Archives for January 2007

My friend Bill Hogeland alerted me to the arrival of a new book that I’m shocked had slipped under my microtonality radar: How Equal Temperament Ruined Harmony (and Why You Should Care) (Norton). It’s by Ross W. Duffin, who heads the early music program at Case Western Reserve University, and who argues that we need to go back and try out the tunings that pre-20th-century composers wrote their music in. He’s not a microtonalist, and there’s no mention of Partch, Johnston, La Monte Young, et al, but it’s an elegantly readable exposition of what the temperament arguments are all about.

Duffin apparently started the book as a much-needed antidote to Stuart Isacoff’s mendacious and unaccountably popular Temperament: The Idea that Solved Music’s Greatest Riddle of several years back. Isacoff’s populist tome was a heady celebration of the status quo: “hey, 12 equal steps to the octave is the perfect tuning, aren’t we glad they came up with it, no reason to ever consider anything else!” To argue that, he had to sweep a mountain of inconvenient acoustic phenomena under the rug. (I wrote a Village Voice review saying so, and, comically, Isacoff wrote a letter to the editor excoriating me as – I quote from memory – “one of those dogmatic pedants who can only imagine doing a thing one way.” Of course, the “one way” I pedantically insisted on was allowing and exploring thousands of different tunings; the open-minded route he so generously opened up was to impose one bland, invariant scale on all mankind’s music for the rest of eternity.) Strangely for so esoteric a topic, Isacoff’s Temperament got a tsunami of undeserved publicity.

Enter, thankfully, Duffin (who alludes to Isacoff’s book, though not by title). His book is just as entertainingly written, just as acutely aimed at the average music fan, and possesses the inestimable advantage of being accurate. He starts off from, and keeps returning to, Pablo Casals’s dictum that, in string playing, sharped notes should be raised and flatted notes should be lowered: “leading notes should lead.” But, once granted that possibility, he shows meticulously how no one style of intonation is good for all musics, arguing that players should adjust their intonation to fit the historical style. His history of tuning theory is quick, concise, and as painless as possible. At one point, before giving some numbers, he adds, “Note to mathophobes: This is not math, it’s arithmetic.” (On the same impulse I call my tuning course The Arithmetic of Listening, not “The Mathematics.”) His history and theory are admirably accurate, and he gives perhaps the simplest exposition I’ve seen of the 18th-century theory of dividing the octave into 55 parts, using a minor half-step of four units (C to C#) and a major half-step of five units (C to Db). We know for a fact that’s the intonation Mozart taught, folks, and as Duffin adds:

Are modern practices better than what Mozart had in mind? I don’t think so, and I don’t think most musicians would deliberately go against the expectations of a composer like Mozart if they knew what those expectations were. And even though the sound of lower sharps and higher flats is likely to be unfamiliar to many musicians, I think Mozart’s endorsement makes it worth trying… and trying very seriously. [Ellipsis in the original]

This is above all a practical book, brief and to the point, “because every musician I know would rather be making music than reading about it any day.” Keyboard instruments he all but despairs of, and he even quotes Casals:”Do not be afraid to be out of tune with the piano. It is the piano that is out of tune.” Duffin gears his argument toward singers, wind players, and especially string players, and includes some wonderful quotations about intonational practice from old-style, Old World quartet players. I might add to Duffin’s argument that I keep my own pianos, at the office and at home, in Thomas Young’s Well Temperament of 1799, and that I find it preferable in every respect, for every kind of music, to Equal Temperament. The problem with that, as Duffin emphasizes, is that, in tuning, there’s no one-size-fits-all:

I am perfectly aware that what I am suggesting is a radical idea for musicians and that it is likely to be met with reluctance, resistance, and even scorn in some quarters. Some musicians will be convinced by my arguments but may still view unequal tuning as a Pandora’s box to be opened carefully or not at all; others will scoff at the long historical pedigree of extended meantone as irrelevant; still others will find both the harmonic and melodic intervals strangeand “out of tune.” At least that’s how it may seem to some the first time they hear it or try it. But my experience has been that an hour or so of experimenting over two or three sessions is all that’s necessary to help musicians begin, at least, to appreciate what non-ET tuning has to offer from a musical point of view…. [T]he testimonials of Bach and Mozart have to count for something. What makes it worth trying is that it makes the music sound better. And remember, I’m not saying that harmonic intonation should replace ET entirely and substitute its own tyranny; only that ET is not necessarily the best temperament for every single musical situation….

Now that’s someone who can imagine doing a thing more than one way. Bill saw a stack of Duffin’s books on display at Barnes & Noble, so maybe we’ll finally hear the bland hegemony of ET – that heavily-processed Wonder Bread of tunings – start to erode. And once that happens: microtonality, here we come!

There is an obvious issue in Morton Feldman’s compositional technique that I have never seen anyone write about – though I can’t be the only one to notice it, and perhaps some discussion of it has escaped my reading.

Through some passages of Feldman’s late works, it is remarkable – too remarkable for mere coincidence – how often his textures change at the end of a page. It doesn’t seem true at the beginnings of pieces, which will often be seamless. But at some point in a work, he will begin to settle into a rhythm. A texture or pitch set will be consistent for a page, and then the next page will have a different texture and pitch set, and the next page a different one still, and so on. It is almost as though he treated the page visually, as a whole, and every time he turned to a new page, thought, “Now for something new.”

