My year of listening and reading

[This is an abridged version of a longer post written for violinist.com]

Each year, as the end of December approaches, I receive an array of "year in review" newsletters. 2021 is no exception. Every time I open my inbox I find another such email, with details of performances, recordings, and other musical projects undertaken over the previous 12 months by friends and colleagues. Sometimes, reading these newsletters, I find myself wondering: how do they manage to do so much? But more often I simply enjoy the ritual of reflecting on past successes and shoring up hopes for the future.

However, as 2021 rolls into 2022, and with a fresh wave of Covid-related cancellations and closures on the horizon, I feel aware of the sheer circularity of it all. Never in my experience has the "arrow-of-time" metaphor felt less apt: 2021 doesn't really appear to be over, but (like 2020) seems ready to stretch endlessly into the future. Perhaps as a result, I feel disinclined to take an accounting of accomplishments of the past year, much less to lay out goals for the coming months. But this does seem a moment to reflect on some of the music and books that I consumed over the past year, and which made 2021 more enjoyable than it otherwise would have been.

Listening

Because I began 2020 with a busy concert schedule (albeit one cut off rather abruptly after the first quarter of the year), I count 2021 as the first year I spent mostly off the stage. Of course, there were a few straggling concerts--but, for the most part, in 2021 my musical identity was not that of a performer but of...a listener. This turned out to be the source of many unexpected delights. In the past, I spent so much time making music that I barely found the mental and aural space to enjoy hearing it; yet in 2021, I rediscovered the joys of being in the audience, and particularly of listening in complete cycles rather than just spot-checking favorite movements or works.

During the first portion of the year, I focused almost exclusively on Beethoven, listening to the bulk of his sonata, chamber, and concerto output. Being a card-carrying period performer, I am always on the lookout for compelling recordings that use fortepianos and gut strings, since, particularly with Beethoven, the old instruments make it easier to capture the gripping, volatile excitement of the music. Beethoven pushed players and instruments alike to their limits (and sometimes beyond those limits!), and the danger of the music is often dulled by the power of the modern equipment used by most performers today. It is only because the fortepiano and period violin are comparatively delicate instruments that they can be played, as Beethoven intended, at the very edge of possibility.

For some of Beethoven's repertoire, 2021 gave me the opportunity to revisit favorite cycles from an earlier phase of period performance. I listened twice-through to the marvelous piano sonata cycle by Malcolm Bilson and colleagues. Age has not dulled these performances; the cycle as a whole still strikes me as one of the greatest Beethoven recordings I've ever heard. (I also supplemented this cycle with some other, more recent recordings, including Andreas Staier's exploration of opp.31, 34, and 35.) I also re-listened to Bilson's recording of the Beethoven cello sonatas (with Anner Bylsma), and, here as well, the music-making is extraordinary. Finally, I re-listened a few times to the Beethoven piano concerto cycle, performed by Robert Levin. Although these works have been re-recorded recently by both Ronald Brautigam and Kristian Bezuidenhout, I am still partial to Levin's recording. Whereas the more recent readings find welcome lyricism and clarity in Beethoven's writing, they simply lack Levin's audacity, brilliance, and wit. Although Levin is known primarily as a Mozart performer, I think he is at his best in this slightly later repertoire. The improvised cadenza to the first movement of the Fourth Concerto is a particular highlight--though the other cadenzas, too, as well as the playing overall, are consistently astonishing. (Although I remain committed to my preference for period performances, I also loved a spectacular recent modern-instrument recording by Eugene Albulescu and the Orchestra of Friends.)

I also discovered some more recent Beethoven recordings. The most revelatory was Trio Goya's performance of the Piano Trios op.1. These early works are difficult to bring off well, since they demand that the performers balance both classical polish and lyrical intensity. Previously, I had found the Castle Trio to provide a close approximation; but Trio Goya's readings are deeper in every respect. Speaking of the piano trios, I also recently discovered a wonderful complete cycle by (modern-instrument) Van Baerle Trio. Although I still prefer Trio Goya for Op.1, these readings of the other works in the cycle are wonderfully stylish and sensitive. Alongside these recordings of the piano trios, I listened to several complete violin sonata cycles, including those by Midori Seiler with Jos van Immerseel, Susanna Ogata with Ian Watson, Ralph Holmes with Richard Burnett, and Benjamin Hudson with Mary Verney. In this field, it was difficult to find a clear favorite, since each recording had very different strengths. Finally, I surveyed a few new recordings of the Violin Concerto, of which my favorite modern-instrument reading was by Daniel Lozakovich--though my heart still belongs to both the Monica Huggett recording and the early (and live?) Heifetz/Toscanini recording.

Following my Beethoven phase, I embarked on a survey of Mozart's violin concertos in a number of new period recordings. Here, as with the Beethoven sonatas, it was impossible to choose a favorite, though among recent recordings the cycle by Christoph Koncz was perhaps the most elegant, and the cycle by Nils-Erik Sparf the most creative and compelling. (The classic recording by Monica Huggett remains my benchmark.)

