All composers steal from other composers, and good composers are unapologetic about it. But it’s sometimes interesting to look at just what it is they choose to pilfer—and how that relates to the reputation of the composer being looted. Today’s meandering concerns a rather unlikely confluence of borrowing.

Example 1 comes from Hugo Wolf’s Spanisches Liederbuch—the eighth of the Geistliche Lieder, “Ach, wie lang die Seele schlummert!” The opening section is one of Wolf’s typically obsessive, austere, serpentine bits of chromatic counterpoint. But when we get to these words—

Doch nun ihrer Sehnsucht Licht
Blendend ihr in’s Auge bricht:
Zeit ist’s, daß sie sich ermuntre.

But now the light of longing
Shines blindingly into [the soul’s] eyes:
It is time for it to wake.

—the harmonies become suddenly opulent:

That ii7-V9 color sure sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It’s almost the same harmonies Puccini later used for the “Te deum” finale to Act I of Tosca:

Now, the question is whether Puccini stole from Wolf, or whether both composers were paying homage to a common source—or both. The Spanisches Liederbuch was published in 1890; Tosca appeared in 1900. (Mosco Carner, in his Puccini biography, mentions that the “Te deum” was partially recycled from an unpublished 1880 church anthem, but no other source sees fit to mention this, so I’m guessing that, if Puccini was stealing from himself, he changed the source material quite a bit along the way.) A search through the published letters and biographies shows no mention of “Ach, wie lang,” but I can’t imagine that Puccini—a composer ever keen on staying abreast of every latest musical development—didn’t know at least some of Wolf’s music, so it’s at least plausible that Puccini had Wolf’s refrain in the back of his mind. It certainly fits the point in the opera—Scarpia is exulting that his best-laid plans are now on the verge of snaring Tosca for him; his pitch-black soul is, at last, fully awake.

More likely, though, that both composers were borrowing from the inescapable Richard Wagner—to my ear, one of his bridal processions, possibly Lohengrin, but more probably Götterdämmerung:

Wagner settles this motive into a V7-I pattern which then embarks on familiar Wagnerian chromatic excursions. But Puccini and Wolf translate the harmonies into a static loop where tonic is delayed. It’s far closer to the language of Tristan—or, in a way, the epic E-flat-major triad that opens Das Rheingold (which, when it finally does move, goes to the not to the dominant but the subdominant—where Wolf and Puccini start). Wolf and Puccini are stealing one of Wagner’s most reliable dramatic conceptions—the stately tread of ceremony as a backdrop for a tightening or release of emotion—and, seemingly, conflating it with some of Wagner’s most radical harmonic experiments.

In other words, they’re not just stealing something because it works, but because it also signals—to listeners, performers, or maybe even just to themselves—that they, too, are on the cutting edge. It’s a claim of modernity. Interestingly, a lot of musical quotation/borrowing/pilfering today seems to go in the opposite direction—composers borrow to assert continuity with the past, with tradition, with a long-standing musical vernacular. Maybe it’s a gesture of reassurance—either to the audience, that the music is not aiming for the shock of the new at any cost, or to themselves, that they can reconstitute the narrative of cultural success and prominence of the great composers of the past: a claim of canonicity. Choose your causality: the preponderance of conservative programming, the recorded ubiquity of the entirety of musical history, the more forbidding nature of recent modernism. (My biases: maybe, yes, probably not.) But it does make for an odd state of temporal affairs—the idea that being up-to-date is less up-to-date than it was a hundred years ago.

Update (4/11): I coincidentally ran across a pleasantly loopy echo of that last idea today, a blurb on the cover of a 1995 sci-fi novel called Strange Attractors: “A 2001 for the nineties.”

The Composer’s Role In Society is one of those subjects that seems to occasion much furrowed-brow reflection (the sort of confab Eddie Izzard would call a “strokey-beard meeting”). I sometimes think that the subject is not really that complicated, but that people would rather not admit that the Role of the Composer is essentially whatever each composer wants it to be—because, I don’t know, maybe they don’t like to think they have no recourse against a piece of music they don’t like. Better to cast about for philosophical justification, and, if possible, blame.

