Neat and tidy music

Over at the Radio 3 Message Board, where everyone is very friendly and enthusiastic, I asked what music I should try now that I've got a handle on Messiaen. The most recommended things were the string quartets of Shostakovich and Bartók, and Mahler's symphonies. I gave Shostakovich a try in the university library but found it all a bit neat and tidy.

When I listened to another of the recommendations though, Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jésus, it got me straight away. It's played on solo piano, is all over the place and sounds very tricky, but at the same time has a very strong musicality to it (am I making sense?!). It has in common with the Quartet a mixture of playfulness and very beautiful, solemn and steady movements. Ahh. I think I'm just going to stick with Messiaen for now until I can find another composer that excites me as much as him.

My other discovery this week has been the joy of old vinyl, listened to on big headphones. This was in the library, which has a huge collection and is very quiet for the summer. I've never been a lover of vinyl but it definitely adds a quality to this type of music.

In fact, without wanting to sound snobbish, I feel I have to point out the stark contrast between the warmth and fullness of records (including CDs) and the tinny, crappy sound you get out of an iPod, and from mpeg encoding generally. I know a lot of people (including me in the previous incarnation of this blog) have written about what a shame it is that there isn't more classical file-sharing; but the fact is that the format is useless (for actual listening; not so much for trying out). Pop and rock are compressed anyway and don't make much use of low sound levels; but classical recordings are more delicate and sound plain crappy in mp3 form. Plus the mood of the stuff usually doesn't suit listening on the go.

[Backtracking NB: I love my iPod really Dad! The standard headphones are a bit tinny is all ;)]

Beethoven: the face of evil

Some interesting thoughts from Dylan Evans of the Guardian newspaper here:

From the speculations of Pythagoras about the "music of the spheres" in ancient Greece onwards, most western musicians had agreed that musical beauty was based on a mysterious connection between sound and mathematics, and that this provided music with an objective goal, something that transcended the individual composer's idiosyncrasies and aspired to the universal. Beethoven managed to put an end to this noble tradition by inaugurating a barbaric U-turn away from an other-directed music to an inward-directed, narcissistic focus on the composer himself and his own tortured soul.

Now I'm not defending Beethoven out of any real love for the guy, but for me, this is a bit like saying Shakespeare ruined the dramatic form. Maybe the lack of attention is starting to affect these critics' heads?

Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time

Olivier Messiaen: Quatuor pour la fin du temps / Quartet for the end of time (1941;2000) Performers: GIl Shaham (violin), Paul Meyer (clarinet), Jian Wang (violoncello) and Myung-Whun Chung (piano) Deutsche Grammophon

Background

Historical context and mythology must be important factors in the popularity of classical works I reckon, given that unlike pop songs, they usually contain no explicit or direct narrative of their own. Without a story of some kind to follow, it's difficult for listeners to attach meaning or to relate personally to the music. Hence the great interest in Beethoven's deafness, Mozart's poverty and Bach's dangerous obsession with monkeys, which far outweighs most people's interest in the actual music of these 'great' composers. Of course, a good story is only really an accompaniment to good music; deafness and poverty aren't much of a draw on their own.

As further evidence of this theory, it was the incredible story behind Messiaen's Quartet for the end of time that made me want to hear it in the first place, and the ghosts that inhabit the work which still give the music, as I hear it, much of its character. I can't help but picture the scene when I listen. Famous classical blogger Alex Ross tells the tale best:

The most ethereally beautiful music of the twentieth century was first heard on a brutally cold January night in 1941, at the Stalag VIIIA prisoner-of-war camp, in Görlitz, Germany. The composer was Olivier Messiaen, the work “Quartet for the End of Time.” Messiaen wrote most of it after being captured as a French soldier during the German invasion of 1940. The première took place in an unheated space in Barrack 27. A fellow-inmate drew up a program in Art Nouveau style, to which an official stamp was affixed: “Stalag VIIIA 49 geprüft [approved].” Sitting in the front row—and shivering along with the prisoners—were the German officers of the camp.

[...]

I was just kidding about Bach by the way.

Music

The Quartet is split into eight movements and Messiaen utilises various configurations to get a variety of sounds that really surprised me. He also seems to have loved rests, changes of direction and crazy interjections. It's difficult to get your head around at first.

At the centre of the Quartet is a piece of music that quite possibly is the most "ethereally beautiful" of the twentieth century. The piece is called "Louange á l'Eternité de Jésus," meaning "Praise for the eternity of Jesus" (Messiaen was a devout Christian and was apparently inspired by his faith in almost everything he did). While the rest of the Quartet is playful, lively and full of variety, the "Louange á l'Eternité de Jésus" is, I think, all about chords. They pulse slowly and beautifully from the piano, while the violin forges sky-trails above. It really is as simple as that, but some of those chord changes are like soft suckerpunches to the stomach. When I first listened to the "Louange", on an old LP through headphones in my university's library, I was rooted to the spot.

I'd like to write more about the music itself, but basically it's beyond me. I'm not well versed in the language of classical music; either in describing it, or in the 'language' of the music itself. And most importantly, after about ten listens, I still don't feel very familiar with the Quartet anyway. No point in hurrying though.

Radio 3's Beethoven Experience

Happening right now on BBC Radio 3 is The Beethoven Experience, a five-day radio marathon during which the station will play every piece of music Beethoven wrote. It started on Sunday and will finish at midnight on Friday. See the Radio 3 site for more info. You can listen online and even download all nine of the symphonies, once they've been broadcast.

This is the first time I've knowingly listened to Beethoven and I've liked it more than I thought I would. The music is very lively, with melodic and harmonic surprises at every turn. It's not music for lifts.

The 2nd Symphony did send me to sleep last night. But then it seems to be the nature of classical music, that even 'livelier' pieces like this work on the brain and not the heart (unlike beat-driven modern music), in ways I'm not really familiar with yet. It seems I can work to it, or fall asleep to it, as if it's not there. But as I've found with the Messiaen I've been listening to, the more you get to know a piece of music, the more sense it makes and the more it comes into the foreground.

New start

I've decided to start again with this blog. I strayed away from the basic idea last time, which was simply to write about my experiences with classical music. It was all a bit forced and pretentious. I won't be posting all that often, but I'll do my best to keep it interesting and relevant.