091031a

Saturday, October 31, 2009, Halloween

Of course the name of the holiday, that word itself derived from "Holy Day", is "All Hallow's Eve", tomorrow being "All Saint's Day" or "All Hallow's Day". Tomorrow is a Holy Day of Obligation in the Catholic Church calendar, and today has traditionally been a day to memorialize the dead as in "Noces do la Morte" in Mexico and other Latin Countries.

We do now broaden the idea of holiday to mean any traditional hiatus from work where institutions and business shut down and people travel for recreation or to see family. Some of our observances have always been secular, but most are based on times that were either religious obligations of days with religious overtones, I am thinking of Thanksgiving in this latter.

Musical Skulls

I had taken the tradition of listening to Mozart's Requiem on either today or tomorrow as I understand it is often done in Austria. I don't know if the book I was engrossed in yesterday at Kepler's Books was part of the traditions of this day or not, but it was on the macabre disposition of the remains of great composers, Beethoven, Schubert, Haydn, principally becase of the discredited Phrenology of their skulls. I don't recall the title, although the cover art resembles a plate inside that shows the skull of Haydn, and recounts the mcabre act of severing the rotting head from the bady and cleaning it of all its putrid flesh.

There is a germ of truth to the idea that the typography of the inside of the skull has some relationship to the treasure that lived within. Beethoven's post mortem is well-enough documented, given the crude methods of 1827. We know that he willed his remains to science and that a description of the condition of his remains was made, noting that he had unusual brain anatomy, more numerous and deeper convolutions (sulcae), large brain mass and a thick skull. Of course the brain was not preserved, and the skull has deteriorated over time in part due to a really poor job in opening the cranium.

Beethoven's Death

A photograph of Beethoven's skull from 1868 exists, but by that time there were a number of mysteries that have hardly been solved. At the same time as this exhumation, remains of Franz Schubert were also recovered. His hair, which was quite thick, was recovered and given to his brother Ferdenand. Both sets of remains were reinterred a few feet from one another.

The information we have is not sufficient to diagnose the cause of Beethoven's death, and especially the cause of Beethoven's deafness. This is compounded by the fact that the aural anatomy has been missing from the start and not found.

The account of Beethoven's death is the same one contained in Theyer's famous biography. It recounts that his last words were a reference to "And the Trumpet Shall Sound" from Hendal's Messiah which is significant since one of the last treasures Beethoven acquired was a recently publicshed Handel Complete Works, for it is known how much Beethoven admired Handel. Also, noted was that many people took locks of Beethoven's hair. There is a research center for Beethoven at San Jose State University, that I have yet to visit, and I remember seeing a locket with one of thses locks of hair supposed to be from Beethoven. I am not expressing disbelief, only that I am assuming that a chain of custody does exist. This lock was chemically analyzed recently and found to contain high ammounts of heavy metals, Hg and Pb, and supports the speculation that Beethoven was treating Syphilis, but that is not known for certian.

I need to reverify the observer who gave us the account of Beethoven's death and autopsy, for he seems to have entered the Master's life at a point where he was still lucid, if ailing. The account is that when he first came to call, Beethoven says he is working on a string quartet, but our visitor realizing that Beethoven was deaf played the piano while waiting. It is interesting to speculate which Quartet Beethoven was working on. It might have been the Rondo for Op 130, that replaces the Grosse Guge (op 133) or Op. 135 or even the Quartet Fugue Op 137. If only Beethoven had lived to my age now. We might have gotten a whole host of fugues for string quartet, letalone piano fugues, let alone a Tenth Symphony. He did surpass Mahler in age, after all.

A couple of years ago I had also read an account of the exhumation of J.S. Bach from the graveyard of the Thomaskirke in Leipzig, and the rebarial of the nearly complete skeleton in the Nave of the church. I don't recall any account of the skull, only that Bach was a giant of his time standing at over six feet.

Musical Brains

There has been much research done of late on the neurological basis for music, and indeed why music seems to be so important to most humans, and much important than that to some people, myself in that latter group. The talk about skulls and brain anatomy of great musicians has a legacy in study of the brains of more people including geniuses of all types and people of known inclinations. The book Musicophilia by Oliver Sacs, a neurologist gives an account of musical abilities affected by trauma. It is a discussion of brain plasticity, and how trauma has both given and taken away enhancements in musical ability.

