Music Book Review: Schoenberg - Why He Matters by Harvey Sachs

Schoenberg: Why He Matters
by Harvey Sachs (Music 780.92 Sch)

There have been a series of books about pop artists lately that include something about them “mattering” in the title. We have a couple of them: Why Sinead O’Connor Matters, Why Patti Smith Matters, and Why Bushwick Bill Matters come to mind. But I never expected to see one about one of the most well-known composers of the 20th Century. That’s why I was a little amused to see the title of Harvey Sachs’ latest book, Schoenberg: Why He Matters. It addresses some serious questions about the Schoenberg legacy, though, and I think it’s an important book, which you can borrow from the Polley Music Library.

 

Sachs lays out the meaning of his title, and the necessity for the book, in his prologue. Although Schoenberg is remembered for being a very influential composer, his music is rarely played today. The 12-tone system of music that he is most known for was interesting and influential in its time, but today it is almost never used, and the atonality it produces is largely out of style again in a general sense, much less by way of Schoenberg’s formal considerations. Sachs also discusses his choice to proceed with this book in as non-technical a manner as possible. This isn’t a book that will require readers to understand music theory and follow formal analysis of 12-tone pieces, perhaps a first for writing about the composer. I found this refreshing: this is a body of work that has mostly been set aside for its reputation as being technical in nature and wholly dissonant in its approach, but I must admit that I have long been an enthusiast of Schoenberg’s music, and what I find to be most notable in his best works is a tremendous feeling for melody. His posthumous reputation stands somewhat at odds with the sound of his actual music, in my opinion. Perhaps this is the only kind of approach to a book about the composer and his music that can realistically help to correct that record.

 

It’s an unusual book. For the most part, Sachs has written a traditional biography here, following Schoenberg’s life chronologically. However, when he traverses into the more “controversial” periods of Schoenberg’s music, all surrounding his gradual shift toward atonality and the 12-tone technique, he pauses for moments of layperson musical analysis and also focuses on the social and interpersonal implications of the pieces, their performances, and their early reception by audiences. The musical analysis tends to be easy to follow, and often focuses on elements of performance practice around this music that have frequently conspired to obscure Schoenberg’s musical intentions.

 

What are these intentions? Reading between the lines here, I really see them as having a very advanced and moving knack for melody, and for writing the kinds of textures beneath melodies that can really highlight their sometimes unusual, fragile natures. As Sachs proceeds through Schoenberg’s life and major works, I can’t help but to put together a bit of a secondary narrative around the music, some of which is explicit in the text, but some of which is more implicit once one starts to think about the musical evolution that happened over Schoenberg’s lifetime. His early works were still very much rooted in German Romanticism, which despite its increased reliance on chromaticism, was still a solidly tonal form of writing. The early works were often larger in scale, too, such as the tone poem “Pelleas and Melisande.” The transitional pieces like his celebrated “Pierrot Lunaire” are a kind of free atonality, and generally written for small ensembles. The lightness of orchestration often helps to clarify his emphasis on melody to my way of listening — check out his string quartets for a great example of this in action that you can compare across his long career, too. We finally arrive at the 12-tone period, from 1921 onward, where again the most representative pieces tend to be for smaller chamber ensembles or for the piano, and though there is a somewhat more strict kind of atonality — Schoenberg really strives to obscure any kind of tonal gravity taking form — the pieces are still somewhat free, too. 12-tone or “serial” composers, at least among this first generation, weren’t so strict as some of their successors like Babbit or Stockhausen.

 

Yes, Schoenberg and some of his contemporaries like Berg and Webern were looking for new kinds of sounds not so grounded in tonality, but this isn’t noise music. Harmonic function may be blurred beyond recognition, but in its wake, the gravitas of melody seems to take on an even deeper role. One problematic area, though, is that musicians simply aren’t trained to play atonally — the exercises and other music played over time all reinforce tonal performance habits. This means that in performance, musicians often find these pieces more difficult than other repertoire, and as a result many performances take place at slower tempos than Schoenberg intended. Sachs makes reference to this phenomenon several times throughout the book, and each time there is a detrimental effect on the feeling of the piece, the grace of the melodies. For example, in reference to Schoenberg’s Minuet from the ”Serenade,” Sachs notes that performances all take place around 20 bpm slower than specified in the music, “And this eliminated not only the ‘singing’ quality that the composer specifically requested but also the whole notion of the minuet as a dance: at too slow a tempo, the music plods, beat by beat.” Much of the misunderstanding of this music, then, may be related to performances that simply don’t match the musical intention. Where Schoenberg aimed for light, airy textures, we often hear these plodding performances.

