Music Monday: Bacewicz Violin Concerto No. 4

[Welcome to Music Mondays, the post series where I share pieces of music I really like with a smattering of biography and context about their creators!]

Being the indecisive sort that I am, I spent a lot of time thinking about what piece I wanted to use to kick off this series. There's an awful lot of great music out there, and I obviously can't feature all of it all at once. I don't have any logical justification for what I ultimately went with; the thought just occurred to me as I was tossing around possibilities, and I couldn't think of a reason not to go this route.

And so, gentle readers, allow me to introduce Grażyna Bacewicz, a Polish composer born in 1909. As with many other composers, Bacewicz received extensive musical training from a very young age, including lessons on violin and piano in addition to composition. She seems to have taken less to piano than to the other two, and didn't study it (as far as I can tell) after graduating from the Warsaw Conservatory. Violin was another story altogether; she had a respectable career playing the instrument, including a two-year stint as the concertmaster for the Polish Radio Orchestra. (Her tenure ended in 1938; I can't find detailed records online (at least not without more searching than I'm willing to do), but I suspect the PRO did not fare well with the outbreak of World War Two.) During the war, she continued to play as a violinist, giving secret underground concerts that often included her own music. She only stopped playing in 1954, after injuries she sustained in a car accident made it physically impossible for her to continue.

Compositionally, then, it's hardly surprising that many of her works feature the violin, tho she also wrote plenty of pieces that didn't. Her style changed considerably over the course of her career, so her early works can sound very different from her later ones. Many of her early works  reflect a late-Romantic sense of musical nationalism, suffusing a basic Austrio-Germanic musical stock with various Polish idiosyncrasies. Some of the resulting works are quite lovely, but they're a far cry from where she ultimately wound up. (In this, her trajectory is not that different from Bartók's.) She continued to develop harmonically thruout the 30s and 40s, but the biggest changes to her style came with the rise of the avant-garde in the 1950s. She dabbled in various experimental compositional techniques, and ultimately devised her own method of "patchworking", which often involved borrowing heavily from her earlier works. Her very latest works show some hints of turning back towards a more melodic, folk-inflected style, but her death in 1969 means we'll never know what would have come of that.

Even tho I generally think of the violin concerto category as kind of overstocked and over-represented in the public consciousness, hers really are quite good, so have a listen to her fourth, which she wrote in 1951, before her shift into avant-garde-influenced experimentation.

We begin with a rousing orchestral introduction, which gradually ebbs away into a gentler music to set the stage for the soloist's first entrance. A short cadenza ensues, but the orchestra sneaks back in shortly thereafter, in a rather less imposing mood. There's some delightfully bouncy writing for the soloist and the wind section, and a few orchestral interludes that are downright sultry, but the opening fanfare returns periodically to keep things from getting too cheerful. A little more than six minutes in, we get to the real cadenza, an extensive fantasy on the movement's themes, at times pleading, pensive, skittish, and lyrical. The orchestra re-enters tentatively at first, but quickly builds back up to a vigorous finale.

In the second movement, we get an extended rhapsody, the emotional heart of the work. It's tortuous going at times, and the soloist and the orchestra sometimes seem to be working at odds instead of towards a common goal, but it builds up to a ferocious climax and then fades into what does seem to be a place of genuine contentment.

Cue the finale. A breakneck romp full of jaunty tunes and virtuosic acrobatics for everyone, this movement is full of playful harmonic feints — the music makes as if to go one place, but winds up landing just a little off from where you thought it was going. There are calmer interludes that let you catch your breath, and some of them edge pretty far into somber territory, but the giddy dance is never too far away and swoops in before things fall hopelessly into despair.

MOTIVational

I've written before about how pieces of music written outside of the European-American common practice umbrella (roughly speaking, music written for churches, concert halls, and theatres from around 1600 to about the end of World War One) can seem completely unintelligible to people who aren't familiar with it. Since I'm not only familiar with but actually quite fond of a lot of this music, today I'm going to zoom in and explain how some of it works by giving a breakdown of the construction of a piece that's near and dear to my heart.

One of the big differences between western art music from the 19th Century and that from the 20th is a general decrease in the focus on melody. Now, plenty of 20th-Century composers missed this memo — I could rattle off dozens of composers who never stopped writing evocative, sensuous melodic lines — but plenty of them got it, and there's a lot of art music out there that doesn't have melodies that most people would recognize as such. But these works still have pitch content (well, except for 4'33", I guess), and still need some way of organizing it. Often, the way in question is a tight network of carefully controlled motives.

What is a musical motive? For our purposes, a "motive" is a short musical phrase that is used to generate musical material. This shortness is key: Unlike a melody, which can usually be broken down into phrases and subphrases, motives don't typically have meaningful subunits; if you cut them into pieces, you're working at the level of individual notes. (Many motives are in the three-to-four note range; very few are longer than six.)

The most famous motive, hands-down, is the one that kicks off Ludwig van Beethoven's fifth symphony. (BA NA NA NAAAAAAAAAA!) Careful readers might note that Beethoven was not, in fact, writing music in the 20th Century, and this is an important point. Motives are not something public-scorning modernists invented out of whole cloth; they have a long and rich history in the western art music tradition, running right back to the music of the late Medieval Catholic Church. But there's still a shift in the 20th Century. Whereas before, motives were typically derived from larger melodies, in the 20th Century we increasingly see motives treated as complete entities in and of themselves; they're building blocks instead of fragments*.

