been exploring [in this book] suggest that the aesthetic mutations of his late works are not unrelated to certain of the more radical and fruitful avenues of that problematic cultural paradigm.”
  —  David Clarke, Music and Thought of Michael Tippett, p. 269.
What especially pleases me in listening to this CD during this awful, catastrophic week are these works’ expression of an ineffable soundworld that is simultaneously tonal and post-tonal—full of melodic tonal writing, but with fragmentation, textural strata, and purpose-built melodic disjunctions that match my dark mood—miraculously healing it. There are ruptures with the premises of tonality, but the departures from tonality turn out not to be permanent—they eventually return us to orderly, diatonic lyricism. So, by implication, we sense that, regardless what happens to our collieries in one decade, our motor works in another decade, our financial institutions and markets in this decade, our cities, our governments, our environment, and so on in future decades—human beings (and brass bands, and the arts, and civilized culture in general) will somehow survive.

Up-coming performances by Foden’s Richardson Brass Band include:
David Clarke, Tippett book

Emperor Nero (U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, after The Fall?)


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Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Cosmopolitanism and Endangered Species: Geek to Learn, Learn to Geek

Allen Forte, Geek Extraordinaire
DSM: A music theory geek friend of mine noticed our conversation last time and sent me this list. You might be a theory geek if . . .
  1. you whistle in style bris.
  2. your favorite pickup line is, “What’s your favorite augmented sixth chord?”
  3. your second favorite pickup line is, “Would you like to raise my leading tone?”
  4. you have ever played the ‘how-many-episodes-is-too-many-episodes’ fugue game.
  5. you have a poster of Allen Forte in your bedroom.
  6. you know who Allen Forte is.
  7. you dream in four parts.
  8. your biological clock follows a non-retrogradable isorhythm.
  9. you can improvise 16th-century counterpoint with no trouble, but you frequently forget how to tie your shoes.
  10. you look at a piece by Bach and say, “You know, I think he could have gotten a better effect this way . . . ”
  11. you expected something quite different out of The Matrix.
  12. you can answer your phone with a tonal or a real answer.
  13. you like to tease your friends and loved ones with deceptive cadences.
  14. you know how many cents a major 23rd is without having to count.
  15. you say you only drink fifths, and then you laugh at your lame pun anyway.
  16. you feel the need to end Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony with a picardy third.
  17. your favorite characteristic of Brahms’ music is the subcutaneous motivic play.
  18. instead of counting sheep to get to sleep, you count sequences.
  19. you find free counterpoint too liberal.
  20. Moussorgsky’s “Hopak” gives you nightmares.
  21. you wonder what a Danish sixth would sound like.
  22. you long for the good old days of movable G-clefs.
  23. the Corelli Clash gives you goosebumps, every single time.
  24. you can hear an enharmonic modulation coming a mile away.
  25. you can hear Berg’s lover’s dog coming a mile away.
  26. you have had to be forced to stop labeling motives.
  27. you confuse fishsticks with ground bass.
  28. you have ever quoted Walter Piston.
  29. you like to march to the rhythm of L’histoire du soldat.
  30. your license plate says: PNTONL.
  31. you have ever defended yourself with “But Gesualdo did it!”
  32. you have ever tried to do a Schenkerian analysis on “Three Blind Mice.”
  33. you have ever tried to do a Schenkerian analysis on Cage’s 4'33''.
  34. you have ever thrown a Gebrauchsmusik party.
  35. you have ever tried to hop onto the omnibus.
  36. you like to wake up to a Petrushkated version of “Reveille.”
  37. you lament the decline of serialism.
  38. you know what the ninth overtone of the harmonic series is off the top of your head.
  39. you keep the writings of Boethius on the coffee table.
  40. you have ever dressed up as a counterpoint for Halloween.
  41. you have ever written a musical palindrome and given it a witty title.
  42. you can name ten of Palestrina’s contemporaries.
  43. you have ever found a typographical error in a score by Ives, Nancarrow, or Babbitt.
  44. you have ever heard a wrong note in a performance of a composition by Ives, Nancarrow, or Babbitt.
  45. you already sensed that if this list had been written by Bartok, this would be the funniest item.
  46. you enjoy the tang of a tritone whenever you can.
  47. you’ve let the rule of the octave determine how you go from one event of the day to the next.
  48. you have ever played through your music as if the fingering markings were figured bass symbols.
  49. you suspiciously check all the music you play for dangling sevenths.
  50. you have devised your own tuning method.
  51. you keep a notebook of useful diminutions.
  52. you have composed variations on a theme by Anton Webern.
  53. you know the difference between a Courante and a Corrente.
  54. you have trained your dog to jump through a flaming circle of fifths.
  55. you have ever used the word fortspinnung in polite conversation.
  56. you feel cheated by ‘evaded cadences’.
  57. you organize your phone numbers based on their prime form.
  58. you find it amusing to refer to your ear-training course sections as your “pitch classes.”
  59. every now and again you like to kick back and play a tune in hypophrygian mode.
  60. you wonder why there aren’t more types of seventh chords.
  61. you deeply wish you had twelve fingers.
  62. you like polytonal music because, hey, the more keys the merrier.
  63. you abbreviate your shopping list using figured bass symbols.
  64. you always make sure to invert your counterpoint, just in case.
  65. you have ever concluded a joke with the punchline “Because it was polyphonic!”
  66. you have ever named a pet, boat, car or child ‘Zarlino’.
  67. you have an <0 1 4> tattoo.
  68. your lips may say “perfect fourth,” but in your heart it will always be “diatessaron.”
  69. you have ever said, “Yes, didn’t Scriabin use that sonority in... ”
  70. you know lewd mnemonics for the order of sharps in key signatures.
  71. you can name relatives of the “Grandmother Chord.”
  72. you’re still wondering where is the “must-resolve-the-dominant-seventh-before-going-to-bed” indicator.
  73. you not only can identify any of Bach’s 371 Harmonized Chorales by ear, but you also know what page each one is on in the Riemenschneider edition and how many suspensions it has in its first four bars.
Hah! It takes a geek to know a geek!