As I recall the Right Temperal lobe is especially significant, but the language centers, especially the parts that do syntax are also important. Pathology involving under use of the visual cortex may be involved as blind people often have strong native musical abilities. For myself some of these indications are quite interesting as I am left-handed, hence probably right hemisphere dominant. I have had trauma to the left motor cortex causing right-side weakness and spacisity, and suffer from low vision having lost my left eye to blindness and having about a third normal acuity in my right eye. The visual nerves from each eye innervate both sides of the visual cortex, but the traffic om my visual cortex may be less, have less bandwidth than normal. As my use of music is propelled by having a good memory for what I hear, including pitch recall if I don't try too hard, there is a good bet that I have some of the anomalies associated with musical skills developed under brain plasticity after trauma, with a strong genetic componant as I know that both of my parents were sensative to music. Indeed most people are to different degrees, and the universal meaning of music cannot be overlooked.

The (Painful) Art of Fugue

A particular ancedote stands out. In 1999 I was working in a national system support call center. There was one engineer there who was alittle slow on the uptake. He could sove problems with a dogged determination, but he was a plodding kind of guy who gave the prehaps undeserved impresion of not being very bright. He may have had a learning or processing defecit, as I discovered from one striking incident. At the time, to while away the slow time we could surf the web to suit ourselves within reason. There was no Internet Police with the possible expection of being indescreet with porn sites as women did work there as well. I had been looking for MIDI files of serious pieces I loved and found a set of Bach's "Art of Fugue". I played one of these over the little speaker in my desktop and the slow guy was around. He recoiled and winced and said something about it being painful to listen to, I think it was Contrapunctus 1, a simple fugue in four parts, not even one of the more complicated pieces. I think now, that he was overwelmed, and couldn't actually process the counterpoint in anything like real time. Now, many more people can quite comfortably process complicated music without pain, even if thay are not conscious of what is going on. Lots of familiar popular music requires sophistocated harmonic and somethimes counterpuntal preception.

Music and Me

Equally fascinating is how irrestible my inclination is, and what it has done for me. In some basic way it has saved my life. as astonishing as that my seem; people regard music as entertainment. To the pragmatic kind of people America is full of, I am sick of them, too, something that doesn't result in a salable trade is worthless, and I have not been able to develop my skills into performance for probably the same reasons as I have them, poor vision and poor coordination. But the advice given to people who live with a loss is to do something that is a peak experience, which shows one's own divine spark, every day. I do that through music, for being able to understand and remember the sound and the action of thousands of wonderful pieces and to do it effortslessly and in my dreams. I do not doubt my accomplishment even though it is largely locked away, for when I talk about music to musicians and others who know music, they are very impressed. Most other people cannot appreciate this; it is either something they have little awareness of or it is a threat to them.

Looking Bach

This is a retrospective on events in my life that go back to the aftermath of 9-11 and cover 2002 to the present. Now at that time I knew plenty of J. S. Bach, but there were gaps and there were plenty of unexplored details, in fact it can be said that the hallmark of Bach, like God, is in the details.

My latest adventure with Bach begins with misadventure from years before. Around 1997 some interloper in my life stole an 18-LP budget set of all of Bach's Organ Music from the garage and sold it probably for booze. He was living under a bridge in San Francisco when last I heard. In retrospect this set was probably not of good quality, although many of the recordings were on period instruments, the recording quality left much to be desired. Even though I had a complete set of the sheet music for this in 8 pocket scores from the Bach Geselleschaft Edition, I did not really pursue the great body of work until after 9-11, which had the effect on me of withdrawing to find ground. I did find ground alright in Bach's Cantus Firmus in the organ chorales mainly, but later the preludes and fugues of the organ music.

I had begun collecting MIDI files from the Internet of Bach's music some years before, and in the time when everybody was afraid in 2001 and 2002 I looked to them for solace and found to my joy their greatness,  especially in the Orgelbuchlein and Liepzig sets. Beginning there and with a few of the Preludes and fugues, such as the Tocatta and Fugue in F BWV 540 and the "Gigue" Fugue BWV 577, I really began to concentrate on these in early 2002.

Later in 2003-4 I began collecting MP3's and because of a move purged much of my LP collection having replaced it with digital recordings, and began to build up a collection of all of Bach's Organ music, among lots of other works by Bach and others.

I had long known that to really get Bach one has to read his music as part music, usually in three or four voices,  and more. Sometimes Bach tells us how many voices. This is not to be ignored even when the music is clearly idiomatic to a keyboard, as is the Organ music and collections like the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Not being a keyboardist, or at least a very weak keyboardist, I had been able to approach this music, all of it, as part-music, learning each line as if SATB. The four-part model works very well for most of it, and having a decent memory means that you can hear how each part you read individually fits in with all the others.

