Listening to the Listeners?

"Psycho" has a very interesting construction and that game with the audience was fascinating. I was directing the viewers. You might say I was playing them, like an organ. 

 -Alfred Hitchcock, interview with Francois Truffaut

A few weeks ago, I was discussing various classic films with one of my UK friends, and, of course, Hitchcock came up. My friend commented that he's not really a fan, since he finds Hitchcock's emphasis on audience manipulation ("playing the audience like an organ") to be deeply unsettling, and unworthy of great art. Yesterday, during a conversation otherwise unrelated to film, an American friend of mine made the same point about Hitchcock. Last week, discussing the arts with one of my former students, a similar theme emerged when he suggested that one of the differences (among many) between good artists and great artists is that the great artists do not consider their audiences. The "greats" create for themselves, whereas the "merely-good" create for their viewers, readers, and listeners.

These colleagues were born in three different countries during three different decades, and are professionally involved with three different artistic media, so their agreement probably isn't generational, cultural, or genre-related. In any case, talking to them, I was struck in each of the conversations by how consistently I disagreed. I cannot imagine a single musical dimension that doesn't fundamentally depend upon manipulating the listeners.

Try a reductionist thought-experiment: beginning on a purely musical level, suppose I decide to play a certain dissonant chord louder than the surrounding ones (and even grant, hypothetically, that my ostensible reason for doing this is just a gut-feeling, with no underlying intellectual framework). Why play a dissonance louder? Because there's an aural clash that "wants" to be "brought out". Why does the aural clash "want" emphasis? Because emphasis will heighten the emotional impact of the clash -- and will help the performance match the musical content. Why will emphasis heighten the impact of the clash? Because if the clash is unexpected and unprepared, emphasis will increase shock-value; if the clash is prepared and expected, emphasis will provide a satisfying aural climax. Unexpected to whom? Shocking to whom? Satisfying to whom? Ding!

The same series of Why-questions can apply to meta-musical decisions, like whether to play from memory, or how much to visibly emote on stage. In every case I can think of, they still come down to the audience's experience. And, in fact, I think this is a good thing. With classical music (and the other arts) in a precarious position alongside contemporary culture, the idea of the lone artist creating only for his own satisfaction strikes me as selfish, arrogant, and entitled. Shouldn't we consider artists even more great when they care not only about the inside workings of their art, but also the outside world that will consume it?

I like deconstructing these issues partly because I'm interested in what makes an artist great, and also because the better we understand what exactly is going on in performance, the better we can take control of it. In this sense, Hitchcock may be the ultimate brilliant, self-aware creator. The filmmaker (or painter, or writer, or composer, or violinist) cannot avoid manipulating her audience in some way: as soon as she's turned on the camera and pointed it at something (or set a piece in C minor, or picked a tempo), she's already begun to control exactly what the audience can and can't look at. Hitchcock is a small leap from that recognition: as long as one can't avoid being manipulative in some way, he might as well do it as grippingly as possible! (Perhaps this qualifies as reductio ad perfectum?)

And if Hitchcock isn't your idea of a Great Artist, then what about Mozart? In two letters to his father (3 July 1778, and 26 September 1781) he consciously and explicitly takes the same attitude. Here's a particularly vivid excerpt from the first letter, on symphonic structure built entirely for the satisfaction of his listeners:

...Just in the middle of the Allegro a passage occurred which I felt sure must please, and there was a burst of applause; but as I knew at the time I wrote it what effect it was sure to produce, I brought it in once more at the close, and then rose shouts of "Da capo!" ... Having observed that all last as well as first Allegros here begin together with all the other instruments, and generally unisono, mine commenced with only two violins, piano for the first eight bars, followed instantly by a forte; the audience, as I expected, called out "hush!" at the soft beginning, and the instant the forte was heard began to clap their hands...

I can't imagine that the other great artists would disagree -- even Beethoven, that archetypal Romantic, who consistently shows himself to be a master of pushing the audience's buttons. (The Eroica alone is a case-in-point.)

More importantly, though, I think the consumers would agree. We go to the opera or watch the movie or read the book not for the story itself (if that were the case, we'd just skim the plot summary), but because we're interested in how the story is told. We want to be manipulated -- and who better to do it than a Mozart, a Beethoven, a Dostoevsky, or a Hitchcock?

