Some people out there know that I’m a confirmed Winnie-the-Pooh freak, so imagine my delight to find Fyodor Khitruk’s 1969 Russian version, Vinni-Pukh, had turned up online:



That’s Vinni-Pukh idet v gosti (“Winnie-the-Pooh Goes on a Visit”), from 1971. Khitruk was one of the first Soviet animation directors to break out of the rut of Socialist realism, and you can see the Russian folk influences in his Pooh films. Weinberg’s music is a perfect fit, vaguely folk-like but also sophisticated and scintillating, setting the mood with a stylish economy of means.

Phil at Dial “M” posted an unbelievable video of Glenn Gould playing a Beethoven bagatelle this week; go there and watch it, and then you can come back here for more miniature fun.

Paul Crossley performing Luciano Berio’s “Leaf”:

This week, Greg Sandow posted an essay by one of his Eastman students about what’s wrong with classical concert formats. It’s the usual suspects:

At times even I feel uncomfortable in the stuffy atmosphere of the concert hall and sometimes I wish I could just go to a concert in jeans and a sweatshirt instead of feeling like I need to dress up for the event…. Less formal attire for musicians would not only make us more comfortable when we’re playing, but I think it would also let the audience feel more relaxed.

(For the record, I’ve gone to probably several hundred classical concerts in jeans and tennis shoes and never once was refused admission. Is Rochester more hardcore about that sort of thing?) The student goes on:

Throw in some pop/rock lighting experiments and I think we might be talking about real entertainment…. What if the composer also specified that the woodwinds should stand and the lighting should be blue during the second movement? Spotlighting on soloists is also a direction that might be interesting in concerts….

In other words, it’s the veneer, not the actual musical content. Now, the outward trappings of a concert experience are important, but here’s where the trouble comes in: this student (and some of the commenters) think outward trappings to be of primary importance, and they want the trappings to be, well, those of a rock concert.

One of the commenters proposes this program:

How does commissioning a ballet for Ades’ Living Toys and a film for Reich’s Eight Lines with Ligeti’s piano concerto sandwiched between sound to you?

Frankly, to me, it sounds like way too much distraction. But that would be about the level of visual stimulation you’d expect from a rock band. For them, there’s a lot more to compete with: audience members come and go, they feel free to talk, they feel free to sing along. They applaud themselves for recognizing a song, and they spend as much time socializing as listening. A rock act needs a stronger signal to cut through that level of noise. That’s the milieu, and it’s fine—rock music is engineered around it such that it’s still musically worthwhile. But that much simultaneous activity would hardly be conducive to really getting into the sonic world of an Adés or a Ligeti (let alone a Feldman, Lucier, or Webern).

What seems to be missing here is the realization that one of the indispensible and vital pleasures of art music (classical and jazz, I should add, even though the focus of this post is classical) is the immersion in the sound on its own terms—not just rhythm and harmony, but the actual sound of the music. And a lot of the logistics of traditional classical performance—the uniform attire, the comparative silence of the audience, the lack of patter and superfluous stage business—have the salutary effect of not diverting your attention from that sound. I emphasize that I don’t hold any particular brief for current practices, but these types of proposals introduce elements that would interfere with the musical potential of concerts far more than they would promote it. For example, I’m hardly a stickler on applause: if you feel the urge to put your hands together, you should. I wonder, though, if the constant focus on the issue isn’t evidence of a stifling tradition, but, rather, an inability to appreciate the beauty of sound fading into silence—as a collective experience, an entire audience cheering can’t compare with an entire audience holding its breath. Has the predominance of rock and pop aesthetics somehow made that sort of suspended moment an uneasy terra incognita for those such as Greg’s student? Even her plea for new music is misguided:

When was the last time a new ballet caused a riot as in the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring?

Not recently, thankfully—a riot is not the best atmosphere for perceiving a new work of art. But note that she’s not highlighting the engagement with something new, the intellectual excitement of coming to terms with an unfamiliar piece, but the crowd’s verdict; the ideal is an instant sensation, a ready-made flow for the listener to go with. Which means that the clothes and the etiquette and the distance of the performers aren’t what’s intimidating, it’s that none of those things give any clear instruction as to what you’re supposed to think of the experience. It ends up being just you and the music. And if you’ve spent your life having marketers and mass media telling you what to think, that freedom can be disquieting indeed.

