T he viola has suffered the ups and downs of musical treatment more than any other stringed instrument. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century it held much the same position in the orchestra that the 1st and 2nd violins occupy today. We now feel that the viola is often merely a source of anxiety to the composer. We feel that [s]he regards its existence as something in the nature of an unexpected prehistoric survival: the hoary instrument was [still] there and had to be written for. [In 1914,] interesting but subordinate contrapuntal middle parts [are] still a thing of the future. The viola, therefore, either does nothing, or does something which … is made [by the composer] to appear as much like nothing as possible.”
— Cecil Forsyth, Orchestration, 1914
CMT: Bashmet’s viola produced such a lush, singing sound in last night’s concert in
Kansas City! If kids could hear viola like that, they would all want to play viola! A very legato account of Brahms’ Quintet in B minor, Op. 115, Bashmet’s movement from note to note was truly seamless, almost as though it were a sleight-of-hand trick. It’s a delight to be tricked, to have the privilege of being tricked in this way! You must truly
understand your instrument to be able to “trick” a roomful of attentive people with it!
DSM: Britten’s Lachrymae, Op. 48A (Reflections on a Song of John Dowland), received an insightful and subdued rendering—virtuosic but without trickery. The Moscow Soloists contributed far more than mere accompaniment to Bashmet. In the end, though, the virtuosic display by Bashmet led to a serene resolution. Wonderful. I have to admit, I was not previously familiar with this Britten piece. Quite unusual, even for Britten. And so distinctive were the effects it was having on me that I couldn’t help myself—while barely into the variations I began immediately in my “delighted-obsessed engineer”-like way, finding out how it was doing what it was doing. What was making it “tick”? Fascinating!
CMT: Fascinating violas!?! Think what you’re saying—how heretical it would be to some, to admit this! The Cecil Forsyth blockquote above, from his venerated book on orchestration—the remarks on the viola’s and violists’ poor stepchild status in the 19th and early 20th centuries—is in striking contrast to what Yuri Bashmet achieves! You know, this kind of artistry makes you rethink why there are so few violists. Purely misapprehension and prejudice, I think! Two cellists claimed in recent interviews that the reason there are so few solo cellists is the ‘limited repertoire.’ I am crying for them! As a lapsed cellist I’m convinced that this is
not a valid reason. In fact, given the number of orchestras and concerts in a performing season, it seems unlikely to me that this is even a significant factor. And who can name more French Horn or Bassoon concerti than those available for the cello? For them, we might be able to feel some sympathy! Maybe it’s all Mozart’s fault. Or maybe it’s due to the difficulty of transporting cellos. But what excuse would you give (to explain a shortage of literature and players) for the beautiful and eminently more totable viola?
DSM: The question might instead be, given a finite number of orchestras of presumed equal willingness to include a viola soloist in their programming and given a modest supply of qualified soloists (smaller than the number of orchestras), can you see any mechanism by which the size of the repertory influences the opportunity for performance, other than in an inverse relationship?
CMT: No, I can’t. I believe that orchestra players and conductors might actually have an upper limit on the number of works ‘in stock.’ But inventory is probably not an issue, as most can work up new material quickly, so long as it’s within the general ‘classical envelope.’
DSM: Chicken-or-egg: must the demand (‘market’) for viola works precede the supply (‘composition’)? Or is composition antecedent to development of a market—an audience wanting to hear more viola, and accomplished violists to serve that desire?
CMT: I think instrument ‘cachet’ more than offsets other factors. So are tuba and piccolo less well-endowed in this ‘cachet’ or sexiness or Darwinian survival competency? One way to look at your question is to examine the timeseries of works created in the literature of each instrument. Look at Lotka-Volterra equations for ‘predator-prey’ dynamics, where generation of excess ‘prey’ compositions gives rise to a boom in ‘predatory’ performers and performances that get satiating and die off. Stability in one instrument’s literature provides niches for other emerging ‘species’ and parallel predator-prey niches to evolve under diminished resource constraints.‘Species’ (literatures and instruments) that were living underground now blossom and develop and grow in popularity.