Here’s a couple of recent, pertinent examples, which I point out not because they’re particularly outlandish, but because they’re rather pure versions of the canonical complaints against composers that have been around pretty much forever. The first comes courtesy of musikwissenbloggenschaft, in which Brent gives it the old college try teaching serialism.

i led what has to be my worse discussion session this year in the music history survey i co-teach. the subject was the second viennese school. problematic was: (1) trying to sum up atonality and the twelve-tone method in forty-five minutes, (2) hiding my seething dislike of all-things serial, (3) teaching to the half of my students that have done thorough serial analysis and before the other half that were encountering this sort of music literally for the first time.

(First, a digression. IU’s a pretty big school; might it not be possible to find someone to lead the discussion without a seething dislike of the subject at hand? Because in my experience, not only is such seething dislike well-nigh impossible to hide, but also inevitably results in nothing being learned. And: if one is a teacher, and one’s class is a) bored, and b) having their lack of curiosity validated rather than challenged, perhaps one shouldn’t be so, well, smug about it? I mean, I had a high school history teacher that could make bimetallism exciting.)

Anyway, here’s the money quote, from the student discussion:

“was it music like this that made people stop going to concerts? it all seems so arrogant.”

my response: again, no comment. but i laughed on the inside.

Ha-ha. I amused myself sitting in traffic this morning imagining how this discussion might play out under other hypothetical seething dislikes: the designated hitter rule, Miracle Whip instead of mayonnaise, silent letters in words, &c. (“Was it spelling knife with a k that made people stop doing crossword puzzles? It all seems so arrogant.” I laughed on the inside.) Nevertheless, there is a real response to this that’s far better than “no comment,” and here it is: all composers are arrogant—maybe not personally, but certainly in the act of composition. Putting your name at the top of a piece of music is hardly an act of humility. For Wagner to present me, as a listener, with four hours of Tristan is equal parts generosity and cockiness. What’s more: the composition of a piece you like is just as arrogant as the composition of one you don’t.

And, boy, that rubs some people the wrong way. Via the gimlet-eyed crew at The Detritus Review, I give you Pierre Ruhe.

The telling moment came when Arrell… led a discussion with his [composer] colleagues. His simple question—about how the composer thinks of an audience when writing music—was met with awkward silence, then nervous chuckles.

Did this suggest these local creators share an I’m-too-cool-to-care attitude toward the recipients of their art? When pressed, each composer had a properly respectful answer about the value of audiences….
…
I encountered something more distressing last month, as a panelist at a national composer’s conference….

When someone in the crowd asked, “Why don’t [living] composers get more attention from the media?” I rashly shot back, “Well, isn’t that the composers’ fault?”

Um… no: if living composers aren’t getting any coverage in the media, that’s because the likes of Pierre Ruhe don’t feel like covering them. Now, Ruhe can like and dislike—and write about—whatever music he wants, but to say that it’s the composers’ fault is just plain goofy. It makes it sound like a moral failing to write music that doesn’t match Ruhe’s particular tastes. (I sometimes spout off my opinions in the Boston Globe, but that doesn’t make them any more “right,” just—in theory, anyway, if not always in practice—more informed and more entertaining.)

Of course, there are composers who want as many people as possible to like their music—and I’ve never met or read about any composer who didn’t want at least somebody to like their music. But here’s the thing: writing music that you think the audience will like is a compositional strategy, not a moral imperative. It is no more or less valid than any other compositional strategy. It produces the same mix of greatness (La Traviata) and crap (“My Heart Will Go On”) as any other compositional strategy. You’re free to swap Violetta and Celine if your taste is different than mine—but that doesn’t mean you get to call James Horner a more “responsible” or less “arrogant” composer than Verdi, just because Verdi doesn’t happen to write music you like. And Schoenberg may not have been aiming at the greatest common factor, but he was writing music that he wanted to hear, and frankly, why is his status as an audience member less privileged than yours?