The student describes a faculty recital with approval:

During the recital they interacted with the audience, allowed themselves to show their strange but hilarious personalities and got the audience involved in their performance. Suddenly their ‘serious’ classical music was not so serious anymore. We laughed, we were entertained and most importantly, we talked about it to our friends the next day.

All concerts can be experienced on the level of personality and stage presentation, but for this student and her friends, that’s the most important aspect. These are all (presumably) music students, and every concert they go to (presumably) has music on it. Why aren’t they talking about all the other concerts? Because then, they’d have to talk about the actual music, which is not easy to do; they’re used to the standard level of discourse surrounding pop music, which is based around celebrity. It’s a fine line between making the audience comfortable and allowing them to never leave their comfort zone. A concert that lets you view and discuss the world the way that you’re used to is hardly an unpleasant experience, but that’s pretty much the opposite of what I’ve always believed good art is supposed to do.

That’s a pretty curmudgeonly thing to say, isn’t it? I’m a curmudgeon about a lot of things. And those people calling for a more rock-like classical experience aren’t wrong to want what they want. We all do. But they’re in danger of closing themselves off from an awful lot. Greg’s student describes a performance:

I turned toward the audience and played one extremely loud note and not surprisingly, a woman in the front of the hall jumped about two feet out of her chair. How often can typical classical music concerts affect an audience member so directly?

Surprisingly often, in my case. But that’s because I finally figured out that it’s not about being knocked out of my chair, it’s about being able to aurally go up to the music and engage it actively, openly, maybe even foolishly. The more that classical music borrows from popular music, the more the artistic content is skewed in a pop direction: towards sensation and away from contemplation, and more crucially, towards expectation and away from exploration. The most important music is the music we don’t yet know that we want. Structuring the presentation along popular lines makes it that much more unlikely that we’ll ever find it.

I’m the first to admit that my skill at prognosticating competitions is non-existent, so I wasn’t surprised that none of the composers I considered in the running for the Grawemeyer Award won (see comments here). I was pleasantly surprised that my other prediction failed to pan out—that the honored piece would be an opera or concerto (the winner, Sebastian Currier’s Static, is for five players). That call, in fact, was based on solid evidence: 12 of the previous 20 winners had been either stage works or solo-and-orchestra affairs. The inherent flash and drama of virtuosity or figurative action, after all, is always going to make a bigger impact than a well-wrought but understated meditation for a few players that don’t seem to be working very hard.

I’ve been thinking about such things this week as I’ve been revisiting the Webern op. 27 Variations for solo piano. In Moldenhauer’s biography, he quotes Webern writing a colleague about his progress: “The completed part is a movement of variations; what is evolving will be a kind of ‘suite.’ In the variations I hope I have realized something I have envisioned for years now.” To another correspondent, a couple of weeks later: “During the last few weeks I was uninterruptedly at my work and now see that the variations go on further, even if they turn into movements of most diverse types.” (Emphasis in the original.)

Webern first started working on the Variations in October of 1935, went at it full-steam starting the next June, and finally finished it in September. That’s a long genesis for a not-very-long piece of music, but the quotes reveal that Webern had to live with the notes for a long time before he could see where they were going, generating a type of fully organic form that he had clearly been trying to imagine for the better part of his compositional life. The pianist who premiered op. 27, Peter Stadler, remembered coaching the music with Webern: “For weeks on end he had spent countless hours trying to convey to me every nuance of performance down to the finest detail. As he sang and shouted, waved his arms and stamped his feet in an attempt to bring out what he called the meaning of the music I was amazed to see him treat those few scrappy notes as if they were cascades of sound.” For Webern, they were: highly charged phrases packed with a year’s worth of thought and emotion.

I doubt the Variations would win any major music award today. The Grawemeyer specifies a “large musical genre”; the Pulitzer is for a work “of significant dimension.” Webern’s few pages wouldn’t get much of a look from such juries. Yet op. 27 is a piece of significant dimensions, even if those dimensions are curled into themselves like something out of string theory. Big awards, thankfully, don’t always go to big ensembles, but there’s a long way to go before a couple of perfect minutes of lapidary precision and ineffable depth can hope to compete on equal terms with a Wagnerian stem-winder.

It’s Thursday, so it must be time for Paul Hindemith and Darius Milhaud to star in a Weimar-era avant-garde German version of Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer” video! That’s Vormittagspuk (“Morning Ghosts”), directed by Dada luminary Hans Richter in 1928 (with music by Hindemith). The Nazis deemed it “Degenerate Art” and destroyed the negative, but a print survived, and, of course, is now available on YouTube. Richter later spent some time in America, where, among other things, he collaborated with Jean Cocteau on the late surrealist romp 8×8: A Chess Sonata (portions of which are also online—check out this sequence featuring Paul Bowles awakening to compose from a slowly draining swimming pool.)