DSM: At any moment in time, yes, you can tabulate the qualifying ‘prey’ works and set up a table where ‘predators’ are classified into (A) large predator instruments, that tend, if they survive, to have around them plentiful amounts of prey and (B) small predator instruments, that can subsist on modest-size prey literature populations. (We won’t ask what, logically, this analogy makes the composer…) Of course, there’s the difficulty of predator misclassification. For example, the oboe is physically small, but it’s a large ‘predator,’ in terms of its popularity and statistical ecological dynamics! I calculated the Kruskal-Wallis statistic on a table I compiled for ten instruments, and it’s significant at p<0.009 for works up through 1995. The phenomenon we’re discussing is
real!
CMT: You’re also talking about population stability and the dynamics of unstable musical repertoires—quantitative mathematical ecology of musical genres—somewhat akin to Dawkins’ famous Selfish Gene. But, in regard to another type of instability, do you think there’s evidence in the Lachrymae of the tonal instability that’s been observed in other of Britten’s work?
DSM: What? You mean the tonal stratification that denotes a division of register space into discrete layers—strata—each associated with an independent functional-tonal process? Well, yes. Conflict in Britten’s music is felt as a clash of opposing pitches, and there are considerable examples of that in the Lachrymae. Pitch ambiguity undermines the security of key definition associated with triad monotonality. And a wide register gap between strata undermines the harmonic integration of voices. These multivalent textural interactions are prominent in Britten’s War Requiem—the tension between the C/F# Bell-tritone and the remnant “pull” of D minor. But they’re also present in the Lachrymae. The piece is short, so if you may miss them. The piece is short, and so probably musicologists and music theorists don’t study it as much as Britten’s larger pieces . . .
CMT: Britten’s use of tonal stratification is related to the expressive uncertainty in Billy Budd and other pieces. And tonal stratification, to me, seems in the Lachrymae to be a device to evoke the interplay between the Present and the Past. Think of Dowland and what ‘lachrymae’ means. To grieve is to long for, to pine for, the past—something that is no more. Britten is using this device as a means to convey verb tense and to establish foreground and background. It’s amazingly effective, the conflict between the motives in the different voices!
DSM: The Brahms Op. 115 has a very different kind of motivic integration, of course—Brahms’ use of motivic 6/3 chords at points of formal articulation, for example. Experts propose two categories: (a) 6/3 chords that arise via a 56 motion over a tonic bass, and (b) 6/3 chords that function as inversions of the tonic. Examples of category (a) include passages from Brahms’ Piano Quintet, the C minor String Quartet, and the F minor Clarinet Sonata. Category (b) include the B-flat minor Intermezzo, Op. 117, no. 2. Brahms uses both types of 6/3 chord to destabilize or delay tonic articulation. In that respect, I suppose there is a parallel to some of what Britten was doing—the aim is to generate anxiety and temporal contrast.
CMT: Well, there’s first-order anxiety, and there’s second-order meta-anxiety! You know, Brahms is somewhat famous for his musical “borrowing”—many of his techniques are fairly overtly derived from or traceable to other composers. Have a look at the
Indiana University ‘borrowing’ website. You may want to have a look at Raymond Knapp’s 1998 paper, “Brahms and the Anxiety of Allusion” in the Journal of Musicological Research 18: 1-30.
CMT: Yes, Knapp applies Harold Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’ concept and construes Brahms’ ‘anxiety’ as the force that drives and modulates expectations of the audience. Brahms realized that his audience would receive and judge his works in comparison to other works with which they were acquainted. So he deliberately composed so as to create convenient frames of reference, similarities to familiar compositions, to make a platform for his originality. He more or less “foregrounded” his non-referential music with these referential allusions. The allusions were a platform to stretch and innovate from. Step off the platform and you generate significant tension in the listener.
DSM: The clarinet is in its timbre and texture a wonderful choice in this Quintet—and in the Moscow Soloists’ hands it melds well with the string ensemble. The ornamental figures all pass from the viola (clarinet) voice to the other strings—at times it feels like a Greek play with the chorus. Brahms even distributed his ‘Hungarian’ flourishes in the Adagio distributing them among all the instruments. But without the distinctive timbre of the viola/clarinet, little would separate the solo part from the rest of the ensemble. Bashmet’s color-saturated playing mimics the clarinet very well. It’s as though the piece were waiting for the possibility of Bashmet’s transcription!