Music is one of the few things that everybody, regardless of whether they actually know anything about it, feels entitled to have an opinion about. That is, in fact, one of the best things about it. But those are tastes, not moral guidelines or philosophical truths. If a composer isn’t pandering to your preferences, you’re free to not like it—but really, try not to take it so personally.

Toby Keith Joins Wayman Tisdale on Barry White Remake

Now that’s an exquisite corpse.

No doubt the admirers of Schumann were disappointed by the performance of his concerto by Madame [Sophie] Menter at the Crystal Palace on Saturday. But what could they expect? To the superb Sophie, solid, robust, healthy, with her mere self-consciousness an example and sufficient delight to her, playing Schumann was like bringing a sensitive invalid into the fields on a sunshiny day and making him play football for the good of his liver. You could hear Schumann plaintively remonstrating in the orchestra, and the piano coming down on him irresistibly, echoing his words with good-natured mockery, and whirling him off in an endless race that took him clean out of himself and left him panting. Never were the quick movements finished with less regard for poor Schumann’s lungs.

The intermezzo delighted me beyond measure. Ordinarily, no man can put into words those hushed confidences that pass in it between piano and orchestra, as between a poet and a mistress. But I can give you what passed on Saturday, word for word. Here it is:

SOPHIE: Now, then, Bob, are you ready for another turn?
SCHUMANN: Yes. Just half a moment, if you dont mind. I havnt quite got my wind yet.
SOPHIE: Come! You feel all the better for it, dont you?
SCHUMANN: No doubt, no doubt. The weather is certainly very fine.
SOPHIE: I should think so. Better than sticking indoors at that old piano of yours and sentimentalizing, anyhow.
SCHUMANN: Yes: I know I should take more exercise.
SOPHIE: Well, you have got enough wind by this time. Come along, old man: hurry up.
SCHUMANN: If you wouldnt mind going a bit slower—
SOPHIE: Oh, bother going slow. You just stick to me and I’ll pull you through. You’ll be all right in a brace of shakes. Now: one, two, three, and—

(attacca subito l’allegro).

And it really did Schumann good.

—Corno di Bassetto, The Star, 25 April 1890

Nothing turns a lousy day around faster than a good shot of G.B.S.

The Boston Symphony Orchestra has announced their 2008-09 season. I’ll leave you in the able hands of Jeremy Eichler for the details (of which some remain state secrets—which version of Simon Boccanegra is that going to be, maestro?), but it’s interesting to see the inevitable Mozart crammed into the sort of three-concert marathon dumping-ground normally reserved for new music. (World premieres by Carter, Schuller, Kirchner, and André Previn, who must be the designated driver.)

My mother-in-law came over last night with a big bag of videos so she and Critic-at-Large Moe could catch up on Korean soap operas. My own current favorite, “First Wives’ Club” (조강지처 클럽, Jogangjicheo Keulleob), is especially operatic fun, not only in that it turns on a dime from comedy to drama, but in the way that both acting styles—serious drama and broad comedy—happily co-exist, often in the same scene. (It’s also—very important—the sort of show that’s pretty easy to follow even if your Korean language skills are, for all practical purposes, nonexistent.)

Anyway, there’s something curious about the music in the show. Most of it is standard dramatic cuing, but whenever there’s a setting that would realistically have its own piped-in music—a store, or a restaurant (lots of scenes in restaurants)—that music is always a bit of American popular music, sung in English, with lyrics that only coincidentally have anything to do with the plot at hand. I’ve never been to Korea, but my guess is that such English-language ubiquity is not all that accurate. But it’s clever as incidental music: for a non-English-speaker, the unintelligibility of the lyrics causes the mind to automatically relegate it to the background.