 

Sachs does a great job of humanizing the composer as well. His long-term frenemy relationship with Stravinsky, for example, makes occasional appearances in the book, as well as Schoenberg’s occasionally prickly opinions about other composers as well. His complicated relationship with his Jewish background and Christian faith are explored, as well as his struggles with anti-Semitism and difficult audiences in his native Vienna. His economic difficulties later in life are discussed. He lived a deeply fascinating life, and knowing more about it will hopefully compel some readers to give his music another listen, too.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Schoenberg and his World by Walter Frisch or Arnold Schoenberg by Bojan Bujić.)

 

( Wikipedia page about Arnold Schoenberg ) | ( official Harvey Sachs web site )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

Music Book Review: Luc Ferrari: Complete Works, edited by Brunhild Ferrari

Luc Ferrari: Complete Works

edited by Brunhild Ferrari (Music 786.75 Ferrari)

 

Luc Ferrari was a modern-era composer whose work has continued to receive more attention in recent years since his death in 2005. At that time, he had released around 23 albums between the years of 1968 and 2004, but more than 50 records of his music have come out posthumously as interest in his work continues to grow. The body of work that he left us is especially interesting in that he freely moved between several modes of contemporary classical music, from notated music for traditional instruments to musique concrete tape music, from electronics to recordings of natural environments, always finding his own voice in unique contexts. There is a recent book about his work called Luc Ferrari: Complete Works that we have here at the Polley Music Library, and it’s a great way to find out about the many approaches of this fascinating composer.

 

Complete Works was edited by Brunhild Ferrari, Luc’s spouse, who is both a composer herself and a steady advocate for his work. She’s been the force behind continuing to find avenues for the release of the many recordings in his archives, and as editor of this book, she’s combined autobiographical commentaries by Luc about all of his major works with interviews sprinkled throughout his career. Fantastic archival photos and ephemera such as pages of scores, film stills, and reproductions of Luc’s visual art are featured throughout as well.

 

After brief introductions by Thurston Moore (whose Ecstatic Peace Library published this book), musician and producer Jim O’Rourke, and Brunhild, the main body of the book starts with “Autobiography No 1” by Luc, a 1-page summary of his own life and work that serves as a kind of prelude to the basic structure of the book, which is simply an exhaustive list of his own works, usually described with a paragraph or two of his own thoughts about them. At the earliest point of the book, there are several early poems written between 1951 and ’58. These overlap and perhaps inform the earliest period of his musical compositions, which start in 1952 with three pieces for piano. He notes that he wrote many pieces before 1952, but these piano works mark the beginning of him feeling as through his own identity was properly represented in his work.

 

Some traditionally notated chamber works follow, including the “Visage” series of four pieces where Ferrari notes again that this “is the first series at the beginning of my life as a composer wherein I honestly expressed myself.” These early works, though, still reflect something of 20th century musical traditions — he notes elements of realism and serialism present in the series. By 1958, his earliest efforts with tape-based musique concrete begin to appear, and immediately overtake his previous focus on notated works. The “Visage” series even continues into this period with Visage 5, composed in 1958-9. This piece has a score, but it’s a graphic notation device, measuring various ranges of movement and timespans to be realized on tape.

 

Many composers who switched to working with tape music or electronics rarely went back to traditional notation, but Complete Works shows that Ferrari continued to draw from traditional instruments and notational approaches as he worked with modern ideas. Certainly traditional notation becomes more scarce further into his body of work, but one gets the sense that Ferrari evaluated musical ideas that came to him and allowed them to develop in whatever way seemed most faithful to the idea, rather than force them all into a singular approach. And we see him picking up new ideas along the way. “Tautologos I” from 1961, for example, is an early foray into electronic music, using frequency generators and picking up their output with suspended microphones that are swinging (this idea reminds me of Steve Reich’s “Pendulum Music” later in 1968). In 1962, we finding him working with the idea of controlled improvisation using notated music in the “Spontane” series of pieces, giving a combination of written material and improvised moments that small ensembles of performers can interpret as they wish.

