April 25, 2006 at 2:21 am · Filed under Blog: Spring 06, Classical Music, Composers, Musicology
After 30 years of study, Martin Jarvis, a professor at Charles Darwin University in Darwin, Australia, has concluded that some of J. S. Bach’s most famous works, including his Six Cello Suites, were not written by Bach, but by his second wife Anna Magdalena Bach. He points to the fact that the only complete manuscript of the Six Suites was a manuscript in Anna Magdalena’s hand as well as “the uniquely symmetrical nature of the work” as factors—musical and otherwise—supporting his claim. At least musicologists will have something new to discuss amongst themselves.
May 31, 2005 at 11:21 am · Filed under Blog: Spring 05, Music, Musicology, Philosophy
After reading Alex’s latest article in The New Yorker I emailed him this quote from Jacques Attali’s Noise, wondering why a preeminent culture vulture would neglect such a reference:
The phonograph, then, is part of a radically new social and cultural space demolishing the earlier economic constructions of representation. With the introduction of the record, the classical space of discourse collapses. Against the wishes of Edison himself, the drugstore jukebox wins out over the singers of the caf’ conç, the record industry over the publishing industry. Even radio, which could have forestalled this process by providing representation with a new market, gradually became, as we will see, an auxiliary of the record industry. After the discourse of representation was devalued, radio provided a showcase or the record industry, and the record industry gave the radio the material it needed to fill the airwaves.
His reply: “Sousa said it first, and in better English!” He’s right, you know. Although Attali, Adorno, and Benjamin are great thinkers, their verbiage tends to get in the way and “hijack the conversation,” as Alex says.
Less is more. A subordinate conglomeration is without exception exceedingly more profitable than an innumerable agglomeration. See? Rich Crawford, the venerable American musicologist, preached this all year long to a small group of us who took his two introductory PhD musicology courses a few years ago. It’s a good rule to follow.
March 24, 2005 at 11:01 pm · Filed under Blog: Spring 05, Experimental, Musicology, New Music, Saxophone
An area of instrumental technique and history that interests me a great deal is extended techniques and Matt Burtner has a pretty good article on the topic over at NewMusicBox.
Extended techniques, as the name implies, requires the performer to play an instrument in a manner outside of what would be considered a traditionally established norm. These techniques include multiphonics, circular breathing, quarter-tones, slap-tonguing, key clicks, muting, playing with the mouthpiece alone, tapping on the instrument’s body, all manners of bowing, and playing on the inside of the piano, to name just a few. Extended techniques as we know them today first appeared in concert music in the early twentieth century–Henry Cowell’s Tides of Manaunaun (1915), Mosolov’s Iron Foundry (1928), Varese’s Ionisation(1929-31)–but experienced a true renaissance in the 1960s.
Because of the growing world of electronic music, composers were now confronted with the task of finding a way to bridge the gap between the seemingly disparate electronic and acoustic sound worlds. Extended techniques provided that link. While the exploration of extended techniques in new music was widespread, many people point to the publication of the Italian theorist/composer Bruno Bartolozzi’s New Sounds for Woodwind in the late 1960s as a codification of these efforts. For Burtner, composers’ exploration of extended techniques in the twentieth century built a foundation and prepared instrumental performance to face new musical challenges in the twenty-first century.
Among the many good points that Mr. Burtner makes in his article is that extended techniques provide a way for the performer to personalize their instrument and draw out its unique qualities, and in the process develop a very personal approach and sonic vocabulary. He also observes, quite correctly, that these techniques more or less ran their course in concert music in the 1960s and 1970s, with the most advances and interesting work with them being done in the 1990s not by composers, but free improvisers and electronic musicians. And finally, he makes an extremely important claim: extended techniques are no longer an “other” in instrumental technique, but rather are an integral part of each instrument’s identity today.
Although most of his article is stellar, I was a bit disappointed with his take on virtuosity. Burtner sees virtuosity as a barrier to the acceptance of extended techniques as a standard component of conservatory instrumental or vocal training. By virtuosity I’m assuming he means the traditional virtuosic model. However, in the late 1960s, in the wake of the explosion of new instrumental and vocal techniques, Eric Salzman coined the term “new virtuosity,” which is certainly alive and well today. I see evidence of this in new music being written for all instruments. And if extended techniques really are no longer an “other,” what’s getting in the way of them being taught? Certainly not traditional virtuoisty. I think it’s an issue of receptivity. The way I see it, some students are choosing a well-worn path and others are choosing to take the road less traveled.
Two errors in Mr. Burtner’s article: Bartolozzi’s New Sounds for Woodwind was originally published in 1967, not 1982; and Berio’s Sequenza VIIb is for soprano saxophone, not alto, something that Burtner, a saxophonist, should be embarrassed to have gotten wrong.