From the wires:

Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes are about to buy Leonard Bernstein’s old apartment. (That’s a Scientological E-Meter to the right there, like the one that will soon sit in the place formerly occupied by Lenny’s ashtray. Build your own!)

Peter Frampton (link warning: auto-loading guitar music) just narrated Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf in Kentucky.

Go to Syracuse and you might just end up as an official Lou Reed scholar. (Reed’s also picking up the George Arents Pioneer Medal for Excellence in the Arts.) English majors only, which may confirm your opinion of Metal Machine Music. Not mine, though—I love the noise. (Thanks to awesome sister Jeana Stewart for the tip.)

Oboist H. David Meyers has been sentenced to a year and a day in prison for running an illegal sports gambling operation. (Speaking of gambling, just one more day to get in on your office Grawemeyer pool. My money’s on Steve Reich—but I came up empty in MegaMillions, so maybe you should ask someone else.)

Update (3/8): The Grawemeyer? We were all wrong—me especially. Congratulations, Sebastian!

Remember Nader Mashayehki? He’s the conductor of the Tehran Symphony Orchestra, who last year, toured Europe with a program that included Frank Zappa’s Dog Breath Variations. He’s at it again: tomorrow night, he’ll lead a perfomance of John Cage’s Four⁶ at the Tehran Conservatory of Music. “It will be interesting to find out whether there is any penchant for Cage’s works among Iranians or not, and if so, to what degree,” Mashayekhi says. As far as anyone knows, this is the first Cage performance in Iran since the Islamic Revolution. The Tehran Symphony faces chronic funding shortages, but Masayekhi isn’t inclined to shift to a more conservative programming philosophy. “[Cage’s] works create a hope and a philosophical view toward life,” Mashayehki says. “This view is very helpful and we really need that hope in Iran… his music creates joie de vivre.” Indeed.

(Article via New Music ReBlog, which I’m shocked and mortified to find is not on the blogroll. I really need to update that thing.)

Update (3/6): Alex Ross, who’s more productive on his lunch hour than I am, tracks down a poster for the concert that I can’t wait to print out and hang on the wall.

Our former DePaul roommate Mark Meyer sends along news that one of our favorite professors, Tom Brown, passed away last week. The “scholar and gentleman” epithet doesn’t begin to descibe Dr. Brown, who had the irrepressible enthusiasm of the true nerd and enough endearing quirks for at least a dozen other musicologists. Two facts that probably won’t make it into his obituary: he met and romanced his former wife, so the story goes, while she was still in a convent, the discovery of which gave us a whole new level of respect for the man; and every ten years or so, he’d put aside all other books and spend the year re-reading Proust. He was living proof that the field of music is so rich that one could happily spend an entire life thinking deep, idiosyncratic thoughts about it. (Post title is a direct petulantly indignant quote from Dr. Brown’s “Shakespeare and Music” seminar, when, after talking for weeks about the high D-flat at the end of the mad scene in Verdi’s Macbeth, the soprano on the video he showed the class chickened out and sang an A-flat instead.)

A composer of music has to be aware of, and to have a penetrating insight into, all the factors which converge to an ideology in the cultural make-up of his contemporaries. He has to come up with an idea, a musical idea, which just passes the accumulated past by not exactly belonging to it, by not conforming to its approved laws, by labeling its claim to eternal validity succinctly as a mere ideology.

That’s the pioneering electronic composer Herbert Brün, in a book I came across while brushing up on the op. 27 Variations of Webern: The Computer and Music, edited by Harry B. Lincoln (Cornell University Press, 1970). As you might expect from a 1970 survey of the topic, it’s not terribly practical, but it’s a fun snapshot of the state of the art at the time. The big advances in computer analysis are programming the machine to recognize basic relationships that would be obvious to a human observer, and computer composition is limited to fairly simple stochastic operations (no one’s yet quite sure what to make of Xenakis’s Musiques Formelles).