Even more interesting is that the choice of music seems to be genre-neutral. Adult contemporary, 50’s rock, country—it all shows up with equal frequency, in a way that would never happen in an American setting. Part of this may be cultural—Korean variety shows certainly display a pleasantly anything-goes aesthetic—but my sense is that merely singing in English semiotically signals a certain kind of Muzak quality within a dramatic context.

Of course, my own perspective on this is probably skewed, since my ear is inclined to gravitate towards the music anyways. (Every time I have occasion to visit Super 88, I end up wandering the aisles, hypnotized to the point of madness by the ruthlessly chirpy Chinese and Taiwanese pop background.) So maybe we should get back to the real question: will the fish-selling housewife finally dump her unfaithful husband in favor of the long-suffering contractor who loves her?

Four students from my alma mater have at least temporarily stuck it to the RIAA. I’ve never been much for school spirit, but: go Terriers!

In light of the drumbeat of news that the U.S. economy continues to underachieve more than a surly teenager, a little quiz: here’s two quotes, with certain terms in bold. In one quote, the boldface words are what was actually said, in the other, they’re words that have been changed. Which one is the actual economic analysis?

[T]he structural characteristics of a given financial instrument are less representative of a general class of investments than they are unique to the individual financial institution itself. Particularly, principles of relatedness… are more likely to evolve in the course of market actions than to be derived from generalized assumptions. Here again greater and new demands are made upon the perceptual and conceptual abilities of the regulator.

Our current regulatory structure was not built to address the modern financial system with its diversity of market participants, innovation, complexity of financial instruments, global integration and interconnectedness…. Moreover, our financial services companies are becoming larger, more complex and more difficult to manage.

If you’re a C-SPAN junkie, you’ll know it’s the second one—it’s from Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson’s recent remarks introducing a proposed new federal financial regulatory regimen. But if you’re a new-music junkie, you’ll recognize the ringer. Here’s the original:

[T]he structural characteristics of a given work are less representative of a general class of characteristics than they are unique to the individual work itself. Particularly, principles of relatedness, upon which depends immediate coherence of continuity, are more likely to evolve in the course of the work than to be derived from generalized assumptions. Here again greater and new demands are made upon the perceptual and conceptual abilities of the listener.

That’s Uncle Milton—Babbitt, not Friedman—from his (in)famous 1958 article “Who Cares If You Listen?” Indeed, watching such figures as Paulson or Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke try and stay on top of the current financial turmoil has been rather like watching a casual audience try and bend their ears around a particularly uncompromising bit of total serialism. They’re trying, but goshdarnit, it’s complicated.

But the point of the comparison isn’t just to analyze the economy—it is complicated, and that’s part of the problem—but also to look at how Babbitt’s article has been and continues to be misunderstood, mostly by people who can’t get past the title (which wasn’t even Babbitt’s to begin with). Babbitt’s position is as hardcore as you’d expect, but he’s explicitly realistic about where his position fits into the musical world as a whole. The article is less a manifesto in support of a particular musical vocabulary than a philosophical justification for the cultivation of a niche audience. He actually puts it in economic terms:

I am concerned with stating an attitude towards the indisputable facts of the status and condition of the composer of what we will, for the moment, designate as “serious,” “advanced,” contemporary music. This composer expends an enormous amount of time and energy—and, usually, considerable money—on the creation of a commodity which has little, no, or negative commodity value….

Nowadays, that last sentence is hardly limited to composers of “serious,” “advanced,” contemporary music. I think that Babbitt doesn’t always get credit for noticing that this was the tendency of music—all music—in the second half of the 20th century: away from universality, towards stylistic fragmentation, thousands of ministers, each preaching to their own choir. The composer no longer comes out of a unified tradition, but picks, chooses, and combines from a plethora of traditions: the composer “lives no longer in a unitary musical universe of ‘common practice,’ but in a variety of universes of diverse practice.”