 

In 1963, Ferrari composed “Heterozygote” for magnetic tape, which marked a new direction in his work. Here, he used environmental sounds found taking a long walk, and then “compressed” them into a 27 minute work. He called this approach “anecdotal music,” “introducing realist sounds as concrete images, added to traditional abstract sounds and structures.” What is fascinating about this concept is his notion of expecting the audience to participate in the creation of the “anecdote” part of the equation: “The audience becomes active because they are implicitly asked to imagine their own anecdote. The use of realistic elements allowed me to tell a story and enables the listener to invent their own meaning.” From this point forward in his music, one finds a certain kind of cinematic perspective in his music, as though he is creating something akin to “movies for the ears.” This kind of approach has become much more common in electroacoustic music circles over the decades, and serves as an interesting contrast to the more abstracted listening pursuits of other electroacoustic composers and audiences. And frankly it just makes sense: our minds are always trying to make maps and models of what we perceive, and it’s only natural that we will look for narrative fragments even in the most abstract environments. In this sense, Ferrari’s approach simply recognizes the obvious and uses it to compositional advantage rather than rejecting the idea outright.

 

A small section of letters between Ferrari and Pierre Schaeffer is included in the book. As Schaeffer was the leader of the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM) in Paris, these reveal Ferrari’s perceptions of his role among his musique concrete composing peers. The letters range from 1960 to 1968, the time period when Ferrari was affiliated with the GRM, and find him always polite, but often unhappy with the direction of the group. By the time of the penultimate letter in 1967, he was firm in a new direction that diverged from the “absolute music” or abstracted focus of the GRM to his “anecdotal music” concept that started with the Heterozygote piece. Considering that membership in the GRM helped to guarantee things like commissions and performances for member composers, his commitment to focus on his own musical needs was a brave career move.

 

And this only takes us up to about 1965 in a career that extended another 40 years, scarcely a quarter of the way into a book that documents the rich and varied works of a composer whose work tended toward inclusivity of new ideas and processes. Through the course of the book, we find Ferrari’s work involving aspects of improvisation, theater, field recording, film-making, photography, and visual art. Broadly speaking, Ferrari continued to compose for traditional instruments, incorporated musique concrete techniques (which he often referred to as segments of “memorized sound”), used field recordings to help establish settings for pieces, and often incorporated theatrical gestures into pieces, both composed and through guided improvisation. It’s hard to define the “style” of Luc Ferrari simply because he incorporated elements of nearly every contemporary music approach when he found them appropriate for his ideas, though the implied narrative elements of his “anecdotal music” carry through many decades of his work. The strongest impression this book leaves with me is that of pure adventure, forever adding new skills, new sounds, and new technology to his repertoire, while retaining his own voice. And his own voice celebrates the human condition at its best and worst. As he reflected in a 2004 interview toward the end of the book, joy and a sense of fear or revulsion at things like war and greed were the two polarities that dominated his thinking, and both are deeply considered in his music.

 

In all, this is an incredible document of an inspiring composer that I’d recommend to anyone interested in modern classical music, and creative music more broadly. The cinematic or literary feel of many Ferrari pieces comes even more alive when placed into this broad context.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try In Search of a Concrete Music by Pierre Schaeffer, Sound Unseen: Acousmatic Sound in Theory and Practice by Brain Kane or Living Electronic Music by Simon Emmerson.)

 

( Wikipedia entry on Luc Ferrari ) | ( biography on the official Luc Ferrari web site )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!