Enough with these generalizations. Let's talk about some actual music!

I'm sure I could use any number of pieces for this exercise, but I'm going to go with the one where I first learned to hear this way: Vincent Persichetti's Pageant, a piece for wind ensemble written in 1954. Besides sheer familiarity, Pageant has another great thing going for it as a learn-how-to-hear-motivically piece: It begins with an unadorned statement of the primary three-note motive. You might want to listen to it a few times just to really get it in your ear. (Thruout this analysis, I'm going to be referring to time markers in that specific recording on Spotify. I'm not going to reference the score because a) I don't have a copy of it, b) even if I did, I assume most of the people reading this don't either, and c) if you want to learn a new way of hearing, you're going to have to listen.)

After the little horn solo, there's a long slow lyrical passage (0'08" to 4'19"). (I tend to think of it as an introduction even tho it's more than half the length of the entire work — the precise nature of this chunk of music is irrelevant to this post, so we're just going to call it "the slow bit".) The instruments here are all moving very smoothly and connectedly, but there isn't a strong sense of melody. The lines float and they're beautiful, but they aren't really broken up into discrete, self-contained chunks; they blur and blend into one another, and it's not always clear whether what you're hearing is a new melodic line or a continuation of what you were just listening to — the color shifts dramatically at 0'35" as other instruments enter to join the clarinets, for example, but the clarinets don't stop before that happens; they run right into it.

Instead of melodies and variations on them, what we essentially have here is a long-range spooling out of that opening motive. The first three notes in the clarinets (0'08"-10") are exactly the motive, and little variations start piling up fast. When the highest clarinets hold out a note from 0'18"-19", the lower voices introduce a slightly squished version — the high note in the middle isn't quite as high as when the horn did it, but the shape is still very recognizably the same. The highest clarinets pick up on this and make a similar gesture from 0'23"-25", then again from 0'28"-30" before melting away as other instruments join.

This next passage, the one that begins at 0'35", doesn't start with a statement of the motive, but it isn't far away. As before, when the top voice holds out a note from 0'45"-47", the lower voices swoop in to fit the motive in the gap, and the upper voices echo the move from 0'53"-55".

The first big break happens when the brass chorale begins with three stately chords from 1'03"-09". The top voice here isn't playing the exact motive, but it's very close; the only change is that the third note is a little lower than in the original form. When the woodwinds get their turn again (1'18"-24"), they stretch it out, but the overall shape, three notes low-high-not quite as low, remains clearly recognizable.

After this bout of mimicry, the music ebbs back into flowy-floaty land. (I would put the transition around 1'44", tho I could hear arguments for an earlier demarcation point.) I'm not going to point out all the instances of the motive in this section because this is a blog post, not a Russian novel, but some of you may be starting to hear them on your own by now. The chorale section returns at the two-minute mark, this time including an unaltered statement of the motive in the trumpets at 2'14"-18", and this ushers in a return of the opening clarinet melody, such as it is.

What follows is essentially a spruced-up version of the opening sequence, including a return of the brass chorale at 3'26", this time with more voices playing along. Everybody gets in on the act with a perfect statement of the motive from 3'40"-46", but then things peter out as this big opening chunk (i.e. the slow bit) draws to a close.

Now for the fast part.

At first, we might appear to be safe on more traditional ground. After a brief snare drum tattoo, we get a peppy theme in the upper woodwinds (4'23"-27"). The brass play around with this, and we get a lovely swoopy transitional bit (4'38"-41"), followed by another pretty distinct theme (4'43"-50"). And that's pretty much it. There's very little that happens from 4'50" to the end of the piece that doesn't get laid out in those twenty-seven seconds. So we could switch over and start doing a more traditional thematic analysis of this part, and it'd be pretty smooth sailing from here on out.

But let's take a closer look at the themes we're working with. Remember how the clarinets had a squashed version of the motive near the beginning? The first three notes of the first melody of the fast section are a similarly squashed version . . . but upside-down. So instead of going low-high-medium, these three go high-low-medium. The next four notes are right-side-up, but they dip back down to the low note before going to the medium: low-high-(low)-medium. Digging a little deeper (and getting correspondingly harder to hear): If you take the first note of this melody, the last note of this melody, and the highest note, you get the original motive! (If you take the lowest note instead of the highest one, you get the motive upside-down.) (Don't worry if you can't hear all of these right away, or even after several listenings. Picking out motives by ear is a skill, and like any skill, it takes a lot of practice to get good at it. I've been living with this piece for more than five years, so I've had a lot of time to dig into every nook and corner of its musical fabric.)

The swoopy transitional bit goes even further — it rearranges the motive to be essentially high-middle-low, then muddies the water further by filling in the notes in the middle**. The third theme combines this displacement idea — having the highest note not be in the middle — and combines it with the "adding an extra note" thing from the first fast theme to get low-middle-(low)-high for its first four notes, and elaborated still further for its next five. Once again, if you take the first note, the last note, and the highest note, you get the original motive. (This time, it doesn't work if you take the lowest note, altho there are other ways in which that note is structurally significant.) So when you're listening to these themes bounce around for the rest of the piece, you're hearing variations on variations of the fundamental motive***.

