Records Recently Heard of music composed after 1791.

And what on earth may I have meant by that????? I thought I had written 'more beautifuly', or something like that!

You see, listening to romantic music can harm your brain. I never make this kind of mad mistake when I speak about Bach

 

Alanbeeb and co. certainly don't know, that this romanticism is a rather deep and introvert thing, as opposed to the very extrovert gesticulations of the Bach/Stokowski arrangements and alike.
So they don't really understand, why polyphony maniacs often find extrovert romanticism a tad superficial.

 

I am afraid we are just a bunch of philistines, and not clever like you.

BTW, I have a lot of time for Bach's music, and a fair chunk of my collection is taken up with it. But I think there is as much beauty and emotional involvement to be found in the music of other composers, many of them in the romantic and modern eras.

Although I find the Goldbergs sublime (particularly at the moment Angela Hewitt's recording and I want a recommendation for a period version), and think the famous Chaconne from the solo violin partitas is probably the greatest single stretch of music ever written - I also find that Der Abschied from Das Lied von der Erde , or the finale of Bruckner's 5th, or DSCH's 13th Quartet or Brahms' 1st Violin Sonata or etc etc etc...

...all of these provide me with an emotional experience and are worthy of celebration and sharing.

 

There I would have to disagree, m'Lud. As an alternative rendering of Bach I have no problem with it, but improved? That I would dispute (and I speak as someone with a big collection of post-1791 music!).

 

Ah you see this is how to stir up a hornets nest.
I enjoy playing Bach, particularly the cello suites, but I often prefer listening to other things. I sometimes get the feeling that you guys never branch out past the 18th century. I think Stokowski does do wonders with some of Bach's pieces, and I'm greatful that he can co-exist with the original versions. Strangely last night I listened to Biber, then Stokowski and enjoyed both of them.
I also think it was very useful of Alan to start this thread, classical music does sometimes appear to be over intellectualised and elitist. It's really useful to have a place to discuss music that is more visceral

 

I for one wouldn't disagree with that. My preference is for baroque, but I have plenty of Beethoven, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Mahler, Shostakovitch, etc. (Sorry, for hornets, see elsewhere ).

 

I don't really think this is a hornets nest. It so happens that this forum attracted a lot of polyphony lovers and organ buffs. On a purely personal level, I can honestly say that I, too, love other kinds of music. For instance, I rather like the late Beethoven, I love Bruckner, some Lieder, and I even like some kinds of ethnical music (for instance, I like the very introvert Irish lamentos).

So I do not consider romanticism 'lesser music'. It just happens that Bach and, in general, good polyphony is so much interesting that most things romantic. I hope I will not offend anybody when I say that there is much more in a Bach fugue or even some of the two voice inventions than in some over dimensioned romantic music.

Take Bruckner: it is powerful, deep and meaningful music. But it can be too long. I once was listening to the f minor fugue from the WTC I just after listening to Bruckner (8th Symphony) and I found myself thinking that Bach could say, in a couple of minutes, what Bruckner took almost two hours to say. There is a condensation of emotion that is very troubling in Bach: every phrase is full of meaning.

Now this is, perhaps, not quite easy to understand when one is brought up with the wide and spectacular gestures of more showing and more 'natural' musical rhetoric. In Bach (I mean in keyboard music) emotion is often extremely condensed and one must really understand the movement of voices and, most importantly, the tension-release of harmony.

But what I think sets Bach apart from other musicians is the 'quality' of emotion. For instance, in the Liederkreiss (Schumann), it is quite easy to grasp the emotional content of the music: this is despair, that is mournfulness, and so on. The same may be said about the marvellous opus 116-118 of Brahms. They are all emotions that are centered on the self: it is quite easy to say 'I felt that'. Exactly what I said about the Nocturnes: I often feel what Cicolini makes Chopin say.