CMT: Well, some of our tastes here are pretty esoteric. But no more so than other arcane things people pursue—sport, for example. Having the inner confidence and security to poke fun at ourselves is good—the list is honestly amusing. But the list-joke begs the question, does modern mass-culture inherently ostracize or disenfranchise us—does it reject anything that is ‘other’, anything different from itself? If we are true to our geekiness, are we inevitably disempowered? In other words, is there a need for a new cosmopolitanism and a greater toleration in society these days? Seyla Benhabib has written about this…

DSM: You’re right. There’s no reason to think of xenophobia as scoped only to geographic or ethnic boundaries. ‘Cosmopolitan’ should encompass distributive justice and toleration not just of citizens of various disparate nations, but also of members of classes whose membership is founded on interests or beliefs, which may be trans-national and trans-ethnic. And of course it’s not just conflict between musicologists/theorists and a hegemonic mass-culture. There’s conflict too among music theorists of different stripes. The mistake armchair anthropologists frequently fall into—taking a complicated concept, like music, and reifying it as if it were a single, simple thing. A static, time-invariant thing. But naturally theory evolves over time. And composers’ technique and materials evolve over time. And critics’ and analyst-geeks’ propensities evolve over time, in unpredictable jumps—Richard Selfish-Gene Dawkins-style.