There is, of course, even more than this. Tracking down every single instance of the motive in this gleefully chaotic fast section would take far more space than I have here, but I would be remiss not to draw attention to the glorious passage from 6'27"-33" in which Persichetti piles up statement after statement of the motive, overlapping the ending of one with the beginning of the next to corkscrew his way from one place to another. This suggests a realm that I haven't even touched on — collapsing the motive onto itself and playing all three notes simultaneously as a chord instead of a melodic fragment. This kind of usage is harder to hear, but trust me, it's there.

I don't want to overstate my case here. Pageant is not only comprised of this one motive. There are other motives at work thruout, and as I said, the fast bit can be analyzed very comfortably in terms of traditionally-construed melodies. (Altho remember that melodies are almost always themselves built from motives, and that even way back in the 18th century (and before), composers were playing with these motives to make their music.) But still, I think Pageant makes a lot more sense if you can hear the ways that Persichetti is using the primary motive to generate his musical material, and I hope I've given you a window into how I hear this kind of music.

The motivic games in Pageant are relatively clear and easy to follow, believe it or not. There are other pieces out there where the motivic relations are subtle, buried, and difficult for even an experienced listener to track. I know it may seem hard to believe if you're not used to listening this way, but once you start to wrap your head around a few pieces like this, it really does start to become an automatic, intuitive process. (If you're looking for another piece with a clearly defined motive to practice on, I highly recommend Ralph Vaughan Williams's fourth symphony.) And if you can train yourself to hear this way, a lot of contemporary music (and heck, even a fair bit of music from the 17th to 19th centuries) will suddenly make a whole lot more sense. Who knows, you might even start to genuinely like some of it!

So don't be afraid of music that runs on motives instead of melody. Give it a listen. See what you hear.

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*If this sounds like a bit of a hedge, it is. For every crisp, clearly defined stylistic break in the history of western art music, there are things like this: general, loosely adhered-to trends that different composers at different times have engaged with to different degrees. What can I say? Art is messy.

**At this point, some of you may suspect that I'm just making these things up, cherry picking notes and techniques in whatever way I have to to magically procure the motive out of every bit of music in this piece. As with so many things in music, this is a judgement call. If this were the only link to the opening horn solo in the entire piece, I'd be pretty sympathetic to the argument that it's an unrelated coincidence — heck, I'd probably even make it myself. But given that the entire piece is so saturated with the motive, I'm inclined to say this one isn't a spurious coincidence; there's a real motivic link going on. Ultimately, it's not terribly significant — if you think that this particular "instance" of the motive is unconvincing, that's fine. It doesn't take away from the fact that the motive is all over this entire piece, from beginning to end.

***This, incidentally, is one of the reasons it works to have the first and third melodies played simultaneously starting at 6'45". Their important structural tones have the same fundamental relationship, so they live in very similar harmonic worlds. (It's also very possible that he wrote that section first to make sure everything would work — pro tip to any aspiring composers reading this!)

On Snippishness

I don't really like cleaning dishes. (No one is shocked, I know.) Up until last weekend, I had been making scrambled eggs for myself for lunch on the weekends, but this tends to leave a fair bit of egg residue in the pan, and while it's not too hard to get out, it does kind of clog up the sponge and drain, which I find kind of annoying. So last weekend I decided to try poaching them instead.

I had never poached an egg before in my life. (In fact, I'm not even 100% sure I'd even eaten poached eggs before last weekend.) So I did what I'm wont to do under such circumstances, and looked up a recipe online. I found several YouTube tutorials, including this one. And watching that one, I had a funny realization.

At around the 1'18" mark, the host, Jamie Oliver, mentions that some people add vinegar to the poaching water. He makes a vaguely disgusted look at the camera, and says "Really? Why? Yes, it does firm up the egg, but it tastes like vinegar, so I would suggest don't bother.". This instantly reminded me of many of the authorial asides in Mark Bittman's How to Cook Everything, especially the numerous herbs and spices that he brusquely advises readers not to even bother buying pre-ground.

Some people, I'm sure, find this kind of snippish dismissal off-putting. I find it immensely comforting.

In part, this may be because I do it myself. As anyone who's gone to many concerts with me can attest, there are scads of places in the literature where I'll go "Ugh. Why would anyone play it like that instead of this?", often over objectively minor issues. For example: I can't understand why anyone would ever take the middle section of the second movement of Ralph Vaughan Williams's Folk Song Suite as briskly as this group does. It should be dignified and restrained, a noble dance instead of a frisky one*. I will freely admit that, objectively, this is not that big a deal. It's less than a minute of music, and it's not like a questionable interpretation does anyone meaningful harm, but I still make disapproving noises under my breath whenever I hear a recording that takes that passage fast.

So part of it may just be like-mindedness, recognizing myself in other people and gravitating towards that. But there's more to it, as well.

This kind of snippish dismissal works to establish authority in an informal context without breaking out of a chatty tone. I don't think this is conscious — certainly I've never done it deliberately — but consider what it manages to convey:

First, it tells us that the speaker has a great deal of experience with what they're talking about. Jamie Oliver doesn't need to offer a cautious defense of vinegar-free poaching; he's tried it, he doesn't like it, he says so, he moves on. This radiates the kind of confidence that only comes with spending a great deal of time with something. I've heard lots of arguments against my position on any number of aesthetic things, and I know I can counter all of them to my satisfaction.