Finally, I ended the year with a pretty obsessive dive into Schubert's Die Schöne Müllerin. My original go-to recording was by Ian Bostridge with Mitsuko Uchida: although the timbre of Bostridge's voice isn't always pleasing, and his intonation is occasionally imperfect, I adore his delivery of the text; and Uchida's piano playing is sublime. However, this year I listened to some other recordings: Mark Padmore with Paul Lewis (gorgeous singing, boring piano playing); Christoph Prégardien with Andreas Staier (abrasive singing, gorgeous piano playing); and Jan Kobow with Kristian Bezuidenhout (difficult to get into at first, and with a handful of imperfect songs...but ultimately mesmerizing). If only it were possible to pair Padmore with Bezuidenhout for this cycle, as Harmonia Mundi has already done for An die ferne Geliebte, Winterreise, Dichterliebe.

Finally, I enjoyed some recordings that didn't fit into any of these three major listening projects. Highlights include: Hank Knox's reading of some Scarlatti sonatas, David Hyun-Su Kim's Schumann, and Trio Goya's spectacular Haydn recording.

Reading

Book recommendations may be of less direct interest to readers here. I didn't do much violin-specific reading in the past year, though there are some broadly music-related books that I very much enjoyed. Two are new (or relatively new) trade books: Dan Moller's The Way of Bach, and Robin Wallace's Hearing Beethoven. Both are beautiful and beautifully-written; the authors reflect on music itself, as well as a wide range of related topics. On the academic side, I read or re-read a number of older books, the most enjoyable of which were Dean Sutcliffe's The Keyboard Sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, Annette Richards's The Free Fantasia and the Musical Picturesque, David Yearsley's Bach's Feet, and Nina Penner's Storytelling in Opera and Musical Theater. I also kept up a pretty brisk pace through various novels (the best of which were by Dorothy Baker, Shirley Hazzard, Dermot Healy, Martin Amis, and others) and poetry. I wrote about some of those other books in this e-interview back in March. Many of the novels I read this year were brought to my attention by the wonderful literary podcast Backlisted, which has been a source of entertainment and stimulation over the past year and a half.

Happy new year to everyone!

Franz Joseph Macdonald

Update, April 1, 2022 - I posted a slightly revised version of this essay to my blog at violinist.com

Like many others, I spent the early Fall of this year watching videos of the late Norm Macconald--and, also like many others, I had to wait until the end of the semester before finding the time to muse about the many facets of his virtuosity. Norm's talents are already widely recognized: his daring selection of subject-matter, his deadpan delivery, the drawn-out jokes that manage to ramble endlessly while still remaining coherent. Yet I am also impressed by the degree of self-reflection and thoughtfulness with which he could discuss the technical parameters of joke-telling: for instance, in this video in which he describes the perfect joke as being one in which the setup and punchline are identical or almost identical:

In a blog post, philosopher Eric Schliesser makes the lateral connection between this theory of the "perfect joke" and academic philosophy, a field in which an argument of the form "A=A" can itself be a source of humor. Schliesser speculates that, for some thinkers (he names Wittgenstein), this idea of identity-as-comedy must have been old hat; but of course the same can be said of others as well, including Slavoj Žižek, whose slim volume of jokes includes plenty that conform to this model.

This particular way of conceiving the structure of a joke--through the identity of "A=A"--is, in its abstract formalism, philosophical through-and-through. Yet various connections with music also suggest themselves. Music as an art deals regularly in humor and wit; it is also necessarily formalistic, since musical utterances accumulate meaning not through their semantic content, but as a result of the forms in which they are laid out. And, owing to its formalistic qualities, music is an art of tightly controlled repetition.

The most familiar way in which repetition features in music is through the formal trope of the recapitulation: that simultaneous return of the global tonic and the first theme, the moment that gives purpose to the trajectory of Sonata Form. Yet the kind of repetition I have in mind here as the basis for A=A-style humor occurs on a much smaller scale, through the repeating motifs that give any piece of music, in any genre, its coherence. (These repetitions can be exact, or they can be slightly altered; for instance, in Mozart's famous "easy" Piano Sonata K545, the opening rhythm in bars 1-2 repeats, with different pitches and chords, in bars 3-4, giving the impression of a consistent, paired statement-and-response.) Much of this small-scale repetition is made possible by the modularity of music. Phrases are made up of small, separable chunks, and these can be repeated, shifted around, combined, recombined, and otherwise mutated as a piece unfolds.

Much musical humor arises through the deft repetition of such chunks. One particularly famous instance of wit in music is Haydn's "Joke" Quartet, op. 33 no. 2, whose last movement presents a series of small modules in the first phrase:

Module A, in this case, occupies the first two bars. Bars 3-4 present an altered version of A, with a slightly varied melody and a harmony 'on' the dominant; and bars 5ff present yet another altered version. The eponymous "joke" is that A contains a melody suggestive of the beginning of a movement but a bassline suggestive of cadential closure; thus, in the first two bars, Haydn uses A to begin the movement, but in the final moments he uses A for the ending as well:

The humorous effect is helped along by the grand pauses as well, which prevent unsuspecting listeners from knowing quite where the piece ends. One possible end comes in bar 166, where the first theme also ended. But Haydn extends the movement, leaving a gap of another three bars, and then presenting A--which, though it sounds like the start of something new, also provides a satisfying harmonic ending to the work. In this case, the joke is, quite literally, that A=A: that the setup and punchline are contained in equal measure in the kernel with which the movement begins.