(Also posted on violinist.com)

Aural DNA?

The location of my mtDNA as of about 47,000 years ago. The light gray lines show earlier routes (c. 60,000 years ago) taken by others who share my mtDNA; the white lines show paths others with my mtDNA took while my maternal ancestors remained near Iran.

For my birthday this past year, I had National Geographic sequence my DNA. [If you're interested, view my "Genographic" summary here!] I've long considered myself to be historically-minded -- after all, I think daily in units of 300 or 400 years, whenever I touch my violin. Even so, a decade of work in early music left me unprepared for what I felt upon receiving my DNA results. Here was my ancestors' migration pattern out of Africa, a temporal distance of 180,000 years broken down into 10,000-year increments. Here was a 142,155-line Excel file showing the As, Cs, Gs and Ts of my sequenced genome. This was both unimaginably larger and inconceivably smaller than anything I had encountered before.

This got me thinking about other kinds of lineages. I went to a cello recital yesterday during which the performer, in his remarks from the stage, said that he traces his musical ancestry to Pablo Casals. (He added that this is something he likes to emphasize in performance: he went so far as to "warn" us that he would not just be playing Bach, but playing Casals playing Bach.) Of course, many musicians have voiced such thoughts. When I was young, one of my piano teachers claimed to have traced his musical lineage to Beethoven; interestingly, popular legend holds that a different teacher in a different decade said the same thing to a young Richard Taruskin. (I resist the temptation to ask whether Taruskin and I are, therefore, musical relatives...)

My own musical genome is complicated. As a conductor, I have two main ancestral lines: on the "American" side, I can trace a line of teachers back to Koussevitzky. On the other side (my RAM teacher), I descend from Toscanini. As a violinist, I can claim to share small amounts of aural DNA with Arcangelo Corelli.

But, to keep this post from becoming a list of dropped names, here's the rub: whereas I do look like my grandmother (my actual grandmother, that is), I'm quite sure that I play nothing like my teacher's teacher's teacher. This becomes even more true with each generation as I count backwards. By the time I reach Corelli, the claim of kinship is quite meaningless. My conducting lineage shows the absurdity even more clearly: I'm removed from Koussevitzky by only two "generations", but one wouldn't know it to watch me conduct.

Still, the game is amusing.

Other fun facts about my real, genetic, non-aural genome: 1) My paternal line remained in Africa until surprisingly recently; 2) my maternal line lingered in the Middle East (Iran, it seems) for about 20,000 years longer than most others with the same migration route; 3) trace amounts of Native American DNA were introduced into my genome either when my paternal line arrived in America or when my maternal line and the pre-Native Americans were still in Russia [I secretly hope it's the latter, but, either way, I will only find out if one of my parents takes the test]; and 4) although I have no Bulgarian blood, my particular proportion of geographic markers very closely resembles that of the average modern-day Bulgarian.

That's d'amore!

I ended my last post, almost half a month ago, with some questions I had hoped to explore "in the next week." Predictably, a number of distractions have prevented me from writing anything that would be worth your time to read. In lieu (for now) of any well-developed philosophical musings, however, here's a bit of documentation from the most recent "Bach Explored" concert.

One doesn't get to hear (or play!) a viola d'amore every day. Since it was a very important instrument to Bach and his colleagues -- particularly to Pisendel -- I felt that it would be wrong not to feature it at least once during the series. I'm fortunate to own a very beautiful original 18th-century viola d'amore, and I'm always thrilled when I get the chance to perform on it. (After all, under "normal" circumstances, it comes out of the case only a few times per year, invariably for the St. John Passion.)

I don't have any closeup photos of my d'amore, but you can see it in this picture -- twelve pegs and all!

Last week, I performed an anonymous 18th-century dance suite on it. Here's a recording of the gorgeous Aria.

And the viola d'amore doesn't just do slow and beautiful. Here's a fast movement from the same work:

The viola d'amore's harmonic vocabulary is somewhat limited, since the open strings are tuned in a two-octave arpeggio, and you can take full advantage of its resonance only in that home key. (Notice, for example, in the second half of the fast movement, that the chords disappear as soon as we move to E-flat major.) Nonetheless, the sacrifice in modulatory freedom is amply compensated by resonance and chordal possibilities. One can imagine the inspiration that Bach, Pisendel, and the other great, early polyphonists derived from this instrument.