More importantly, tho, it tells us that the speaker is passionate. It tells us that the speaker cares deeply enough about the subject to get bees in their bonnet about the smallest details. The video on poaching eggs is my entire exposure to Jamie Oliver, but I have zero doubt whatsoever that he is supremely, consummately passionate about food. And that's really what I'm looking for when I'm looking for expert advice. Because people who are consummately passionate about things usually care about getting those things right, they care enough to get bogged down in the hairsplitting details, to do the painstaking work of sorting thru myriads of open-ended possibilities with enough rigor to form a specific, grounded opinion on all of them. I may not always agree with that opinion (I can't speak to vinegar in the poaching water, but I'm not bothered by pre-ground allspice, sorry Mark.), but at least I know it's coming from a place of having done the homework.

My feelings about music are not rational. I did not sit down one day and decide after calm and considered deliberation to have the deep and overwhelming reactions to this art that I do. (To be honest, that would be a . . . pretty questionable decision.) And yet I have them. Indeed, that's what I mean when I say I'm passionate about music: I mean that I respond to it in an obsessive, irrational, hotwire-to-the-hindbrain way. That's why Jamie Oliver's comments about vinegar made me feel so at home. Passion resonates with me on a very deep level, and that kind of snippish dismissal is a giant flashing sign that passion is at hand.

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*While we're on the subject: I also don't understand the attraction to the outer two movements to this suite. Like, the first one is OK, but the last one is so annoying, and doesn't even work that well as a conclusion, it just kind of stops. I get that you need the last one for balance if you play the first, but given how much better the second one is, just play it as a standalone and don't bother with the other two. Anyway . . .

To Hear and Hear Again

I first heard Nixon in China my sophomore year of high school. A friend of mine had been turned on to John Adams's Harmonielehre thru one of the Civilization video games, and found the opera at our town's library. She insisted that I listen to it, and it wasn't long before I had memorized the exact rhythm of Nixon's sputtering "News!"s and the chorus's pitter-patter of "pig"s (start at 3'35"). I listened to the entire opera dozens of times, and entered the entire libretto into iTunes by hand.

My freshling year in college, the Metropolitan Opera staged the work, and I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to attend the simulcast. I dragged along a friend and excitedly talked about it with him during the intermissions. My then bassoon teacher opined that he really only liked one scene from each of the acts, and I boggled. Wasn't the whole thing great?

And then I just kind of . . . stopped.

Oh, I kept listening to Adams, and occasionally I'd recommend Nixon to someone looking for accessible 20th-Century operas. I read Adams's autobiography, and I greatly expanded my knowledge of the Minimalist and post-Minimalist repertoire. I took formal courses in music history and filled in the more modern stretches on my own time (our history curriculum ended around 1950. I have . . . a lot of feelings about this, but I'm going to save them for another day.). But I stopped listening to the work itself. According to my iTunes library, the last time I did so was on the ninth of August, 2012.

Fast forward two years. I couldn't take my entire CD collection with me to California, so I only brought the highlights. Nixon in China made the cut. The CDs sat in their shoebox all the way across the country, and then sat in their shoebox some more while I slowly pieced my apartment together. Two weeks ago, I finally started listening to them all, and Nixon in China was first on the list.

It was a shocking experience.

I used to hear Nixon as a culmination, as a work in which Adams had gone from his early watered-down-Phillip-Glass works to his own mature, fully-fledged compositional voice. Now, it sounds like a beginning. I can tell that it's by the same composer who would one day go on to write "Batter my Heart", but he is so not there yet. It sounds experimental, like he's still fumbling towards the composer he would become.

I can't go back to hearing Nixon the way I used to. I can't un-know Doctor Atomic or A Flowering Tree, can't un-read Hallelujah Junction and the sometimes off-putting attitudes it contains, can't de-nuance my understanding of the context of his music. But I can remember.

Even as I heard the work with completely different ears, I could still remember how I heard it before, and I could feel, acutely, the gap between how I heard it then and how I hear it now.

This isn't always the case. Some things are just too new — I fell in love with Whitelake this past March; there hasn't been enough time yet for me to grow a new set of ears. Some things visit too rarely. Luciano Berio's Sequenza XII has been bouncing around my life for nearly a decade now, but has yet to stay long enough to make a lasting impression. Other things never get far enough away. Paul Hindemith's bassoon sonata*, Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring — these things are never far away. I hear new things each time I listen, but because of this they mutate slowly; they grow as I do, with no sharp breaks or yawning discontinuities. Sometimes, you need to see a valley to tell how far you've come.

I've written before about how music accumulates meaning with repeated hearings, how when you hear a performance of, say, Ludwig van Beethoven's seventh symphony, you're hearing not only that performance, but all the other ones you've ever heard. This is the other side of that. When you listen to a piece you know well, you're also listening back to your own past selves. Nixon in China isn't just a window to all the other times I've heard the opera, it's a window into who I was for all those other listenings.

This is one of the most powerful aspects of music. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about my past. I grow, I change, I move on, I forget. It's a continuous process, and it's easy to miss the differences piling up. But then sometimes, when a certain song comes on, I pause. I listen. I wake up. I come back to myself.
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*I have come to the conclusion that there just aren't recordings of the Hindemith bassoon sonata that I actually like. This one is pretty good, but it splits the last movement into two tracks; the "Langsam" track has the first section of the second movement, and the "Marsch" track has the last two sections. If you're just listening thru, it doesn't make much of a difference, but I feel compelled to mention it here as a little outpost in the perpetual battle against minor inaccuracies and questionable bibliographic decisions on the internet.