Music Book Review: Variations on the Theme Galina Ustvolskaya: The Last Composer of the Passing Era by Semyon Bokman

Variations on the Theme Galina Ustvolskaya: The Last Composer of the Passing Era
by Semyon Bokman (Music 780.92 Ustvolskaya)

 

You never know what you’ll learn in books at the Polley Music Library, even for me. In this case, as I was preparing a show on the book The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth by Michael Spitzer a few months ago, I came upon this passage about the Russian composer Galina Ustvolskaya: “There is a creeping realization that one of the outstanding composers of our time was a forgotten old lady living in poverty in a freezing St. Petersburg flat. Shostakovich thought that his pupil Galina Ustvolskaya (1919-2006) was a better composer than him, and I would have to agree. Ustvolskaya didn’t write much, but what she did has the weight and killer intensity of a black sun.”

 

I didn’t know much about Ustvolskaya, but that paragraph sent me looking for her music, which is indeed incredible and maybe the most idiosyncratic among 20th century composers I can think of. I’ve been very taken by her music as well, and in the last few months I think I’ve heard just about every piece she’s written. Some of the music is hard to find, but YouTube has some excellent performances of her work, as well as “Scream Into Space,” a short documentary about her work that was finished in 2005, just a year before her death. Little about her work has been translated into English yet, but a former student of hers, Semyon Bokman, has published Variations on the Theme Galina Ustvolskaya: The Last Composer of the Passing Era, which you can borrow from the Polley Music Library.

 

At the outset, a little biographical information is useful, as the book takes an unusual angle into Ustvolskaya’s work and life. Born in Petrograd (later Leningrad), Russia in 1919, she studied at Leningrad Conservatory in the late 1930s and early 40s, and went on to teach composition there from 1947 to 1977. Part of her studies were spent with Dmitry Shostakovich, a fact that is almost always mentioned in conjunction with her work, but late in life she frequently mentioned that she didn’t like his music (or him as a person). In the post WWII Soviet Union, she wrote the kind of music that was often frowned upon by the authorities. Although her work wasn’t officially banned, it was rarely performed, so her life as a composer mostly consisted of what is sometimes called “composing for the drawer,” or writing the material that you’re compelled to create but filing it away for more receptive times.

 

Like many creatives under Soviet rule, it’s not hard to imagine that her life was hard, living at the edge of poverty and getting little attention for her life’s work until she was in advanced old age. Because of these conditions, we don’t have a deep understanding of her in the way we’d expect to know more about the inner lives of many contemporary composers. We do know that she was very particular about the performances of her works, and once she finally started receiving attention (mostly from other parts of Europe), she was fairly cantankerous in interviews and in her feelings about most recordings of her music. And as you might guess from that Michael Spitzer quote about her from the beginning of our discussion, her music is quite dark, abstract and somewhat impenetrable, though incredibly memorable and moving as well. Ustvolskaya’s husband has maintained a website about her and her works since her death, which includes many of her thoughts about statements made by others about her music and her background, and he has added his own thoughts about books and recordings published since her death. And it must be noted that he has unpleasant things to say about the book we’re discussing today, which largely focus on the structure of the book, which centers its author in a way that he feels is unfair to the legacy of Ustvolskaya. In looking at the Ustvolskaya website, one might get the impression of a grumpy composer, though trying to correct disinformation about yourself would probably get frustrating!

 

One gets a different impression of Ustvolskaya from Bokman’s book, however. While it’s true that it’s formatted as recollections of the author as a student interacting with her as instructor, he remembers her has having a sense of humor and fun, and many of his impressions run counter to any folklore of her as a cantankerous person. Occasionally he even describes her as cheerful. However, he does observe that she maintains a certain distance from students, thinking of her teaching work as essentially just a job to support her as a composer, and not thinking of students as potential peers. As he observes in chapter 5, “This belief in herself and her work, and in this gigantic ‘I AM,’ helped her withstand her internal struggles and life’s temptations.” And some of this is reflected in the few interviews conducted with her, as well as in her music. She didn’t like to talk about her influences, for example, and asserted that her music existed mostly within its own boundaries. This would be a bold claim for many composers, but her music really does feel like it exists in a self-contained world. She considered her work symphonic in nature; even though most of it was written for small chamber ensembles, she rejected the notion of “chamber music” for not containing the dynamic and conceptual resources required by her music. And although it can be primitive music on some levels, plodding forward through quarter-note motion across most of her work, there is lots of complexity to discover within.