Now with Bach (and with Buxtehude, the greatest romantic of them all) emotion is not quite so easy to pinpoint. It is not about oneself, but about a kind of cosmology. Whereas Beethoven (5th, or opus 106-III) speaks about his own emotion (fury and rage, or whimsical nostalgia and sorrow), Bach speaks of a quite different kind of emotion. What is the e major invention about? Some people try to make them be about something. But, as a matter of fact, I don't think it is about anything at all: just the flow of a rather complex rhythmical pattern and the blossoming of the e major tonality. Or take the Passacaglia? It is dark, powerful and meaningful. But what it is about? One can only answer in terms of the music itself: c minor throughout and there is thinning of polyphony and rarefaction of intervals followed by an intensification, leading to the fugue where, again, there is tension (here helped by modulation) and an accumulation of tension that is at last released. The music is actually about nothing at all, nothing that you can 'name'. You just know what it is from your bodily feelings.

Or take the Dona Nobis Pacem: what is it about? I don't know, it is just fantastically beautiful and I actually feel it in my body. But there is no actual 'agenda', no actual possibility of saying what it is about.

Of course one can say the same about some Beethoven. But not quite. Take the opus 111. It is very easy - indeed I have done very often - to 'explain' it in terms of words. Or even the slow movement of opus 132 (where there is an actual explanation of the meaning of the music).

So, what I actually mean is that whereas romantic music perhaps tends to depict emotions that we identify with the 'I', that is, with the 'Self', Bach is just about space and time: movement, tension, release, direction and so forth. If you have read Hermann Hesse's 'The game of glass beads' (I don't know if that is the English standard translation) you will understand what I say.

But is there another way to actually like Bach? Of course. Most people like the Brandenburgs just for the sheer alacrity of the music; or the Chromatic Fantasy just because of the sheer drama; or the g minor organ Fantasia just because of the extreme soul shattering anguish. But most of Bach is not like that.

So, after all these obscure mutterings, what do I think about Stokowsky? Well, I think an analogy might be in order here. Take a Dürer engraving and let it be Bach; what would it be like if it were Bach/Stokowsky? I think it would be a redrawing where all the subtle lines would be rendered at maximum strength, like a Bruegel painting, and it would be technicolorized.

I hope I have not offended anyone: I honestly tried to be as clear as possible, but it is almost impossible to write about music, because music is, to a very large extent, the language of the world that is impossible to express by words.

 

Bach is good because it goes quickly into the brain, like nicotine. Music goes to right side of the brain, that is a good antidote to all thinking, logic, etc. so prevalent these days. I would like to listen to Bruckner but I never find the time. And Bruckner would require some silence and good speakers, too. For Bach, a couple of minutes is enough since there is usually so much going on.

Nevertheless, sometimes I feel that Bach bores me... because it is always the same. We are stuck with the Art of Fugue, etc. Imagine that one would have to eat same food every day - yes, excellent haute cuisine, but same food each day. That is why romantic composers are good - they are the antidote to Bach.

And rock and blues are good antidotes to classical music. In fact I think that most of the good music composed during the last decades has been rock music, or anything but not modern (classical) music.

One thought. Let us suppose that someone comes one day and composes really great music, something up there with Bach's best efforts. What kind of music would that be? Would it somehow resemble Bach's polyphony? Would it resemble anything?

 

Mmm.. Nope. musicians that listen to Bach process the information in the left hemisphere (kind of reading, you see). Second, you can listen and listen and listen to the Art of Fugue: you will always find something different. It is very hard to play, but I feel it is the best way to get to the core of the music. The Art of Fugue repays listening partition in hand.

What kind of music? It is quite impossible to know where one is going right now!

Watch it! You will be banned from this most high place if you are not careful!!
! :laser: :beat: :chair: :saw: :spank:

 

Yes and no. Bach boring? He has never bored me. His music has on the contrary during the last forty years been one of the central events of my life.
But I agree completely with you and RdS, that the best music in the last decades has been Rock music. I have of course to confess, that I have used much time on British rock music from these years. Dare I say The Beatles and so forth.
But how would a genious composer of to day write really great music? Of course we don't know, because if we knew, it wouldn't be genious.

 

No, I think, Bachs music first and foremost allows us to listen with the dominant and recessive hemisphere simultaneously, making us feel integrated human beings without the usual intellectual/emotional scisma.

Completely agree with the rock music, but maybe we disagree as to which rock music is the best.

 

This is not at all a question of being clever or not. This is about emotions.
And RdS has stated that much better than I ever could have done.