Making Up and Making Over

Western concert music, with its centuries-old tradition(s) of scholarship and study, has some very specific terms for very specific things: Essential Structural Closure, a modulation to the flat submediant, and my go-to bugaboo hexachordal combinatoriality — these all refer to pretty specific things and those specific things only.

Western concert music, being a rowdy and living tradition practiced by untold numbers of people with wildly different levels of formal education, also has some terms that can pretty much mean anything you want.

"Arranging" falls decidedly into the latter category.

I think most people, even non-musicians, have a pretty firm grasp on what it means to compose something. The specific process will vary from person to person, but at its heart, you go into a room with a blank piece of paper, and you come out with a piece of music. For some people, that involves literally sitting at a piano and plugging away, for others it involves fiddling with audio samples in a computer program, but either way, the result is much the same: The composer is the person who decides what sounds happen when*.

Arranging is much more nebulous.

At one end of its possible meanings, you have what can also be called transcription: Taking a work originally scored for one ensemble and scoring it for a different one, as with the concert band version of Leonard Bernstein's Overture to Candide compared to the orchestral original. Calling something a transcription implies a high degree of fidelity to the original source material. The instruments change, but the form remains the same. If you run across something labeled as a transcription, you wouldn't expect to find different harmonies or new countermelodies, at least not in the way that most people use the term today.

At the other end of the scale, you have things like Jimmy Mundy's arrangement of Louis Prima's "Sing, Sing, Sing" for Benny Goodman, which alters almost every aspect of the original**, up to and including the melody itself. (Few arrangements take this degree of latitude in the concert music world, what with our general reverence for scores and source material, but it's absolutely common practice in jazz and other less score-based musics.)

A lot of things fall somewhere in the middle. When William Schuman arranged his New England Triptych from orchestra to wind ensemble, he transcribed the first two movements with minimal alteration, but completely revised the third, nearly doubling it in length from its original incarnation. Gustav Mahler's piano parts for the piano-vocal versions of his Des Knaben Wunderhorn songs are not simply reductions of the full orchestral score from his orchestral arrangements.

Then, too, there are cases where the orchestration — the determination of which instruments play which notes — is so striking, so specific that, even tho the melodies and harmonies of the original are preserved in every detail, it seems misleading to call the new work "just" an arrangement of the previous one. The most iconic instance of this is probably Anton Webern's arrangement of one of the fugues from Johann Sebastian Bach's Musical Offering — Webern's meticulously detailed and relentlessly modern scoring transform Bach's exacting counterpoint into a psychedelic whirlwind of motives and fragments; it's an arrangement, sure, but one so strongly marked by the arranger's aesthetic that one almost wants to give them co-compositional credit for the resulting masterpiece. (You don't need two different people, either. The end of Igor Stravinsky's Svadebka (aka Les noces aka The Wedding) is another place where "the notes and rhythms being played" and "the instruments playing them" seem impossible to separate; orchestration and composition become one. (The passage in question, where frenetic energy gives way to the purified ringing of bells, begins around 8'17", but the whole thing is worth a listen if you have the time.))

Given this nebulosity, it might be tempting to dismiss "arranging" as a useless term. To the contrary, it's precisely this nebulosity that makes it useful. I can say that I'm "arranging" some of the music from Window Full of Moths for wind ensemble, and I don't have to clarify that, while the second movement is essentially a transcription of "Beside You", the third is a mixture of the opening of "Hey" and a radically altered version of "Stop Dreaming", with some new material thrown in to stitch them together, and then —

Arranging encompasses all these things in a way that gets at the core of what I'm doing: This music existed before. I'm changing it in some ways so that it exists in another form as well. Some of these changes are small, and some of them are big, but for the most part, we neither need nor want to get bogged down in the nitty-gritty specifics of which are which. Having a catch-all like "arranging" lets us get away from worrying about arbitrary distinctions on a continuous continuum and gives us more time to spend actually making art.

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*There are, of course, exceptions where composers leave room for other people or things to make some of these decisions. For now, I'm simply ignoring this type of composition, but I think it can be subsumed into this framework with little difficulty.

**I am not actually 100% certain that this is the original arrangement given the sheer number of recordings of this tune and Spotify's spotty bibliographic information. If someone could confirm this or provide a link to the actual original arrangement, I would greatly appreciate it.

The Courtiers and the Dragons

We all know it. It's rule No. 1 of the internet: Don't Read The Comments.

Most often, this is because the comments section is infested with trolls, people spewing racism, sexism, transphobia, and other forms of hateful bile. (Hence Lewis's Law: The comments on any article about feminism demonstrate the necessity of feminism.) While it can sometimes be hard to tell whether a given commenter is earnest but confused as opposed to flat-out trolling, I think most people would agree that there's little point in engaging those in the latter category.

Sometimes, tho, the comments will actually be on point, there will be an actual discussion of the issues going on, with people on both sides arguing in good faith. And sometimes, especially when the discussion involves the fundamental human rights of an oppressed group, the people in these comment threads, usually those who are members of the oppressed group in question, will become visibly hurt and angry. This can manifest in caps-lock-laden declarations ("I'M SO FUCKING DONE WITH THIS") or sardonic mockery ("lol, misandry"), but either way, they are often then accused of being "immature" or otherwise criticized for not carrying on a "reasoned, dispassionate intellectual debate" about issues that affect them on a deeply personal level.