In the midst of all this, Brün’s contribution, “From Musical Ideas to Computers and Back,” bursts forth like a Roman candle. Ostensibly a proposal for a program of computer composition research, it’s also a philosophical tract and a historiographical analysis of musical style. Equating musical styles with compositional systems, he points out that any system is ultimately a way of limiting the vocabulary of available sounds. As such, any system contains only a finite number of possibilities, and as more and more information is extracted out of the system, the possibilities decrease. Brün characterizes the life-cycle of a given system/style as four stages:

Brün clearly thinks that Western music has reached the “administrative” crisis point:

Recent developments in the field of musical composition have shown that the limited and conditioned system of acoustical elements and events, considered musical material for several hundred years, has now entered the administrative stage, where all further permutations will no longer possess any new meaning. The degree to which contemporary composers are consciously aware of this fact may vary widely. But equally widely varied are the signs giving evident proof for the growth of at least an intuitive suspicion that the system of well-tempered pitches, harmonic spectrums, and harmonic time periodization has had its day, and has now become so thoroughly organized that nothing unheard and unthought of could possibly find, therein, its communicative equivalent.

At its core, this construct echoes the mythical musical march of progress a little too much for my taste, but it’s nothing if not provocative, and it’s a particularly intriguing framework to think about decadence, artistic stagnation, and the sprouting of various neo-this and that movements.

But really, like the rest of Brün’s work, it’s the tone and sheer scope that I love. The rest of the articles in The Computer and Music are academically careful and reasonable—when the authors do venture to make predictions or try to characterize the importance of their research, they’re appropriately modest and qualified. Not Brün. He can’t seem to get through more than a couple of paragraphs without putting the topic at hand into the widest possible philosophical and historical perspective. The quote at the beginning of this post is immediately expanded into a set of trenchant and broad verities that are worth quoting at length:

Whenever a man finally recognizes and understands the notions and laws that rule his behavior and standards, he will, usually, honor himself for his remarkable insight by claiming eternal validity for those notions and laws, though they be ever so spurious, ever so limited to but temporary relevance. Ideologies flourish on retroactively made-up beliefs which are complacently proclaiming to have found the truth, while skeptics are already busy looking for it again…. An idea, on the other hand, usually challenges the adequacy of using approved criteria as standards of measurement, and expressly demonstrates the irrelevance of the approved in questions of desirability concerning changes of state or law. It is for this that ideas come under attack; not for being good or bad, but rather for uncovering the impotence of persisting ideologies. To cover this shame, the ideologically possessed apostle finds himself frequently provoked to advocate indifference, complacency, corruption, or even murder. Often enough, unfortunately, such a defender of an expiring ideology, by proclaiming it to be nature’s own law, succeeds in contaminating the more gullible of his opponents, who, unaware of their defeat, then begin to retaliate in kind. The most contagious disease in our human society is the agony of dying ideologies.

Brün, who fled Nazi Germany in 1936, studied with Stefan Wolpe in pre-independence Israel, spent a summer at Tanglewood, then bounced around Europe before settling at the University of Illinois in the 1960s, always believed that composers had an almost moral obligation to work outside their comfort zone, to constantly demonstrate the bankruptcy of any sort of dogma, to prod those of us in society to reach beyond what we already know or think we know. “If a composer takes a political view of his role in society, he may see that a certain lack of new orders is not only threatening his own system, his ego, his biological existence, but the biological existence of his contemporaries and neighbors,” he once said. “He may say that this society, as it sees itself, will now not give any more new answers to repeated questions. It needs an input which will change it just that much that the next time a certain set of questions is asked, it will give new answers.” That’s awfully close to my ideal of composition, regardless of style or vocabulary.

Brün is compulsively quotable; you can start with a sample of writings and interviews posted on the Brün website (which also contains many of his graphical scores, including Mutatis Mutandis #12, above). Not much of his music seems to be online, but you can hear a quartet of works, including the seminal electronic piece Futility 1964, on this archived program from Brown University’s BSR radio (it’s in the midst of a lot of college-radio musique concrète hijinks; Futility 1964 starts at the 7:26 mark). And here’s a YouTube snippet of an undated but characteristic Brün lecture; he starts from a pregnant, unexpected linguistic observation, then, when you finally think you know where he’s going, he takes off in another, even more provocative direction.



Seven years after his death, Brün is mostly known only to electronic-music specialists, which, given the breadth of his ideas, is a shame. My sense is that the current new-music ethos is in retreat from Brün’s tough, wildly ambitious idealism; the most common goal seems to be to carve out a little space of order and beauty in the midst of a chaotic world. Brün would insist that you could change that entire world with every single note you put down.