 

You are completely wrong. I use much listening time on romantic and modern composers, and even rock music. But early music and especially Bach is nearest to my heart.

 

In the interesting book "The world of the paranormal" is a computer brain scan picture taken while the subject was listening to music. When he was reacting intuitively and subjectively, the neural activity was predominantly in the right brain. When he was listening analytically, the activity had shifted to the left hemisphere.

In other words, if you analyze your Bach, you use your left brain. If you just listen and enjoy, you use the right brain. Right?

But - remember - we really shouldn't discuss Bach in this thread... Perhaps we could use a code... we could talk about Bax instead of Bach, and no one would suspect.

Rock music reached incredible heights during 1964-1972, but then it faded away and became (with some exceptions) absolute junk.

Let me add this: It is VERY EASY to write an opera, but VERY HARD to write a really good 3-minute rock piece.

 

There's been some very good points made all round here in the last few posts.... I think I know exactly what RdS means about the objectivism of the baroque era vs the subjectivism of the romantic and modern era.

For me Bach's music has a grandeur and intensity which other composers of the baroque era fail to match. Only a few of Handel's Concerti Grossi or Pergolesi's Stabat Mater can compete in the fascination that Bach's music exerts - but then I have not heard more than 0.1% of the music of the era. Buxtehude, for example, is an occasional radio 3 experience for me.

Anyway, back to the subjective vs objective question.... quite simply, is it not just a product of the social and economic factors of music making at the time allied to the previling trends in art which were themselves the product of the same socio-economic-political factors?

To grossly simplify: Bach and his forerunners were highly specialized artisans. They were employed to write music for other people - for religious service, for court ceremonial, for the entertainment of the wealthy elite and the privileged ruling class. Quite simply they were not being paid to write about themselves. And possibly this lack of self was reflected in the smaller number of works they did compose for their own purposes.

But by the romantic era, or from Beethoven's time onwards, when romanticism in all the arts was in full swing, the socio-economic-political factors had changed. The composer was now an economic operator in his own right, writing his own music and living off the proceeds of its publication. The importance of the aristocratic or wealthy bourgeois patron was diminishing and the paying audience was the growing wealthy urban middle class who partook of music for the sake of art and played it at home on their new-fangled pianofortes (what a consumer status symbol that was - the 19th century music centre!).

So now the composer could write about himself, and his music was being consumed by the same consumers who were reading Walter Scott, Goethe, etc etc - and were quite happy with the heroic narrative of the self against the world. And so it goes on.

And its this subjectivism that draws me in. Its the power of personal emotions that makes this appeal to me. Romantic music is a narrative of emotional states.

Towards the end of the romantic era, it begins to get a little bit sickening.... I love Mahler's music but often find I prefer to listen to single movements at a time and not whole symphonies: "look at my joy, look how I suffer!". Its true that Bruckner asks the same question nine times and comes to the same answer... yes I will be saved if I keep faith (but in the 9th there is only faith and hope - no revelation as in the other symphonies, but instead doubt against which only faith and hope can prevail).

Despite the crisis at the end of the romantic era - which was marked in the political and social worlds by WW1 and the attendant social upheaval - subjectivism in music remained in expressionism and in the continuance of the romantic tradition in music by most post WW1 composers - it might be the 2nd Viennese and Darmstadt Schools that get the headlines and notoriety, but actually most classical music produced in the 20th Century is in a post- or neo-romantic vein with many eclectic inclusions borrowed from the serialists or jazz or elsewhere - e.g. Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Britten and so on.

Earlier tonight I was over at Ditton's listening to his latest system upgrade (balanced outputs on his DAC - definitely a step up) and one of the pieces we listened to was a live recording from the 1962 Edinburgh Festival of Shostakovich's 8th Quartet. It may have been the UK premiere, given by the Borodin Qt. The sense of an eyewitness on history in this music is very strong, especially with the use of the D-S-C-H motif in the music as if saying "I was there - this is how I saw it" but also as if in riposte to Mahler's utter subjectivism, he is saying "look at us, look how we suffer". The difference in nuance and focus is fascinating and compelling. As is the historical and political context. It is why I love this music.