I'm sure many of you reading this are familiar with a slew of defenses of this behavior (the angry, hurt commenting, not the criticism thereof). Members of oppressed groups are, you know, oppressed, and asking them to set aside the genuine hurt that they feel for the sake of a "calm" debate about their fundamental rights is pretty gross. (If you want a more thoro explanation of this concept, look up "tone policing" and have a field day. tl;dr: If your commitment to, say, "basic human rights for trans people" is contingent upon trans people being nice to you, people are probably right to question how deep that commitment really is.) This is all old hat.

Today I want to take a different tack.

I have never been a heavy commenter. At times, tho, I have been a heavy comment reader, especially back in middle school and high school, when I had different priorities involving how to use my free time. These were dark days indeed, my friends, when I didn't understand what feminism was, still thought I was heterosexual, and was kinda homophobic to boot. (What can I say? I had a lot to learn.) But still, I'd often wind up reading long comment threads about these issues, rife with some people arguing calmly and logically for whatever it was (gay marriage crops up a lot in my memory, but it could have been for any of a number of other issues) and others raging in anger and hurt.

And I have to say, it was the latter category that gave me the most pause.

Because carefully reasoned arguments? Sure, if you're being strictly methodical and intensely rational, those can be hard to overcome. But if you're reading quickly, just trying to get a feel for the positions? It is very easy to just go "Eh . . . maybe. I don't really care enough to tease it out and put my finger on it precisely, but I feel like there's something I disagree with buried in there, so I'm not going to accept that position as my own. And reasonable people disagree about things all the time, so like whatever.". But people screaming with hurt? People so upset by these positions that they could do nothing but cry out in frustration and rage? That's a lot hard to dismiss. Those comments made me hold myself accountable. "OK," I would think to myself, "If you're going to continue to hold a position that is this upsetting to this many people, you had better be damn sure that you can answer every objection to it." Those comments made me go back and do the careful, methodical work of trying to pick holes in the opposition.

And often I couldn't. Often, the discomfort I felt reading those arguments wasn't the discomfort of a hidden logical flaw but was instead the discomfort of realizing that I held a homophobic (or sexist or racist or . . . ) position and being confronted with the necessity of change. I never would have done that work if it hadn't been for those angry comments. In all likelihood, I would still be the sexist, racist, homophobic jerk I was in middle school. (I am not claiming to have completely rid myself of any of these ideologies. But to the extent that I have gotten better about them, I feel a pretty direct causal link to angry people commenting on the internet.)

Many of the attacks on tone policing that I've seen quietly abandon this point. I've read too many articles that, while offering a full-throated defense of the acceptability and necessity of unapologetic, confrontational outrage, tacitly seem to cede that these angry comments don't win over allies. Winning over allies isn't the goal of every debate, nor should it be, but even when it is, I maintain that calm, dispassionate comments are not the only kind that are helpful.

Because when you're commenting in a public or semi-public forum, you're not only engaging with the other commenters. You're also leaving a record for other people just passing by. Snark and fury may not directly convince the person posting counterarguments, but they can have a powerful effect on people lurking on the sidelines. I'm not arguing that everyone should scream all the time in every context; I am merely offering another defense of its use that I often see get short shrift.

So if you're thinking of tone policing: 1) Don't do it, because it only ever serves to further oppression and 2) Remember that there are people who read without commenting. It isn't always about you.

Taking Stock

I’m still getting over the intensity of the audition on Tuesday (and the (very mild — don’t worry, Mom!) downtick in physical health that inevitably followed on Wednesday), so I’m going to do a lighter post this week. Instead of my usual essay-ish format, I’m going to post about what i hope to accomplish in the next little chunk of time.

• Assuming I didn’t make it into AYS, I’m going to start working up one of the Bach cello suites (probably the third one) to post movement by movement on YouTube. I may decide on a specific and explicit schedule, or I may just see how it goes. I still want to make music with other people, but this will be a good way to keep my hand in the bassooning game.
• Related to this: If I do hear back in the negative, I’m going to ping some of my contacts for thoughts about how to keep an ear out for gigs in the area. I’m fine with something super casual/chill, I just want to be making music with other people again. (If any of my followers have tips on this, they’d be more than welcome!)
• This weekend I’m going to procure a desperately-needed second bookshelf, a butter dish, and hopefully a nightstand of some sort. Then, when the piano arrives, my apartment will finally be out of the “gradually setting up shop” phase! (I know it’s taken me more than two months to get there, quiet, you.)
• On the composition front: I’m pressing on with arranging some of the music fromWindow Full of Moths (specifically the opening number, “Beside You”, “Hey” + “Stop Dreaming”, and the final sequence) for wind ensemble. I ran out of giant staff paper (more is coming with the piano!), so I’m starting to enter parts until I get more. I feel like I’m making good progress on it, and that it’s going to be a fun thing for people to play. 
• Once that’s done, priorities are: Revise the clarinet sonata, revise Window and get the parts and score into reasonably presentable shape, and then arrange the clarinet sonata for wind ensemble as well. In the meantime, I’m also going to keep my eye on the ACF opportunities page, and send scores in to those that seem like things I want to/can do. The world will not come knocking; I have to take the initiative.
• I’m going to hold off on looking for opportunities to volunteer until I know for certain how the AYS audition turned out. Too many variables on that front at the moment.
• I want to get back into the habit of reading. Since I have the job, I don’t think I can quite get away with the hour and a half with a book thing I did every morning last summer, but the “half hour before bed” should be pretty doable.  I’m still clearing out a lot of links that I saved during term, but now that I don’t have how-to GoogleDocs to write, I’m making pretty good progress.
• I feel like I still need to build up my apartment as more of a “home base”. I don’t really mean this in any physical sense; I just still don’t quite feel like it’s 100% home. I think this will mostly involve giving myself permission to just veg out in front of a Netflix show or two, to teach myself that it’s OK to not be in constant motion doing all the things all the time. I’m still definitely weaning myself from the Yale lifestyle, and that’s something that’s just going to take time.