CMT: We could instead put forward theories of compositional intention as if the evolution of composers’ technique were logically analogous to Darwin or Mendel’s wrinkled garden peas. There’s a self-evident truth here that any serious musician recognizes—anyone who has experienced that moment when the execution shifts from working memory to procedural muscle memory. My favorite aspect of playing the piano is reaching the jump where my hindbrain is carrying the piece along. Then I can enjoy the music in a different way, without thinking as much about the technical mechanics of making my body perform the piece, making my fingers navigate the keyboard, and so on. Anybody who has performed music at this level knows also that that is the moment when inspiration can enter—when you can deeply surprise yourself, when new layers of meaning become apparent. On some occasions, I’ve had actually an ‘out-of-body’ experience, as though I were looking down from the ceiling, looking down on myself at the piano. That’s pretty rare. More commonly, though, the loss of a consciousness of ‘self’ is more subtle. The interpretive gestures that’ve been internalized and which unfold almost automatically become during a performance quite foreign, as if they were being executed by someone who is not me—and the separation [of that part of me that’s observing this and applying additional adjustments as the playing proceeds] is complete. I wonder whether, in the theater, actors who are in-character experience their art in this way…

DSM: The exoticness of that experience is part of what creates social distance: your having experiences that you clearly value but which the mass monoculture doesn’t understand or regards as deviant—defines and reinforces your otherness. This seems to me to be a feature of globalization—or at least the harms to individual communicative freedom and [full] citizenship and justice are made worse by globalization trends. According to Benhabib, the homogenization, standardization, mass-ification, and so on—are not inadvertent consequences of globalization. They are fundamental preconditions for the possibility of the kind of interaction and interconnectivity that make globalization a reality. The obverse is also true. Heterogenization, hybridization, carnivalization, and mestizaje are also not unintended consequences of globalization—they breed novelty and long-tail niches, and support increasing amounts of novelty, exotics, differénce, and authenticity. Benhabib says that cultures are inherently and continually contested and unstable. They are always in the process of transforming and being transformed. Cultures and specific subcultures (like classical music, or chamber music, or music theory, or sub-subcultures of these) survive or perish in a sort of Darwinian natural selection. Culture is the horizon within which each of us social agents is socialized and individualized.

“... it is only the presumption of each individual’s equal claim to develop the conditions of his or her self-hood within certain webs of interlocution that gives the politics of recognition its normative bite. Claims to authenticity presuppose claims to justice—or the pursuit of differences presupposes a framework sustained by premises of individual equality.”
  —  Seyla Benhabib, Claims of Culture, p. 57.

CMT: And Wellmer is (along with Klaus Günther) one of the philosophers in the Frankfurt School critical theory tradition who has sought to translate discourse ethics’ reformulation of human freedom into communicative freedom.

“Solidarity in a post-conventional sense demands that we want a space for everybody else’s negative freedom, a space which is the precondition for determining and taking responsibility for one’s own life, and which, by the same token, is a space for the freedom to say ‘no’ and to act accordingly. Only on the basis of such freedom are symmetrical forms of mutual recognition, voluntary agreements, and rational concensus among equals conceivable.”
  —  Albrecht Wellmer, Endgames, p.33.


“VI.[14] Mihi vero licet et semper licebit dignitatem tueri, mortem contemnere. Potestas modo veniendi in hunc locum sit: dicendi periculum non recuso.

[15] Quae, malum, est ista voluntaria servitus? Fuerit quaedam necessaria; neque ego hoc ab omnibus eis desidero qui sententiam consulari loco dicunt. Alia causa est eorum quorum silentio ignosco; alia eorum, quorum vocem requiro. quos quidem doleo in suspicionem populo Romano venire non metu, quod ipsum esset turpe, sed alium alia de causa deesse dignitati suae.”

(VI.[14] It is in my power, and it always will be in my power, to uphold my own dignity and to despise death. Let me have only the power to come into this house, and I will never shrink from the danger or declaring my opinion!

[15] What, in the name of all that is horrible, is the meaning of this voluntary slavery? Some submission may have been unavoidable: nor do I require this from every one of the men who deliver their opinions from the consular bench; the case of those men whose silence I pardon is different from that of those whose expression of their sentiments I require; and I do grieve that those men have fallen under the suspicion of the Roman people, not only as being afraid--which of itself would be shameful enough--but as having different private causes for being wanting to their proper dignity.)
  —  Cicero. Fourteen Orations against Marcus Antonius (Philippics 1), 44 BCE.

Milton Babbitt, Celebrated Geek


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