This shouldn't be surprising if you remember the Swingle Singers, a French Jazz vocal group of the 1960s, who became famous for their sparingly modified vocal renderings of Bach sung as part music. In fact their version of "Num Kome Der Heiden Heiland" BWV 659 is still one of my favorite performances of that work even though I now know all the  of the Leipzig chorals in their original form.

I delight in singing each part as well as I can, and often can hear it better that way as the lines can be lost or obscured on a given organ or choice of registeration.

In 2008, I was surprised to find that this paradigm even applies to that clearly keyboard work the Well Tempered Clavier. Most keyboardists would see that music as sufficiently challenging to master under their fingers, but it was the Glen Gould performances of 1955 which I had acquired on CDs a  couple of years earlier that taught me that they could be approached in the same way as other Bach as part music and them sung each line as a part. This is even true of pieces like the D-Flat Major Prelude of Book II, which is clearly a keyboard arpeggio, in its first section, and clearly true of most of the fugues. At first I was put off by Gould's use of the modern piano instead of the Harpisichord, which is most often chosen as the instrument to perform these with, but it is clear that the modern instrument makes it easier, at least with the uniqueness of Gould's technique and manner, to reveal an analysis of each voice in the performnce. One of the best examples in the C-Sharp Minor Fugue form Book I. Gould was able to play so that he could bring forward whichever voice had control of the interest, now alto, now tenor, maybe the bass, then the saprano, according to an analytic scheme for the piece.

Now, I knew and loved many of the pieces from the WTC long before this, It was "Switched On Bach" of Walter (Wendy) Carlos from the 1970's that turned me on the the E-Flat Major Prelude and Fugue from Book I with its double fugue in the "prelude". You get two wonderful  fugues in one, in that work. But it was Giould's insights that allowed me to get nearly all the rest in 2008.

Of Course, this pursuit is never really finished. My memory isn't flawless or complete. A given performance will reveal new detail even though I have possessed the sheet-music for years. There is so much detail in the interplay of parts that a lifetime isn't enough to exhaust the possibilities.

Mozart Violin Sonata in D, K 306 performed by Isaac Stern

I know of this performance from a collection of Stern's output and includes a wonderful performance of Brahms String Quintet in G Op. 111 ( mislabeled as a Quartet). The Mozart is wonderfully performed, but I want to call you attention to the first movement, a sonata form, for its extensive modulation in the development section, it is quite extensive even for Mozart, more like what Beethoven would do, and is not just a Circle of Fifths modulation as in the A-minor Piano Sonata K. 310 whose first movement is perhaps the most concisely perfect Sonata form movement I have ever heard, but like the fugue, no one example no matter how well crafted can be the last word, as the above-mentioned development shows. Mozart does not recapitulate in the expected way at the end of this modulation even though it starts on V and arrives back at I as we would expect, but the next thing we hear is the transitional material of the exposition, transposed as we would expect for for the false transition, followed by the expected rhyme of the second key, followed by the opening theme only in the coda. That theme is fanfare-like and so it easily adapted for the closing cadence where to fits perfectly with the original closing material of the exposition, of course rhymed in the tonic. So the order of the material is reversed in the recapitulation and the reason is the great beauty of the transition and the way the sections of the movement begin and end the same way. This is a good example of how the material dictates a change to the form and the common practice to upset these expectations so as to keep the listeners from nodding off.

Something else to point out about this performance is that all the repeats in Mozart's music are played out. This can be an eye-opening experience if there are double endings in the score and if the repeats are not played, you rarely hear the return back to the beginning of of the movement. This is the case for Beethoven's "Eroica" for example. But in this Mozart there are no double endings, still, there is good reason to play the repeats and it is interesting to think why they were written in the first place and why they often are not played in recordings. First, the repeats in Mozart are for the entire exposition and development plus recapitulation in sonata forms. This is true for symphony as well as chamber works. The reason for these is that listeners did not have benefit of recordings and so needed the repeats to "get it", to hear the exposition twice to listen to the premise of the movement, as it were, and to hear twice the puzzle of how the development and recap are going to wrench the rhyming of the ideas of the premise. There is also the need to emphasize the distance, the point furthest removed in the development whether convayed by a distant harmonic excursion or complex counterpoint, the case more often in Beethoven's developments. Also, keep in mind that listeners differ so much in their tonal memory that what they can't remember of pitch must be marked by stylistic markers. The most musical of listeners will readily hear the harmony and the points of arrival in the harmonic form, but the textural devices will help everybody know where they are in the form. Mozart's audiences would have been well versed in these devices and would be in on the joke.