 

Considering that her brief time spent studying under Shostakovich is usually the first fact brought up about Ustvolskaya, Bokman approaches the subject from two angles: first, he reflects on how she would respond to students when they brought up the subject of Shostakovich. On this subject, he notes that she was dismissive of the question, usually responding with some variation of “this is not interesting.” But he follows this with a question of his own: did he feel there was an influence on Ustvolskaya’s music or work from Shostakovich? Musically, her unique approach stands alone, but perhaps she got some intellectual rigor from him. Bokman recounts a story from Ustvolskaya about doing an in-depth study of all of Beethoven’s major works, which she didn’t want to do, but Shostakovich insisted. He notes, however, that perhaps her knack for orchestration bears some influence from her famous teacher. Although her music avoids using full-size orchestras, she and Shostakovich both have a powerful sense of choosing the right instruments to play the right parts, all the more important for Ustvolskaya’s small-but-massive arrangements.

 

It’s difficult for Westerners to fully conceive how composers, writers and other artists had to navigate the political challenges of life under Soviet rule. Bokman’s observations about Ustvolskaya’s career choices seem a little perplexing to me at first, but he too lived in that environment and had a better inside understanding. He observes, “Ustvolskaya managed to save herself as an artist by taking little interest in the surrounding world; she did not let it in.” Had she capitulated to the aesthetic requests of Soviet officials, perhaps she would have become much more well-known, but that would have come with the cost of having to forever change her musical style, too. Considering the external pressures on artists under totalitarian rule, the somewhat mysterious image of Ustvolskaya as a kind of musical hermit becomes more complex—perhaps she was inclined to be a far more socially gregarious person, but her commitment to her work necessitated that she keep her head down and those fascinating works mostly put away. Less attention equaled more safety.

 

Bokman addresses another unusual quote from Ustvolskaya that is frequently mentioned in her biographies: “All who really love my music should refrain from theoretical analysis of it.” This notion is basically the opposite of what everyone does in the classical music world, although some pop musicians have said similar things about their music. There is a mystical, otherworldly quality to her music, and perhaps this idea reflects a position that knowing more about the constituent parts of a deeply moving piece of music doesn’t really explain the ineffable qualities of its power. Of course, Bokman then goes on to interpret broadly what this body of music means to him: “a proclamation of renewal.” His explanation for arriving there, for reconciling the person he knew as relatively warm and friendly with her unforgiving, stark music, is interesting to me, especially because my own response to this music, which is still very fresh in my mind, is almost the opposite! I hear it as very powerful, indeed, but more like calling out to the divine for intercession, while knowing full well that it isn’t on its way. Perhaps music that effortlessly elicits such acute but contradictory responses isn’t likely to be better understood through music analysis, indeed.

 

Overall, I found Variations on the Theme Galina Ustvolskaya to be a good read, and I didn’t feel like the author overly centered himself in the story — indeed, it’s necessary for him to be present, since most of the book is simply his reporting reminiscences of his time around the composer. Whether his recollections are entirely accurate is hard to say, though I must admit that I find his portrait of the artist to be a kind and warm one compared to what one can put together from her own quotes and her widower’s representation of her thoughts. But given the circumstances of life under Soviet rule, this book is probably the closest we’re going to get to a personal view of Ustvolskaya.

 

(If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Sofia Gubaidulina: A Biography by Michael Kurtz or Shostakovich: A Coded Life in Music by Brian Morton.)

 

( Wikipedia entry for Galina Ustvolskaya ) | ( official Semyon Bokman Twitter feed )

 

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

 

Have you read or listened to this one? What did you think? Did you find this review helpful?

New reviews appear every month on the Staff Recommendations page of the BookGuide website. You can visit that page to see them all, or watch them appear here in the BookGuide Blog individually over the course of the entire month. Click the tag for the reviewer's name to see more of this reviewer’s recommendations!

Check out this, and all the other great music resources, at the Polley Music Library, located on the 2nd floor of the Bennett Martin Public Library at 14th & "N" St. in downtown Lincoln. You'll find biographies of musicians, books about music history, instructional books, sheet music, CDs, music-related magazines, and much more. Also check out Polley Music Library Picks, the Polley Music Library's e-mail newsletter, and follow them on Facebook!