by Judy Jones
CATHARSIS: The experience of purgation, or purification, of the emotions that Aristotle claimed tragedy could be counted on to produce, thereby rendering it socially useful. Ideally, catharsis is something that both hero and audience will undergo simultaneously, although it’s going to hurt the hero a lot more. Of course, we’ve lost the volume in which Aristotle explained what catharsis was, exactly, but don’t let that stand in the way of your having a good cry.
How Is an Ancient Greek Like a Modern Californian?
Both base their way of living on the concept of arete, or inborn capacities, the development of which is, for each, the highest purpose of the individual. (The classic example of arete is the acorn that, right from the start, has the potential to become a mighty oak.) The Greeks assumed, however, that arete had as many social as personal reverberations and that, given all the freedom in the world to develop one’s potential, one would naturally develop it in a way that was best for everyone. Self-actualizing as it may be, leaving one’s spouse and children to marry one’s eighteen-year-old freshman composition student probably wouldn’t have counted as full-fledged arete for the Greeks.
What’s Love Got to Do, Got to Do with It?
The Greeks wrote the book on forms of affection, and Western civilization hasn’t done much but muddy the waters ever since. Our umbrella-term “love” didn’t exist back in fifth-century Athens; instead there were seen to be three very distinct and powerful love-related forces at work in the world: eros (what we would call “sexual love,” only more complex), philia (what we would call “friendship,” but ditto), and agape (what we would call “love of God” or “love of God’s creatures” if we ever gave it a second thought). Having organized the whole business from the ground up, the Greeks were able to appreciate its subtleties: Eros, for instance, while it is the basis for our word “erotic,” didn’t just refer to the feelings evoked by pornographic vases, or even to the heat generated between men and women (for that matter, the Greeks gave more credence to the heat generated between men and men), but to all sorts of passions, including spiritual ones, that were based on a yearning for union or self-fulfillment; it also recognized the fact that fulfillment inevitably neutralized desire. The social implications of philia can’t even be translated into English, and under the joint heading eros/philia the Greeks had room for a whole roster of good feelings, ranging from kindness toward creatures of the same race (physike) to benevolence toward guests (xenike). On the other side of the cosmic coin was agape (say it like “canapé,” sort of), which implied the giving of affection without expecting anything back, and which was soon twisted beyond recognition by overenthusiastic Christian theologians. None of this is to say that the Greeks’ clearheaded perspective was responsible for their minuscule divorce rate, only that the Greeks spent a lot of time thinking about the meaning of love, whereas the rest of us have opted just to dance to it.
Classical Music for the Disconcerted
Ten paradigmatic works, offered as a map for the ear by contributor Jon Pareles.* JOSQUIN DESPREZ:
LA DÉPLORATION SUR LA MORT D’OCKEGHEM
For most regular concertgoers, music before Bach is a mystery. Even a lot of early-music fans think of it simply as intensely dulcet, fa-la-la-filled madrigals and jaunty dances played on nasal instruments. But that’s not all there is to it. This is, after all, music that has survived almost five centuries; one way to enjoy it is to savor its alienness. Its structures can seem whimsical or perverse, as with “cantus firmus” pieces whose important melody is the slowest-moving part, in the bass. And early harmonies sound a little off today, both because the tuning of instruments has changed and because the fifteenth-century ear had its own notions of dissonance and consonance. So, early music moves in mysterious ways—often, it just seems to mosey along, coming to a rest here and there, then moseying on again via the occasional utterly peculiar turn. La déploration sur la mort d’Ockeghem, by the Fleming Josquin Desprez, is the sound of the Middle Ages becoming the Renaissance. Johannes Ockeghem, who died in 1495, was the last great medieval composer, writing seamless, otherworldly pieces, all of whose parts moved independently. Josquin’s requiem piece for him, with “Requiem aeternam” as its cantus firmus, begins as an homage to Ockeghem, then changes to the more modern style: clearer phrases, voices sometimes echoing each other, something akin to modern chords. In half a century, there would indeed be madrigals; a century after that, Bach would be born.
