Two women, two songs: in and out of harmony
I love Brazilian popular music. I love its sultry sophistication, the lazy warmth of its harmonies, and its rhythmic beat, which breathes rather than batters. The most popular of its popular songs was born just after me, in the early 1960s, and Antônio Carlos Jobim’s ‘Girl from Ipanema’ can still turn heads as if it were written yesterday. I’ve always loved this song and been fascinated by its harmonies, which somehow manage to combine complexity and subtlety with instant recognition and recall. It is an example of a melody that relies entirely on its harmony for its effect. Try singing it while removing the harmony from your inner mind. Or if you’re near a piano, try playing it with the harmony the simple tune would naturally suggest, G major: it is utterly banal and worthless. But slide that harmony down a whole tone to F major and make of its opening Gs and Es major ninths and sevenths and you instantly smell the sun, the sand, the sea … and you see this inaccessible girl walk past. Aaaah!
So much for the seductively gorgeous ‘Girl from Ipanema’, and how that song relies entirely on its harmony to make any sense at all. Another song from the same era, the Beatles’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’, could not be more different in every aspect. Not only is this poor, lonely woman unlikely to turn any heads, but it’s hard to imagine the dank waterfront of the Mersey river being more different in every respect from the sultry beach in the suburb of Rio. And musically they are totally different too. If Jobim’s song is meaningless without its harmonies, ‘Eleanor Rigby’ is unusual in needing no harmony at all to make sense. It is almost like Gregorian chant in its melodic self-sufficiency. Indeed, its E minor tonality sounds almost modal at times. The original recording, with its famous string quartet accompaniment, is an iconic track of the period, rough and rugged with a raw honesty that is hard to find in today’s digital pop-music world. Father McKenzie laid more to rest in 1966 than the tragic woman who kept her face in a jar by the door.
Is New Age thinking bad for musicians?
Reading Bishop Richard Harries’s book God Outside the Box I was struck by the following passage:
The German novelist Hermann Hesse wrote, ‘When a man tries, with the gifts bestowed on him by nature, to fulfil himself, he is doing the highest thing he can do, the only thing that has any meaning.’ This sums up succinctly the dominant idea of the twentieth century. Self-expression and self-fulfilment override all other considerations. This is related to new age spirituality because although conscious adherents to that movement may be relatively small in number, our whole culture is saturated with the idea of the self and its development. [Whereas true] fulfilment in life comes from giving oneself to what is worthwhile. It comes as a by-product of doing something else. We engage in something that interests us, let us say carpentry or gardening, and as a result find fulfilment. If we simply seek fulfilment in itself, it not only eludes but is likely to destroy us.
The ‘pursuit of happiness’ rather than the ‘pursuit of the goods that (may) lead to happiness’ is perhaps the deadest dead-end street in the modern age’s sprawling moral metropolis.
There’s much to be said in a general sense but is there anything that applies directly to music? I think there is, yet we are hit with an immediate question: isn’t ‘self-expression’ what the arts are all about? Well, yes and no.
I have time for only one regular student but I do give public classes all over the world, usually organised by the orchestra or promoter where I’m playing. I would hate to return to an earlier authoritarian age when being ‘seen and not heard’ by your elders and betters was the order of the day, but I am often amazed at the unmerited self-confidence some students display. A good, healthy self-esteem seems often to have morphed into a carefree arrogance. I remember one student playing really dreadfully for me once: everything was weak, inaccurate, coarse, chaotic. As the performance ended I wanted to say something constructive that would be kind and encouraging, and I began by making a small suggestion of interpretation to get the ball rolling. He instantly shot back, ‘Yeah, well I guess there are many ways of thinking about this piece. Your point is interesting but I prefer what I’m doing.’ I said nothing then and I’ll say nothing now.
We need a great dollop of self-confidence to walk out onto the stage and perform, not just to overcome the nerves involved, but to believe in the vision of the music we want to convey to the audience with passionate conviction. But self-confidence has to move away from self in order to be of any real value. It should ultimately be confidence in the music to be performed, and the gaze has to be outwards: a gift for the listener that the gift we possess makes possible. If it’s all about me then all that’s left on stage is me. The audience might still be sitting there but the communication music seeks – thirsts for, is made for – has shrivelled to impotence.
There is no greater school for self-absorption than the recording studio. (Let no one think I’m writing this from some pedestal where I’ve found all the answers. I begin each recording session on a surfboard riding waves of neurosis and anxiety.) Narcissus’ reflection was blurred and brief in the old days of 78 recordings – a few minutes, much hiss and scratch, a faint (if glorious) hint of the real thing. But now the mirror of the playback is clean and even magnified. Today our rivals are ourselves – preened, polished, packaged – not our colleagues. The temptation when the red light is illumined to gaze, to obsess, to fuss, to be tortured by the hope for chimeric perfection, is overwhelming. I think we can hear it in live performances too, when many artists’ anxious search for pitch perfection or laser-sharp accuracy hampers their ability just to do it. As Bishop Harries puts it, ‘If we simply seek fulfilment [‘perfection’] in itself, it not only eludes but is likely to destroy us.’