Paulson’s proposed regulatory plan has been criticized for assuming that the markets can still be regulated in a comparatively unitary way. From NPR this morning:

“Remember, we have seen in the last eight months repeated instances of CEOs of large, complex financial institutions being fired because they didn’t understand their balance-sheet risk at their institution,” [economist Vince] Reinhart says.

How likely is it, he asks, that Fed staff members making far less money will be able to understand them any better? In other words, Paulson may want the Fed to anticipate potential meltdowns, but in an ever-more-complex securities market that’s not always so easy to do. And critics note that the Fed has had a spotty record detecting excessive risk-taking in the housing and stock markets.

But that complexity puts any regulatory agency in a bind. Regulation is necessary to avoid turmoil in the markets, but the markets are getting too advanced to regulate. Here’s Fed chair Ben Bernanke, also this morning, defending the Fed’s bailout of investment bank Bear Stearns in Senate testimony:

Our financial system is extremely complex and interconnected, and Bear Stearns participated extensively in a range of critical markets. With financial conditions fragile, the sudden failure of Bear Stearns likely would have led to a chaotic unwinding of positions in those markets and could have severely shaken confidence. The company’s failure could also have cast doubt on the financial positions of some of Bear Stearns’ thousands of counterparties and perhaps of companies with similar businesses. Given the current exceptional pressures on the global economy and financial system, the damage caused by a default by Bear Stearns could have been severe and extremely difficult to contain. Moreover, the adverse effects would not have been confined to the financial system but would have been felt broadly in the real economy through its effects on asset values and credit availability.

I would have personally preferred not to see yet more corporate incompetence bailed out with tax dollars, but the problem is, as Benanke explains, that the economy has become such an intricate network that there’s no way for me, as an individual, to opt out of a portion of the economy that’s too Rube Goldberg for my taste. The difference between the musical world that Babbitt predicted and the economy is that, if you find a certain music too complicated and cerebral, you can listen to something else. “Why should the layman be other than bored and puzzled by what he is unable to understand, music or anything else?” Babbitt asks. “It is only the translation of this boredom and puzzlement into resentment and denunciation that seems to me indefensible. After all, the public does have its own music, its ubiquitous music: music to eat by, to read by, to dance by, and to be impressed by.” In other words: listen to what you like. And he’s not saying that composers shouldn’t write for a potentially large audience, he’s saying that composers that don’t should still have some opportunity to pursue their craft, because you never know where musical taste is going. I agree with Kyle that countercritic put it particularly well: “Post-war atonality made today’s taste for oblique tonality possible.” I don’t know what Babbitt makes of that oblique tonality—probably not much—but the evolution of such taste and variety is entirely in line with his argument.

Alas, no such choice in economic life—you may have stellar credit, and may have never come near a subprime mortgage in your life, but you’re still feeling the resultant pinch. I’d never use it myself—I love the crazy modernist noise—but here’s a line to try out on an aesthetically reactionary investment banker: how bad is the economy these days? It’s worse than atonality.

I’m not much for April Fool’s Day jokes—I’d much rather pull a hoax when everybody’s not expecting one—but Pliable passes along a fine example of the genre from today’s Guardian. (Carla should be glad that Damon Albarn doesn’t have a daughter.*)

*Update (4/1): Actually, he does. (Note to self: always fact-check jokes.)

Update II (4/1): Even better—it’s a meta-joke (see comments). Well played, sir!

Today’s nominee is Komitas, the pioneering Armenian composer and musicologist. I’ve run across his music before, but I had never seen this particular photo of him until today. It’s not just the monk’s hood—it’s the look of bemused disdain, as if someone in the room has just asked an incredibly tactless question.

Komitas had an undeserved end—he died in a Paris psychiatric hospital, mentally crushed by his experience during the Armenian nightmare of 1915—but his music shows equal parts austerity and humor, and he had a particularly searching ear for rich and unusual sonorities. (Lots of good listening here.)