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH:
MASS IN B MINOR, BWV 232
Bach was the greatest Baroque composer because he was also the last Renaissance composer; that is, he wrote brilliantly in both the newfangled concertante style—with a clear separation of melody and accompaniment, in forms built from contrasting sections— and the older, free-flowing counterpoint. Written between 1733 and 1748 (Bach died in 1750), the Mass is a virtual Bach encyclopedia, with each chunk of text set as the composer saw fit. It has solo arias; sections in which voices and instruments intertwine; massive concertante choruses in which solo and instrumental groups trade off with full chorus and the Baroque orchestra of strings, organ, recorders, oboes, bassoons, trumpets, and drums; and sublime, complex fugues, pieces in strict counterpoint derived from the staggered entrances of the theme, or “subject.” Some arias, such as the “Agnus dei” for alto and the “Domine Deus” for soprano, tenor, and recorder, are so devout it’s hard to remember that Bach was only a Lutheran.
WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART:
SYMPHONY NO. 41 IN C MAJOR
(“JUPITER”), K. 551
In Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis called Mozart’s music a “skein of untiring facetiousness.” Maybe. But not the “Jupiter.” True, its themes are typically Mozartian question/answer pairs, ever so neatly balanced. And, as with most classical symphonies, each movement proceeds duly away from, then back to, its starting point. (In sonata form, used in first movements of symphonies and sonatas, themes are introduced, taken for a ride, then returned home safe and sound.) But in Mozart’s music, the process is displayed with diagrammatic clarity and absolute poise. Even when the writing seems effortless, it moves forward; its symmetries pull it ahead gracefully yet inevitably, disturbing their own balance, only to set it straight again. The three final symphonies Mozart wrote in summer 1788 (the “Jupiter” is the last one) are the peak of classical form, congenial and precise. At his best, Mozart wasn’t facetious—he was Olympian.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN:
PIANO SONATA NO. 29 IN B FLAT MAJOR,
OPUS 106 (“HAMMERKLAVIER” SONATA)
When the movies show Beethoven in creative agony, the soundtrack ought to be the “Hammerklavier,” which took him two years to write (1817–1818) and blew the roof off the sonata while honoring its form (see Mozart). The “Hammerklavier” is an obsessive work, longer and probably more difficult than any previous piano sonata, yet so concentrated that almost every detail, large and small, derives from a single idea: in musical terms, a chain of descending thirds. Like the iodine crystal that seeds a cloud, that idea generates not only all of the sonata’s themes, but its harmonic plan and even the relation between movements. Beethoven’s relentless logic leads him far afield (the Adagio has moments that sound like Chopin) but he never, ever rambles. Despite its length, the “Hammerklavier” is no-frills writing with a vengeance. FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN:
TWENTY-FOUR PRELUDES,
OPUS 28
In some of the greatest salons of all time, Chopin was the salon pianist. He was much loved for his pianistic technique, and for the sense of melancholia in even his most triumphant pieces. He was also a harmonics pioneer, charting extraordinary new chords. Like most of his contemporaries, Chopin was better at writing tunes than at sustaining large-scale structures; unlike them, he had the sense to concentrate on miniatures (the preludes, waltzes, mazurkas) and on extended miniatures (ballades, nocturnes, polonaises). In 1839 he completed the twenty-four preludes—one in each major and minor key, just like Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier
; none is longer than five minutes, most under two. Each is a gem: the C Minor, whose chord sequence was stolen for the Fame theme song; the E Minor, with its sustained melody floating above an astounding sequence of chords; the lithely filigreed E Flat Major; the vociferous, breakneck, where-the-hell-are-we-going G Minor. Chopin doesn’t make more of his ideas than he ought to; if thirty-three seconds is enough, that’s where the prelude ends. A few composers could take the hint.
PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY:
CONCERTO IN D FOR VIOLIN
AND ORCHESTRA, OPUS 35
Think of Romantic man, alone and heroic, bending a universe to his will—what better analogue than the concerto? The soloist faces the orchestra and battles it with his virtuosity until, finally, they join in triumphant partnership. From Mozart’s time, the concerto had been a star vehicle, but the classical-era composers at least remembered that the orchestra existed. By the time Tchaikovsky wrote his Violin Concerto in 1878, the orchestra is lucky to get a few rumbles and forebodings in edgewise before the soloist enters with his first sweet, soulful melody. That tune comes back as a rabble-rousing march, complete with trumpets, but not before a tear-jerking second theme and considerable violinistic showing-off. The showing-off is the point, of course. After a short, tearful Andante, the concerto’s finale is a violin decathlon. Upon hearing the premiere, Vienna’s top critic wrote: “The violin is no longer played but rent asunder, beaten black and blue.” What fun.
ARNOLD SCHOENBERG:
PIERROT LUNAIRE, OPUS 21
Schoenberg blueprinted quite a bit of twentieth-century chamber music with his 1912 song cycle, Pierrot Lunaire. Loony (or, if you prefer, moon-drunk) Pierrot the harlequin drifts through Albert Giraud’s twenty-one poems to the sinuous dissonances of a “broken consort,” instruments from different families: piano, flute, clarinet, violin, and cello. The poems are declaimed in Sprechstimme, literally “speak-sing,” which Schoenberg devised as a combination of song’s melodic contours and speech’s indeterminacy. After Pierrot, Schoenberg (along with Anton von Webern) went on to further compress and systematize atonal pointillism in the serial or twelve-tone style, all the rage in the latter part of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, the instrumentation, Sprechstimme, text-centered form, tiny musical gestures, and atonality all gave other composers ideas. So did Pierrot’s light-headedness.
IGOR STRAVINSKY:
LE SACRE DU PRINTEMPS
(THE RITE OF SPRING)
The Rite of Spring is Tarzan among the classics: pagan, ill-mannered, passionate, suffused with jungle rhythms. No wonder there was a riot at the 1913 premiere, where it backed a Diaghilev ballet that Stravinsky never much liked. What the vociferous audience missed, however, was the music’s astonishing intricacy and delicacy. Between its percussive, brassy climaxes—the rite ends with a young girl dancing herself to death—Le Sacre is deeply melodic without an atom of sentiment (the bassoon call that opens the piece may haunt you forever). Stravinsky studied orchestration with Rimsky-Korsakov (of Scheherezade fame) but turned all the old tricks inside out, using woodwinds in particular to achieve an eerie, pungent sound. Half a century later, Le Sacre is still galvanizing for audiences and hellishly difficult for orchestras and conductors. It has, moreover, left its mark. Leonard Bernstein brought its choppy rhythms to Broadway in West Side Story, and its obsessively repeated motifs, energizing harmonies that barely move, predicted late-twentieth-century minimalism.
BÉLA BARTÓK: THE SIX STRING QUARTETS
String quartets, historically, are a composer’s most rigorous private utterances; with just two violins, viola, and cello there’s no room for anything but purest form expressed in intimate counterpoint. The six string quartets Bartók wrote between 1908 and 1939 are, with Beethoven’s final six, the form at its most intense. Bartók’s sum up his growth from an impressionable pan-European eclectic to a visionary native (in this case Hungarian) voice. In the first three, Bartók puts the squeeze on received lyricism: He reduces themes to angular motifs, develops those motifs with merciless concision, replaces comfortable Europeanisms with dissonances and rhythms out of Hungarian folk tradition. The third quartet, his shortest, is so distilled and dramatic it feels like a single indrawn breath. For the final three, Bartók loosens up a bit, singing in the atonal phrases of his own new language. Along the way, he uses every bit of the string quartet’s sonic vocabulary, including sliding notes and glassy harmonics and grainy col legno (playing with the wood of the bow), yet never sounds as if he’s showboating because every effect is at the service of the whole. TERRY RILEY: IN C
It’s only a page or two of music, a collection of fifty-three motifs in the key of C. Any number of musicians, the more the better, can play it without a conductor. While somebody plunks out steady Cs on a keyboard, the other musicians play a motif, repeat it for some time, then move on to the next one. They all listen to each other so that no one gets too far ahead or behind. And the nigh-miraculous result is a monumental work: a rich, pulsing C chord encompassing ceaseless activity, change within stasis. Written in 1964, In C was Riley’s seminal work of minimalism, or trance music, or process music, or going-nowhere music, or cooperative music, or whatever you want to call it. Because it was so warmly consonant, minimalism attracted a new audience to contemporary music; because it ignored most classical ideas of form and drama, it had the old guard outraged.