Music Notation CSI (Or, how did H.I.F. Biber tune in 1681?)

When historically-interested performers need guidance on practical issues, we often look for answers in 18th-century treatises. (Or, if we don't, we really should: as I've already discussed.) Anyone who has talked to me about this topic knows that I'm a passionate believer in the power of treatises to enrich us in ways that recordings and teachers can't.

Still, I concede that 18th-century sources are limited. They can't actually play for us; their musical advice must be approximate, mediated by language. Furthermore, each treatise represents its author's viewpoint, but that author is rarely a composer we care about. We may read, say, Geminiani and Türk; instruments in hand, however, who wouldn't rather play Corelli or Beethoven? And one often wonders whether Leopold Mozart's theoretical advice really applies to his son's mature compositions, or whether, by the late 1770s, a surname was the only thing Wolfgang and his father had in common.

In many cases, treatise-reading encourages generalization, while performing should really be about specificity. Unless we devote unrealistic amounts of time to reading an unrealistic number of treatises, we risk overburdening a few authors. Thus, Geminiani becomes a go-to source for all Italian music; likewise, so many French performances ape Muffat.

(As an aside: the widespread Muffat-infatuation has always puzzled me. Look at the dates: he went to France briefly in his late teens, and didn't write the treatise until decades later. Is his evidence reliable? I wonder, too, why nobody seems interested in his German bowings. They could be applied to Bach and Telemann, who, despite vaguely-Francophone interests, were writing German music, in Germany, to be performed by German musicians and consumed by German audiences.)

Muffat's Treatise: Menuet. The German bowing is above, the French is below. Note that the German version begins on an upbow, and is entirely bowed out. Presumably, the upbow at the beginning is meant to accommodate the figures in bars 3, 5 and 6.

Having now made a meal of the appetizer, I hasten to my main point: Treatises aren't our only option! We can steal the occasional glimpse into past practices by searching for clues within the notation. Of course, most notation is neutral, and we need treatises to help unravel "what" (if anything) it "means". But, sometimes, a composer leaves a clue.

For example, on the question of whether Mozart's grace-notes should be played on or before the beat, treatises are unhelpful. Most say nothing; Quantz, writing in Berlin, gives the wrong answer. We know that Quantz is wrong because an examination of the Minuet from Mozart's KV 304 reveals grace-notes of three different durations, all in a single phrase:

Copyright restrictions prevent me from posting from the NMA, but see here for an urtext original. Amazingly enough, all editions on IMSLP show incorrect grace-notes! (In our age of increasing IMSLP-reliance, it's a reminder not to believe everything posted there.)

At once, we infer that note-value does matter for grace-notes. It follows that they have to be on the beat -- after all, if grace-notes were to be played before the beat, could a quarter note be distinguished from an eighth or sixteenth?

The notational clues are not always even related to performance-practice per se. The example that inspired this essay comes from Biber's Sonatae Violino Solo 1681, on my mind this month. Halfway through Sonata VI, the violinist must retune into scordatura -- the only instance of mid-sonata retuning I'm aware of pre-1900:

I've spent the last few days testing various different retuning methods. When I last performed this piece, a few times in 2011, my habit was to knock the E string completely slack, and then retune it from scratch. (This seemed to improve the stability, but it takes a lot longer to bring off.) Now, I'm considering inching down from E to D, and then simply adjusting as necessary if the string creeps sharp -- the quick fix. After all, Biber's dramatic pacing is characteristically perfect, and drawn-out retuning would do more harm than would a slightly-sharp top string.

Whatever I decide to do, this moment speaks worlds about Biber -- his own ability to tune quietly and accurately, and his flexible stance towards tuning in general. There are also subsidiary inferences, such as the thickness of his E string (it must still have sounded good when loosened to D) and the stability of his G string (with the slightly decreased tension on the bridge, my own Aquilla "type F" silver-wound, sheep-gut string goes unplayably sharp).

Have you encountered any other moments in music pre-1830 when these sorts of indications are buried in the notation? My instinct is that such notational clues don't surface on our music stands every day...