 

Great post, Alan. I wrote a reply, which the machine decided to devour, and I can't be bothered doing it again at my typing speed of 10wpy. However, I basically agree with it. I would only add that there is also an element that the great masters of the Baroque, Bach and Handel, had said everything in the baroque style that there was to be said, and that a new direction had to be found. Bach's own sons started down that path (helped by the fact that they regarded their father as an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy anyway - it has been suggested that the famous visit of JS to Frederick the Great was the work of CPE Bach, then harpsichordist at Frederick's court, in an attempt to show up the old boy). The new direction was to lead to Beethoven and the revolution in thinking of the musician as creative artist (if you'd told JS he was an artist, he would have laughed at the idea).

So, who triggered that change? Was it evolution or revolution? I suspect the former, a gradual moving away from the strict fugal structure of the baroque. (The form was to last for a lot longer - Beethoven regarded the contrapuntalists as his deadly enemies).

 

First of all, let me correct a wrong interpretation of an earlier post of mine: I know *nothing* about rock. I was just being humourous when I quoted Bat and hurled a lot of punishing to his statement. A priori, I would not say that rock is better, say, than Thierry Escaich or Aarvo Paart. I would think not, but how could I know if I never listen to rock?

Second, about objective-subjective in pre- Sturm und Drang music. I agree with the clarification Allan made. But I also must say I dislike Beethoven saying ‘I feel this, listen, you blockheads, and learn from a genious’. I don’t like the attitude and I quite agree that with Mahler this becomes even worse. Bruckner is quite different and yes, his 9th is truly something miraculous. But then, his 8th or even his fifth are also pure marvels, if too long (and the 5th is arguably too complex for immediate understanding - and if one is honnest, for repeated listening understanding).

But were the baroque and earlier musicians just payed artisans? I do not think so. Buxtehude, just to name one, was clearly composing besides his obligations: he did not have to write organ music, all he had was to improvise; even his Abendmusicken were an extra. He was plainly enlove with music, and he expressed himself through it.

So much so that his music is absolutely full of passion, just as a Beethoven sonata. Only, the kind of passion and emotion are different. Take the openning notes of the opus 111: we clearly see him frowning- pi-ponnng, tada! Now listen to the not less impressive g minor Buxtehude (the one that begins with a basso ostinato): you listen to a motif that does not return to the tonic and leaves you in anxiety. It is not Buxtehude saying ‘I am frightened’: he is just depicting a very dangerous, very anxious, extremely dramatic meaning (just like the beginning of Brahms’s 1st Symphony, only Brahms did not know what to do with that in the rest of the symphony).

So when Beethoven says: ‘listen to ME’, Buxtehude just says: ‘Lo and behold’. Both were equally passioned about music making. Only Beethoven used music to tell us about him and Buxtehude did not. Why? Just as Alan said, because the cult of the Self, the importance of the I was not yet developped. Of course, people had Selves, but there was no possibility of writting from that standpoint. It was Rousseau, I believe, that brought the ‘I’ into respectability, and romanticism that created the hero-that-tells-his-story possibility. My only disagreement is that social factors in the musician’s standing were responsible: I thing it is, as Allan also hinted, a change in the Weltanschauung: the Self acquired recognition; but was a paid musician not expected to do that just because he worked out of obligation? I do nor really think so: it was just that speaking about one’s emotions was not the thing to do because the was no cultural ‘niche’ for it.

But this is not always the case: Sibelius, for instance, had the same kind of non-Self way of writing. And Gesualdo plainly was all about himself (as Michelangelo).

So, to sum up, romanticism made it possible to speak of emotion as felt by the Self; in Bach or Buxtehude, emotion is out there but it is not about the composer. Romanticism is the era of the novel; baroque the era of the visual. Perhaps that is the main difference.

And, speaking of Selves, this is precisely what I like about pre-romantic composers: they speak about tragedy, not their worries; they speak about good and evil (even when the different is absolutely not obvious, as in Buxtehude), not about themselves. So the difference, it seems to me, is that between Agamemnon and Werther.

 

Of course you know I don't agree with the first statement - I took it out of context, of course, where I might agree. But I'd like to stress that Bach is definetly not the summation of the Baroque. And, as I said earlier (in a reply to another thread) Bach himself shows very clear signs of wanting to change to a lighter vein but he utterly failed (several WTC II preludes); he therefore reverted to his world of counterpoint and abstract God.