CMT: Britten’s Lachrymae also shows exceptional insight into the character and possibilities of the viola, probably because he was himself an accomplished violist. It’s hard to think of a more sympathetically written viola piece. It was written in 1950 and dedicated to violist William Primrose. Britten’s Lachrymae begins with introspective bass lines with motives drawn from Dowland and then develops diverse variations, each of which manifests the Present-Past tension we were discussing earlier. The denouement at the end resolves the tensions with a restatement of the viola’s early motive.
DSM: Yuri is—what?—a renowned Professor at the Moscow Conservatory and Artistic Director of the Moscow Soloists. The Moscow Soloists is comprised of Conservatory students under 30 years old—the group made its debut in 1992. What phenomenal success they’ve enjoyed! What a busy and demanding schedule they have! And despite the burdens of this, what remarkable energy and enthusiasm for more and yet more conversation! The after-concert discussions with Yuri and members of the Moscow Soloists were amazing. I thought they would be tired out. But they could easily talk us under the table any night of the week!
M aybe viola will be not so ‘mystic’ an instrument. Viola has some mystery, in history, and today, also, and that is the main thing why viola is the most exceptional of string instruments. Some people say that the viola is the middle between violin and cello. I will tell you that from one point that’s right, but from another it’s historically wrong. … Of course, now is a Renaissance for viola because a lot of modern composers write for viola. … What viola has special is first the tessitura. It is very special because main thing happens in the middle. If you go very high, it is the same like a violin, but it has much more ‘tensive.’ Could you believe violinists would play everything without the high string?”
— Yuri Bashmet
CMT: Yes, they do love discourse—both verbal and musical. In Lachrymae we see possibilities of discourse unfolding in front of us—locutionary and
illocutionary acts, discursive shifts between the voices that imply changes of speaker, possibly the current self who grieves and the former self in times remembered.
DSM: What I was characterizing earlier as ‘quotations’—the Greek chorus-like parts of this work—really are discursive shifts that are Britten devises from fragments of Dowland’s motives. And the register gaps are matched by temporal gaps—the Elizabethan Dowland and the 20th Century Britten. That feature, more than anything else, is what establishes the sense of grieving and backward-looking sense of time for me. That’s part of why and how this piece “works,” I think. It’s a compositional analogue of the Belousov-Zhabotinskii Reaction in chemistry: the tensions and conflicts are a ‘morphogenic field.’ Both the Brahms and the Britten, really, are ingenious ‘autopoietic fields’ that automatically induce these cognitive effects and structures ! These notes on the staves—they’re not tropes so much as trope-generators! Britten’s writing in the Lachrymae has all this ‘runtime indirection’ in it—you’ve written LISP code: doesn’t this composition look like a program written in LISP?
CMT: Yes, that seems right. And the discourse in Lachrymae moves between Dowland’s “unmediated” direct speech and the Brittenesque variations or “reflections”—the mediated and indirect speech acts—that form the majority of the piece. That, to me, is another very effective device that explains how the piece works or has the sense and meaning that it achieves. And it, too, manifests autopoeisis and runtime indirection. Pulls itself up by its own bootstraps.
DSM: In the
Lento, Dowland’s direct voice is shadowy, and the balancing phrases in the bass (Phrase 1a, Phrase 1b; m9) trail off unresolved. So if you were looking for an aporietic feeling, this Britten is definitely for you! Yuri and the Moscow Soloists will be at Carnegie Hall this coming week, as part of the
Carnegie Hall Moscow Soloists program, 25-JAN-2007. Cовершенно изумительный ! Kрасивые тембры и, что очень важно, высокая культура пения !
- RussianKC website
- Moscow Soloists IMGA website
- Moscow Soloists ICMA website
- Grammy nomination article, Lenta, 08-DEC-2006.
- Yuri Bashmet website
- Bashmet International Viola Competition website
- Elba Festival website
- Van Walsum Management (Yuri Bashmet's agent)
- Московская Kонсерватория website
- Moscow Conservatory website
- Violin Society of America website
- Viola website
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W hat is the real ultimate value of music? The best what I can tell you about this is that I don't know. Second, I can tell you that if I would know this, then music would be not music.”
— Yuri Bashmet