For instance: in Crippled Symmetry there are no particular texture changes at page turns until page 5. The flute spends most of pages 5 and 6 on a motive in sevenths, Eb – Db – C – D, which ends when page 7 begins. Then:

– On page 9 the flutist plays only long, low notes on E, F, and Gb, and the percussionist plays only slow chords on the vibraphone alternating with single notes on the glockenspiel.

– On page 10, the flutist switches to angular motives on the regular flute, and the percussionist to the Eb – Db – C – D motive.

– On page 11, the flutist plays only reiterated Bbs above the treble clef, while the vibraphone is limited to a motive G – F# – B – A.

– On page 12, the flute takes up a different four-note motive, and the percussion is now limited to a reiterated Bb.

And so on, with changes of texture, pitch set, notation, and even number of staves occurring regularly with the turn of each new page. This is all the more peculiar in Crippled Symmetry, of course, because the three parts (flute, piano, percussion) aren’t synchronized. Presumably, Feldman doesn’t want such changes in texture and motive happening simultaneously, and thus waits until several pages into the piece before implementing them.

For Samuel Beckett for orchestra demonstrates an analogous relation to the page in a synchronized score. On pages 6, 8, 12, and 13, the last four or five measures are encapsulated in repeat signs. On pages 14, 15, and 16, each entire individual page is repeated. On pages 17, 18, and 19, the page is broken into two passages, each in repeat signs. Later we have a long passage in which, on each new page, repeat signs encompass every measure except the first and last. Neither here nor in Crippled Symmetry does any passage within repeat signs cross from one page to another. (Not every late piece is structured this way. I find no such changes in For Christian Wolff, and only a few, more inconclusively, in Clarinet and String Quartet.)

It is difficult to escape the impression that sometimes Feldman planned out each page individually, as an artist would. Sometimes in For Samuel Beckett the page is planned out symmetrically, making a contained and visible palindrome. Luckily, the Universal editions of these scores are copies of Feldman’s manuscript, because if you engraved them, the pagination would likely change and obscure the relationship (as may have happened in the engraved piano works, like Triadic Memories and Piano). Evidence suggests that he composed the music on these pages – or, at least, when recopying, took care to maintain the same pagination.

It’s an odd thought because, of course, a page is not a unit of musical time. We don’t hear a page go by, or, usually, know from listening when one ends. But Feldman’s music is often devoid of striking temporal landmarks, and the sense of experienced time becomes vague and immeasurable. For him, I suppose any long unit of time was as good as another. He loved exploring notation’s psychological effect on the performer, and apparently he gave free rein to its psychological effect on himself too. A page became just the right length for a section of music, and, sitting in his study, each time he turned the page, it was time for something new.

Photo by Peter Gena

My tombstone is going to read:

Here lies

KYLE GANN

Remember to raise the

seventh scale degree in

minor

so that whenever my students drop by with flowers they’ll get an extra reminder. I wanted to also include the rules for acceptable resolutions of the six-four chord, but I’m afraid the engraving costs would be a hardship on my heirs.

Why is it that some students cannot be persuaded to write a triad without adding a seventh on it? I assume these kids had a jazz teacher in high school who was very, very successful in drilling into them that every chord, every friggin’ chord, contains a seventh. And since it’s often nice in classical harmony to spice up the occasional chord with a seventh, you can’t flat out forbid them, and it’s really not possible to get across the inexpressible nuances of why sevenths sound nice in some contexts and not in others. And if you’re teaching four-part writing, the presence of a seventh in every chord wreaks havoc with voice-leading. And what is it with ending tonal compositions on six-four chords? If I never mentioned six-four chords, would their natural instincts lead them to close in root position? Is it because I so emphatically bring six-four chords to their attention, as something to avoid, that they subconsciously or passive/aggressively end up writing epic strings of parallel six-four chords in their final compositions? What is so freakin’ attractive about having the fifth in the bass on every beat? Did I miss a meeting?

And what is it with the students who are allergic to initiative, and have to have everything done for them? I call them my DLDS Syndrome students: day late and a dollar short. They never have the textbook with them. They’ve never extracted the parts for their compositions, and when they do, they’re never transposed. Their printers, of course, haven’t been operational since seventh grade. They are incapable of looking up e-mail addresses of the performers they need to engage. The posters with which they advertise their concerts remain in the back seats of their cars until hours before the event. Many of them are charming, intelligent, funny, delightful people, some of my favorite students ever. One of my best came to my house to print his orchestral parts with only an hour to spare before deadline – and, as we were finishing, spilled a glass of orange juice over all the parts we had just printed. I slowly looked at him and said, “You really wanted to make this a memorable occasion, didn’t you?”

Why these DLDS students exist isn’t what’s interesting. The curious thing is that THEY ARE ALL MALE. I have never had a female student who fit this pattern. The young women, when they have something important to do, take care of it themselves. Explain, anyone?

That’s off my chest. I’m done. Let the new year begin.