Second, I would not think Beethoven hated counterpoint or counterpointalists: he loved the WTC and he himself tryed to include counterpoint into his work. The fact that it is not very convincing counterpoint is quite another issue.

 

I am slightly paraphrasing Albert Schweitzer, who said words to the effect that, whereas musical trends radiated from other composers, in the case of the baroque, everything went to Bach. Albert wrote a long time ago, so perhaps that thinking has changed.

Again, I remember a quote of someone who visited Beethoven during the course of his writing the Missa Solemnis. Even as he approached the house, he could hear Beethoven bawling out parts of the piece. And when Beethoven opened the door, "he looked as if he was engaged in mortal struggle with a whole group of contrapuntalists, his deadly enemies." I believe that Beethoven was criticised a lot by the contrapuntalists for his lack of it (he wasn't composing in what they saw as a formally correct manner). He, on the other hand, didn't see the need for it and resented the constant criticism.

 

Yes, that was the current view at the time of Schweitzer. That is because pre-18th Century composers were not well known. Musicians had to work backwards: 'modern' composers, then the triad, Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, and then everything that went on before Bach.

We now have greater access to 16th and 17th century music. And no one will be surprised that two or three centuries of music cannot very well be summed up in Bach, with his tonal and definitely non-modal language.

Did Schütz's music find its way to Bach? Most certainly, but in the process its specificity was quite lost; the same with Frescobaldi, Monteverdi, Froberger, Scheidemann, Buxtehude, Lübeck, Grigny, Couperin and many, many others. And I am not naming the extraordinary Iberian or British composers that Bach knew nothing about. Is John Bull's music not special and meaningful? Or Cabezon's?

Let me exploit a case that is very much close to my heart: Buxtehude. His music, chiefly his organ music, has never been matched in terms of expressiveness. I'll give an example, the g minor prelude, the one which begins with a trill that leads to a very fast lightning of a upward movement and then maintains a G in the pedals for a very long time. It starts fearfully; it goes on plaintively; this section ends most terribly in dark chords. A fugue follows, rather whimsical but clearly unsure of itself: it seems to try to find its way from darkness to light. Of course it cannot because the pedals and manual chords come in in a very menacing and sinister way, pulling everything down back to darkness. There is next a fugato, very fast (positiv, Cymbel), a kind of despaired runaway from darkness which, of course, in Buxtehude is no good sign: the dark, strong, Hauptwerk takes
over and stops it short, in a screaming way. And, out of the last chord, a slow fugue comes out. It is a terrible battle between light and darkness, a violent, implacable one. It really seems that the dark will have it, but suddenly a very strong rhythm states its g and the pedals come up very forcefully, almost brutally, and the piece ends in two short chords, just like that. It is over, brutally and definitively.

This was called a Prelude and Fugue. But is it? Of course not: there is

1) a chordal section linked to a fugato, followed by another chordal section. This is the first part.

2) a fugue, leading to

3) A chordal section which leads to g

4) a fast fugato, rather developed but not a fugue, interrupted by a series of chords out of which there emerges

5) The final fugue (the same motive of the first but rhythmically changed to the point of not being recognizable) which ends in brief chords.

Did Bach ever compose something like this? He tried to, in his early organ works. It is nothing like Buxtehude, because Bach could really not be Buxtehude's equal in terms of expressiveness, pathos and emotional structure.

This kind of music died with Lübeck and Bruhns. Was it taken up by Bach? Definitely not.

So, in conclusion, Bach was never Buxtehude's equal in the stylus fantasticus. Is there stylus fantasticus in Bach? Not really.

I am not saying that Bach was a lesser composer than Buxtehude; but never really managed to incorporate Buxtehude like content into his music.

So, as always, reality is never as simple as our categories would have us believe. No, Bach was no culmination at all: he was just an exceptionally talented composer of the late Baroque and rococo period with his own, unmistakeable, language. The same as Beethoven was a 'French revolution' or 'Bourgeois revolution' composer and Mozart a classic composer. And Buxtehude was another genius, from the gothic-baroque hanseatic tradition.

Yes, Beethoven could not really master counterpoint and that annoyed him.