So yeah. These are things I’d like to do. Some of them are super vague, some of them are super concrete, but all of them feel pretty plausible to me. Sometimes it’s nice to take a larger view of where I am and what I’m doing. It doesn’t all have to be the breathless rush of the moment.

Regular posting resumes next week!

Four Days and Counting

So in a little over four days’ time, I’ll be sitting in a room with a panel of judges playing my audition for the American Youth Symphony. 

There is not much left to be done in these four days. I will, of course, be making the most out of the time I have left to practice, but these things are incremental. Between now and Tuesday, I may go from nailing the first entrance in the Rite of Spring solo eighteen times out of twenty to nineteen, but I’m not going to be able to radically alter how I play anything. I am, effectively, in the land of the most subtle refinements; where I am now is where I will be Tuesday.

I’ve spent a long time preparing for this. I mean, of course, the roughly two months I’ve been working on the audition repertoire, but I also mean my life as a bassoonist before this point. I didn’t start from nothing in the middle of June, I started from years and years of intense, dedicated work, and a familiarity with most of the material I’ll be performing. With the exception of the solo piece, I have been working on everything I’ll be playing on Tuesday since high school.

In some sense, tho, the preparation goes even deeper than that. The way I turn a phrase, how I conceive of musical lines and larger forms — these things will be on display in the audition room, and I’ve been learning them for much longer than I’ve been wrapping my fingers around the awkward mechanics of the bassoon. The cassette tapes I fell asleep to when I was a toddler, the piano lessons I took in elementary school, the mp3s I listen to as I go about my day job — all of these are training grounds for the more fundamental tasks of making music.

Given this, it’s easy to see an audition as a kind of summation, an evaluation of who you are as a musician. This can be thrilling and affirmational when things go well, but it can also be a crushing source of disillusionment when they don’t. I try not to think of it that way.

For starters, everyone makes mistakes. This is true even at the highest levels. I have heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra slip up during Stravinsky, I have seen the Metropolitan Opera nearly come apart at the seams playing Wagner. I am not a machine; I will not and cannot be perfect every time. Even if I only muff an excerpt 1% of the time, there’s still a chance that Tuesday at 6:30pm will not be in the 99% I’m happy with.

But it’s also true that auditions are not a perfect measure of musicianship. Indeed, I think many of my finest qualities as a musician are not those that are tested in an audition room. My ability to blend, to match pitch, to play a supporting line underneath the primary voice, to internalize a score and snap back into place when things go wrong, to keep my cool and blithely continue after stumbling, to follow a soloist doing … expressive things with time — none of these will be clearly on display. Certainly, an audition will measure much of what I can do on a bassoon, but much will go unaccounted for as well. (Many groups have a probational period for just this reason.)

All of which is immaterial if everyone else happens to be better than me this year. Or if the audition committee has preconceived notions about whose students they will and won’t accept. (Music, alas, is not some magical fairyland where human pettiness is banished.) Perhaps they’re looking for a different sound, or a different sensibility as to how to build to a climax. I can control how I prepare, I can control how I play, but I can’t control any of these things, and many more besides.

So I try to let them go.

I try, as much as I can, to think “Hey, let me show you this!” in the audition room, not “Oh no, what are they going to think of me?”. I try to play first for myself, so that I can walk out of that room thinking “Yes. That is how I sound. That is how I play. That was a good representation of what I have to offer.” And if they’re not interested, well, they’re not interested. Sometimes there will be obvious mistakes, but often not. Often, you can only guess as to why the committee passed you by. 

And so it goes. If I get in, I will be thrilled. The AYS is an excellent group, and they have an exciting season lined up. If I don’t, it won’t be the end of the world. There are other ways I can keep making music. And hey, there’s always next year. If they pass me up at this audition, I’ll have that much more time to get in shape for the next one.

I may have been preparing for this all my life, but there’s always room to improve.

Letters: An Appreciation

As most of my friends could tell you, I’m a pretty active user of social media. My tumblr may not be the most prolific out there, but anyone I follow could tell you the frequency with which I like and reply to posts. I’m all over Facebook, and I’m thinking about signing up for Twitter. I may not be the model of a modern hip millennial, but I’m a pretty far cry from a Luddite or a technophobe.

It may come as something of a surprise, then, that my favorite form of long-term communication is the hand-written letter.

I like receiving letters. I like the feel of them in my hand, the weight of their pages, light but still perceptible. I like seeing people’s handwriting, matching letterforms to syntax. I like learning my friends’ approaches to errors, how they react to an encroaching margin. I like being able to live with the anticipation and mystery of an unopened envelope — a letter can’t be answered on the day of its arrival, so it doesn’t matter if you don’t open it the minute you receive it.