The Parts of an Orchestra, Dear, Once and for All
Actually, you have a right to be confused; orchestra structures come and go— as they’ve been doing for about three centuries—and a conductor will add or subtract instruments at the drop of a baton, depending on the demands of the piece to be performed. In general, however, when people today say “symphony orchestra,” they mean pretty much what they meant in the nineteenth century, and what you see below. Of the four sections of instruments, the string section is the largest, most important, and usually the most continuously played. Woodwinds are second in the pecking order; they add color and sometimes carry the melody. The brass, which acts as the muscle, or amplifier, in those swelling, passionate passages, is generally used sparingly. And, of course, the percussion section provides the beat. If you still don’t know a cornet from a clarinet, study this page, then clip and pin it to your sleeve.
STRINGS: First and second violins (they’re all the same instruments, they just play different parts), violas, violoncellos (or simply cellos), double basses, and, sometimes, a harp.
WOODWINDS: Piccolo, flutes, clarinets, oboes, cor anglais, bassoons.
BRASS: French horns, cornets, trumpets, trombones, tuba.
PERCUSSION: Timpani, bass drum, snare drum, cymbals, triangles, assorted instruments such as woodblocks, castanets, celeste, gongs, glockenspiel, xylophone, etc.
Practical Italian for the Concertgoer
First, there are the words indicating the speed and volume at which a composition is to be played; we’ve ranged them from the least to the most.
You’ve noted that the Italians like to qualify things. Sometimes they do this with suffixes (that issimo, for instance, means “very,” ino and etto both mean “a little”). Sometimes they use whole words, as with:
molto
much
meno
less
mezzo
half
poco
a little
non troppo
not too much
But that’s just the basic, strike-up-the-band stuff. Other, less blatantly quantitative terms, in simple alphabetical order, include:
A CAPPELLA (literally, “as in church”): Used of vocal music without instrumental accompaniment, even though instrumental accompaniment has been common in churches since the Middle Ages.
ARPEGGIO (literally, “as played on a harp”): A broken chord in which the notes are played in succession so as to recall—on a piano, violin, whatever—a harpist “sweeping” the strings.
CADENZA (literally, “cadence”): A passage in a concerto (and a display of virt
uosity, florid, brilliant, or both) in which the solo instrument plays without the orchestra. It was up to the performer to decide to execute a cadenza until the time of Mozart; now always indicated by the composer.
CANTABILE (literally, “singable”): In a flowing style.
CODA (literally, “tail”): A concluding, rounding-off section to a piece of music, or a portion of it.
DA CAPO (literally, “from the head”): An indication that a previously played section of music is to be repeated.
GLISSANDO (from an Italian version of the French glisser, to slide): Sliding from note to note, as by running one’s fingers over the keys of the piano, strings of the harp, etc.
LEGATO (literally, “bound together”): Describes a smooth performance without accentuated notes (cf “staccato,” on the next page).
OBBLIGATO (literally, “obligatory”): Denotes some indispensable part: an elaborate embellishment of a main melodic line, an instrument that’s critical (but subordinate) to a vocal performance. Careful: Some people use the term to signal precisely that element which can be dispensed with; the point is, according to them, if it’s a key support, it can’t also be the heart of the matter.
PIZZICATO (literally, “pinched”): Directs that, with stringed instruments, the strings are to be plucked with the fingers, not bowed.
RUBATO (literally, “robbed”): Indicates that a player should “play around” with a given tempo, marginally accelerating or relaxing it, for effect; sometimes on a piano keyboard one hand might play “normally,” the other go with the rubato. Also known as swaying the rhythm.