We might struggle for a lifetime even to begin to achieve such an outward-looking vision, but being aware of the thinness of the alternative is perhaps a helpful first step. Sorabji forbade performances of his works; Bach freely wrote for all to hear (and sing and play). I think there’s a lesson in there somewhere.
Memory clinic and Mozart
A few years before my mother died, her memory was deteriorating, so I decided to take her to visit a memory clinic in Manchester. The doctor we saw, after asking various general questions, gave her a small test. As I was sitting there I did it too, and I was horrified how, when under pressure, the simplest things are difficult to remember. What year is it? Well, that was easy, but perhaps less so than in the days of writing cheques or letters by hand, when we would write that number numberless times until the year changed. What day is it? I panicked a little and it took about three seconds of oscillating between Wednesday and Thursday before I settled on (the correct) one. Then he gave us three words to remember, which he said he would ask us about later on. My mother couldn’t remember any of them five minutes later, but I managed only two – because of the anxiety involved in the whole situation.
I’ve only ever had one serious memory slip in my career so far – early on, in the mid-1980s, in Mozart’s Concerto in C K. 467. It was with the Bournemouth Sinfonietta (of happy memory) and I was in a state of utter exhaustion from the pressures of starting a career – learning the repertoire, travelling everywhere for the first time, constant jet lag, struggling to pay bills. The moment of amnesia happened when I took a wrong turn in the recapitulation of the first movement. With a solo recital such an occurrence would not matter too much; we can usually clamber our way out somehow to the next familiar passage. But the sudden descent of harmonic pots and pans to the floor as pianist and orchestra played along in different keys was hard to ignore or sweep out of the way. I decided that the best course of action was to pretend it wasn’t happening, so I played on, trying to look calm. As it was the recap, the cadenza was around the corner – the bit where the pianist plays alone – so I headed for that, tumbling around with fumbled, threadbare figuration in the C major key of the movement. Finally the conductor stopped the orchestra and looked over in a panic – was it Wednesday or Thursday
? – but I simply ignored him and played along serenely and merrily until I could start my solo passage. Finally! Of course, the conductor knew where to bring the orchestra in again at the end of it, so we finished the movement together.
A woman came backstage after the performance and said to me, ‘I did enjoy that, Stephen. Pity the orchestra made such a mess in the first movement.’ I am utterly ashamed to admit that I … well, I didn’t agree with her, but I just smiled (and looked bashfully at my shoes). The cowardice of youth. But it’s reassuring sometimes to remember that forgetfulness is not just for the older generation.
My terrible audition tape
In the spring of 1983 I saw a poster on one of the Juilliard noticeboards advertising the Naumburg International Piano Competition. I was twenty-one years old and finishing up my master’s degree. I had no intention of trying to embark on a performing career at that point; my plan was to enter the doctoral programme and to learn repertoire. But as the early rounds of the Naumburg were going to take place inside the school building itself, and as I had all the pieces I would need in my fingers, I thought I’d enter on a lark. My teacher, Adele Marcus, who had won the Naumburg herself in 1928, thought it was a waste of time, but I decided, not for the first time, to ignore her advice.
I needed to make an audition tape – a cassette in those far-off days. There was no easy access to a recording studio but I did have a tape with me in New York from a recital I’d given a year or so before in Salford. I was fairly pleased with that concert, even though the piano was a clangorous old Bechstein. So after brunch one lazy Sunday afternoon a duplicate was made by holding my Walkman next to another cassette recorder that was playing my playing into the open room. It was at a friend’s apartment and we had to keep quiet during the process or our voices would have been heard on the tape. Actually at the end we forgot for a moment and our chit-chat was recorded after the Chopin F minor Ballade’s final chords had died away. This tinny hotchpotch of a tape (there were even some small blisters of silence in the middle of the pieces) was submitted in an attempt to be accepted into the competition. As you can tell, I really didn’t care too much about winning.
After the event I heard the full story. My tape had been rejected, of course, but along with it I had had to submit two letters of reference. One of them was from the teacher of the Piano Literature course at Juilliard, Joseph Bloch, and apparently it was extremely and unusually positive. Lucy Mann, the executive director, phoned him up.
‘Jim, we’ve rejected Stephen Hough from the competition. We liked his playing but the tape was terrible. But you wrote him such a glowing reference.’
‘Let him into the first round, Lucy, and see how he fares in a live situation.’
She did, and one September morning I was having coffee in the Juilliard cafeteria with friends.
‘Stephen, don’t you have the Naumburg today?’ said one of them.
I looked at my watch and realised I was due on stage in less than thirty minutes.
‘I’d better go,’ I said, putting down my coffee cup and heading off to play.
I wasn’t expecting anything but I passed through to the second round. ‘That’s nice,’ I thought. A day or so later I was on the same stage in the Juilliard Theater. The piano felt wonderful, I was still very relaxed, and later that day I heard that I’d passed through to the finals which were being held on the main stage of Carnegie Hall.