It is the time constraints on recording media up to the invention of the audio CD that most often preculded playing repeats in recorded performances. Now that performers more often play repeats we can appreciate what the experience of the composer's audience must have been and why the repeats were needed. I had written about this earlier in my other blog describing a performance of Beethoven's Quartet in E-minor Op. 59 #2.

One last comment about Mozart's Violin Sonatas, noting that Albert Einstein played the violin part with his brother Alfred who was a noted Mozart researcher, would it be that there are recordings? There might be some disagreement about how many of these works are attributed
to W. A. Mozart. Is it 35 or closer to 15? I have a three volume set of Lea Pocket Scores that cite the larger number, yet many collections only include more like the lower number. Even the Kochel index may not help if some works attributed to Mozart have been shown to be spurious.

I can't help myself

After seeing several recent books on brain plasticity, brain trauma, and musical abilities, I can understand how one can become so sensitive to music, to have abilities that are beyond what is common in other people. I seem to have a very good memory insofar as I seem to be able to remember entire large works of music and have been able to do this all my life.

It is not all that uncommon that people recall music, indeed, music seems to be tied to memory for most people to some extant. My parents seemed musical. Both liked music and it was played all the time, but neither studied music in any formal way. I seemed to have developed a preoccupation with music at quite an early age, and after having read Oliver Sach's book "Musicophilia" in which he emphasized those cases he knew as a neuroscientist where trauma had caused people with no developed acuity towards music to become suddenly obsessed with it, I have been wondering how my history has to do with the inclination. I seem to fit into the group where visual handicap leaves a large part of the temporal and visual cortex underused. I lost vision in my left eye at an early age and my acuity in the right one is only about a third normal. I am far from legally blind and any first year anatomy student knows that tracts from each eye lead to both lobes of the visual cortex. Still my musical acuity seems to be developed as it often is in blind people and I may have unused processor bandwidth, to barrow the metaphor from computers, that gets used in recalling music.

I have heard of musicians who have a better memory than I do, and I realize that I have been cheating somewhat in looking at scores and remembering the music that way. This inclines one to think more musicalogically, but often the impetus to analysis is driven by its memonic value. When I first started using pocket scores to help my memory as a high school student, I didn't have as good tonal memory as I do now. I couldn't sight sing parts, as I do now, and I didn't know much theory or even how to read transposed parts and odd clefs, like C-clef. I still struggle to read voice parts in the old clefs, as in the Bach Geselschaft edition, but what I was getting around to say is that performers have to read from the individual part. They have to count the rests and do not get the benefit of seeing all the other parts of the score. It takes great discipline to count and play a part correctly, all the more for chamber performers where there is no conductor. Still, someone has to have an overview, to see the forest for the trees. Of course a century or more ago, performance was the main access people had to music. You either learned to make music yourself or you did without. Now, recorded sound makes it possible for people like me to do everything in reverse, to learn about music from the top down, from a rich sample of music played on the radio years ago, and to dive into the details.

And it goes without saying that there are strong emotional ties in this passion. The people who know about modality in the way people think will say that there are most people who key on spoken or written word, hence the large number of people who find pleasure in reading; who find emotional depth in books and ideas. For me those hooks have always been musical and with particular pieces that carry connotation and history for me. Aesthetics seems to be based on subconscious archetypes of cycle that leads to forms. Memory is an essential part of the ability to perceive aesthetically and so you can't spoon-feed music appreciation by talking about form and style to people who have no memory for music. And you can't entice them with academic discussions of sonata-rondo form unless they have an emotional attachment to music that uses that form.

In some sense to write about music is always like preaching to the faithful; it doesn't really mean anything unless you have some essential abilities and experience. I might talk about particular pieces I know, even spur you to go listen to them, but I am talking myself blue in the face unless you have some basic capabilities, not the least of which is a developed memory.

Introduction

I am starting a second blog devoted entirely to music commentary. my interests run to the serious literature and in my case it is literary in the sense that I have much of the music I know in sheet music or score, so I can make general comments about style and form and performance with detailed reference to the printed source if needed. There are posts to my other blog that belong here; I would like to be able to move or copy them here, and I will add new items as my on-going experience allows it. My goal is to provide my unique perspective with an unorthodox approach.