I like sending letters. I like clearing out the time to write them, marking out an hour or so to just Do One Thing, without the convenient distraction of another browser tab. I like the expansive, meditative mood I get into when I’m writing them — tidbits of news will be long dated by the time a reply arrives, but zooming out a bit and summing up an overview has a bit more staying power. I like the physicality of a pen gliding across paper, of seeing an empty page fill up with flowing scrawls. I like knowing that if they get shoved inside a shoebox and tucked away in a cool dry place for fifty years, they’ll probably be perfectly readable, unlike a desktop hard drive.

I like the content letters get out of me. I don’t like leaving lots of empty space, so unlike an e-mail which is always only as long as it is, I dig a little deeper and tell stories that might otherwise fall by the wayside. From what I can tell, many of my correspondents do this as well, and these little tidbits, the small and almost accidental windows into their lives, are sources of profound delight.

Much of this is rank sentiment. There’s no reason I can’t write the same way in a Facebook message as I do with a pen on the page. (I could even set myself character minimums if I really needed the goading.) Facebook and tumblr provide many little windows, with built-in ways for expressing appreciation for them. Knowing someone’s handwriting doesn’t really tell you anything new about them.

So?

I am a creature of sentiment. I like many of the things I like without rhyme or reason. My goal is not to lead a life filled only with things defensible from first principles, to cut every trace of inefficiency or irrationality from what I do. I want to enjoy the ride, not streamline my journey to its end.

Letters aren’t for everything. I wouldn’t give up my ability to text my collaborators, to simultaneously chat with friends in Connecticut, Thailand, and Japan, to reblog trenchant commentary about the latest Marvel film — not for an infinite supply of postage stamps. Social media isn’t always and only a source of pure unblemished good, but I wouldn’t want to go back to the days where I had to rely on the postal system to hear about Ferguson. Letters aren’t for everything.

But the things they are for, they’re pretty good at. So if you can spare the time (and it’s certainly true not everyone can), maybe think about writing a letter to someone you love. It won’t heal all the broken places in the world, but it might just build a few islands of calm.

And if you’re a friend of mine: Can I have your address?

Not So Universal

If you spend much time listening to people talk about music, sooner or later you’re pretty much guaranteed to hear someone tout music (especially western concert music from, say, 1600 to 1945ish) as a “universal language” that can transcend temporal and cultural boundaries and speak to people with very different personal backgrounds. Now, to some degree this is obviously true. People who are not 17th-century Italian aristocrats can enjoy Monteverdi; Beethoven’s ninth symphony did not die with the last audience member at its premiere. 

But take a listen to something like Vincent Persichetti’s Parable IX for concert band. It’s an acerbic, uncompromising work full of jagged motifs and harsh edges. If music is a language, most people would say this is sheer gibberish.

And yet we’ve only gone a very small way outside of the concert music canon. Persichetti was trained thoroughly in classical composition, and Parable IX dates from 1972, within thirty years of such popular pieces as Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (1943) and Copland’s third symphony (1946). If our goal is to plumb the depths of musical diversity, we’ve barely dipped our toes in, and we’re already running into incomprehensibility.

Seems like a pretty dismal prospect for universality, no?

At this point, some of you may be thinking to yourselves “well, of course not all music has universal appeal, only some of it does!”.

I think we need to go further. None of it does.

No one is born with an appreciation for Beethoven. No one comes out of the womb tapping their foot to Sondheim or Porter. These tastes have to be acquired.

If Beethoven’s fifth symphony seems to resonate with “everyone” today, it is only because we have never stopped teaching people to understand Beethoven. Even ignoring the (considerable) play time for his actual works, the underpinnings of his language are everywhere, from muzak to movie scores. Music works by setting up patterns that listeners recognize and then either fulfilling them or tweaking them in surprising ways. If you don’t have an intuitive understanding of the patterns, you won’t be able to make head or tail of the music that uses them. This is why the Persichetti from earlier is so nonsensical to so many people — He’s using patterns that are far enough outside the average listener’s experience that said average listener can’t tell when they’re being fulfilled and when they’re being violated — they can’t feel the forces of expectation and surprise that make music tick. Beethoven is universal only insofar as the patterns he uses in his music are.

(Lest anyone argue that prevalence of western musical patterns is due to some inherent superiority on the patterns’ behalf: These patterns were in vogue among the European elite at a time when they were colonizing as many other parts of the world as it could and systematically destabilizing and attempting to eradicate indigenous cultural traditions. This is … not a coincidence.)

That you have to know the patterns to understand the music, however, offers some hope. Recognizing these kinds of patterns is a matter of familiarity. You don’t have to know what a Perfect Authentic Cadence is to get the emotional impact of one; you don’t have to study theory and scores, you just have to listen. If you want to “get into” a new style of music, from modernist works for wind band to traditional Indian ragas and beyond, all you have to do is listen. Studying the theory may help if you have the background to make sense of it, but listening is the key. At first, things will sound like an undifferentiated wash (and possibly a pretty unpleasant one at that), but in time, with enough exposure, your brain will start to make sense of what’s coming at it — you’ll start to pick out islands of difference in the sea of sameness. You’ll start to understand what you’re hearing. It will start to mean things to you. (Whether this payoff is worth the amount of time you’ll have to spend with confused ears is something only you can answer.)

No style of music is universal, but the tools to understand it are available to all who can hear.