Now the nerves began to rumble a bit, but I was so bewildered by the successful journey thus far that I was happy just to have the experience of playing in that legendary auditorium: Beethoven’s op. 111 Sonata first movement; Chopin’s B minor Sonata first movement, Haydn’s Variations in F minor, and Prokofiev’s Sixth Sonata, last movement. I played the programme and then walked off the stage to see the pianist Jeffrey Biegel standing in the wings.
‘Hi, Jeff, what are you…’
Then I realised. He was my ‘orchestra’ to play the first movement of Brahms’s Second Concerto. The fact that I’d forgotten that I still had this monster to play destroyed all my anxiety. Laughing internally at the absurdity of it all, I walked out with Jeff on to that immense stage. Later that evening I received the first prize, which started a longer walk onto many immense stages since. No thanks to my tape, but many thanks to Jim Bloch’s letter.
Quaver or not: should orchestras use vibrato?
Let me begin by emphasising in the strongest possible terms how much admiration and gratitude I have for all of those who have investigated and uncovered principles of performance practice over the past sixty years. Finding accurate source material, learning how to read it properly, taking composers’ markings to heart and hand, and looking behind the notes on the page to the historical context in which they first sounded has revolutionised the way musicians play. Performance practice covers countless topics, most of which have been written about extensively, but there’s one issue I’d like to raise: orchestral string vibrato – that wiggle of the fingers on the string that produces a quiver of pitch in the note being played.
It has become commonly accepted in the twenty-first century that until the post-war period string players did not use much vibrato. The evidence for this comes almost exclusively from early recordings from the first decades of the twentieth century. There is no doubt that string sections back then did not have the same constant vibrato that we tend to hear in present-day performances. But there is a problem with taking that particular historical practice and simply copying it now. There are three other crucial differences in string playing today that have to be taken into consideration.
First, before the Second World War most players used gut rather than steel strings. A gut string has its own internal quiver due to the irregularity of the natural material, whereas steel is naturally clean and ‘cold’ and in need of vibrato to warm up its sound. The cellist Steven Isserlis, who usually plays on gut strings, told me about a rare occasion when he was playing on steel. A certain soft passage, which he would normally have played with no vibrato to create a haunting, eerie sound, this time, on steel strings, came across as dead, synthetic and empty. He just had to use more vibrato than he would otherwise have done. It’s one thing to remove vibrato in a period instrument group such as the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, but it’s another matter when the entire string section of a fully modern ensemble is playing on steel strings.
Second, string players tend to play more in tune today than they did in the early decades of the twentieth century and the general standard of rank-and-file orchestral playing is higher now. As whole violin sections play with a ‘purer’ intonation today there is a reduction in the complexity of colour – and in the number of pitches. Twelve violins, each playing with a slightly different tuning, will simulate a vibrato.
Third, there was a time when not only was pitch less uniform in a string section, but shifting to that pitch was less cleanly executed. Portamento – that gentle, expressive slide from one note to another – was a constantly employed technique. In fact, until the 1940s it is hard to find one melody recorded without one of these inflections. Today things are reversed: you can listen to a whole orchestral concert without hearing one portamento.
You can’t re-create one aspect of olden style in isolation: you can’t wear spats on sneakers. If you are seeking ‘authenticity’ in Romantic music – and there are many who argue that we shouldn’t try – there is a need to learn again how to inflect the notes with the dialect of the period. This involves not just a removal of vibrato but an incorporation of portamento slides, agogic accents, characteristic rubatos, appropriate instruments and appropriate tempos. Otherwise the search for true character becomes truly a caricature.
Parlour songs
I love the repertoire of sentimental songs written for home consumption in a time when every house that had a kitchen had a piano. The greatest of these made their way to the stage and recording studio and their greatest exponent, John McCormack, made a recording of the 1908 ballad ‘I hear you
calling me’ that sold 4 million copies.
In the 1990s I recorded a CD of a lovingly chosen selection of these songs with my friend the American tenor Robert White. Entitled ‘Bird Songs at Eventide’, this diverse collection shares an ‘Edwardian’ identity, dating from the late-Victorian years when Edward VII was waiting in the wings to the decade or so following his death, when the wings themselves were a memory, having been destroyed in the Great War. We cannot make fun of these songs when we perform them or listen to them. The slightest cynical smile or amused, knowing glance will destroy their magic completely. They come from a tradition where emotions were not trivialised and so could be sung about without shame or embarrassment. Although the tears had some sugar mixed with the salt, they could still be freely shed until the adolescent 1920s made crying unfashionable. This change of fashion was not without some justification, of course: there was something distasteful in indulging in the pleasures of tragic fiction when in wardrobes across the land there hung the fading clothes of millions of men, casualties not of changing fashion but of war’s insane destruction, their owners’ bodies lifeless under the mud of Flanders fields.
There is a profound nostalgia and a deep-rooted conservatism in this repertoire: ‘That is no country for young men!’ The young leave home, whereas these songs call us home, to take shelter from the storms of change and to take refuge from the thundering race of Time. They are shy of the modern age. Rather, with respect and affection, we have to enter their world, a more naive world, which the later twentieth century tended to leave behind. If we can do this for the length of a song we can, to our surprise, discover that this world, with its poignant, searing emotions, is not so alien after all, but is, in a strange way, still our home.
Rough Ideas Page 7