Another, similar example of the same kind of humor occurs in the last movement of Mozart's Symphony no. 39, when the gesture presented at the beginning as an "opening" module is reused in the final bar. Here, as in Haydn, the same calculation goes on in hindsight: we realize that the gesture traces a descent from scale-degree 5 to 1, and that it can therefore double as a perfectly good closing module, even though in its first appearance this motion is hidden because of the rhythmic underlay.

Jokes of the form A=A, musical or not, seem to be worlds away from other modes of humor explored by Norm Macdonald. Yet extensions and variations of this strategy can be located throughout his corpus, as well as in some musical works. A staple of his humor, for instance, is the long, rambling joke that ends with a silly (often inane) punchline. The celebrated "Moth" joke is exemplary:

There are many respects in which the narrative strategy at work in this joke can be related to musical compositions. For instance, much of Norm's delivery involves "playing dumb": he pretends to be inarticulate or otherwise unable to follow the joke's narrative thread, the better to make a heroic rescue when, at the end, he delivers the unexpected punchline. This technique of feigning incompetence has a precursor in many 18th-century musical compositions in which the simulation of improvisation (as in written-out cadenzas, fantasias, and capriccios) would be more theatrically convincing if the player or composer used haphazard structures or modulations. These would seem to be incompatible with careful, compositional planning, and would help give listeners the impression that improvisation was taking place. Haydn's Capriccio in C major--both an exemplar of musical humor and a masterpiece of simulated improvisation--shows both techniques in action. The work alternates tightly-structured motivic elaborations with passages of blatantly un-melodic writing, haphazard modulations, and parenthetical digressions that are neither properly begun nor properly ended. The performer, as a result, seems to be following whims of the moment rather than a prefabricated compositional plan:

In both Haydn's Capriccio and Norm's Moth joke, the formal plan of A=A is still present, hidden within the protracted structure. Both narratives elevate bloatedness to the level of a humorous trope. In the moth joke, Norm constructs an extended parenthetical about the moth's personal difficulties; and in Haydn's Capriccio, the harmonic plan follows a number of extended digressions into distant tonal areas. Both end with an obvious, even banal, return to the subject-matter with which they began--and it is in this sense that their overarching paths still follow the plan of A=A: or, more correctly, of A.......=A. As soon as Norm says "a moth goes into X", a punchline involving "attracted to the light" seems inevitable. And likewise, built into Haydn's musical vernacular is the requirement that a composition end with an emphatic assertion of the tonic. (In the case of this particular work, the melody begins G-C and thus prefigures the V-I motion of the last two chords.) Both works complicate the path from the first phrase to the last; yet both nonetheless derive a large part of their humor from the way they flirt with incoherence while nonetheless eventually regaining their narrative thread.

Of course, A=A is not the entire story, in either Haydn's or Macdonald's comedy. Even if utterances that take this form are possibly funny, it seems clear that they are not necessarily funny. One question, for instance, is how much the delivery contributes to all of this. Is it in the text, or in the performance, that the essence of the joke is to be found?

In both cases, delivery is certainly part of the package. It seems obvious in Norm's case that we're laughing not only at what is said, but at the way it is said, including his body-language and stage deportment both before and after the joke. (Before: setting it up as being someone else's idea [playing dumb, again]; and after: glaring at Conan, trying to gauge the reaction--or, in other cases, quietly chuckling at the jokes himself.)

The importance of performance is perhaps less self-evident in the case of Haydn, but it is nonetheless equally relevant. In both the Quartet and the Capriccio, Haydn weaves performative concerns into the structure of the composition. In the quartet, the extended pauses are integral parts of the joke--both because they help to "disentangle" the modules, allowing us to hear more clearly the I-V-I motion of A when it is used as the final utterance, and because they help to build uncertainty as to when the movement actually ends. In the Capriccio, Haydn instructs the pianist to sustain some notes (particularly those immediately preceding audacious modulations) until the sound has naturally faded away before moving on to the next segment. Both of these techniques--the grand pauses and the protracted sustains--are meant to slow down the performer: perhaps to simulate the act of thinking, of stalling for time, of searching for the next word. Both Haydn and Norm prefer to stumble, fail, and splutter as they seem to lose themselves in a narrative loop. Yet both ultimately arrive back again at A.

Mozart's humor, in the 39th Symphony and the various other works in which he mixes up opening and closing modules or plays dumb, is geared less towards performance and more towards abstract elements of the compositional language. Why? We can't be certain, but one possibility is that he is more interested in subversion than straightforward joke-telling. Haydn's jokes make uproarious humor a feature: they want to be noticed by listeners. Although Mozart tells his share of blatant jokes (most famously in A Musical Joke, K.522), his humor is generally far subtler, often leaving us wondering whether what we just heard was a joke at all. When he wants to maximize this ambiguity, the best way to do it is not to implicate performative decisions, but allow the players to keep a straight face while the musical grammar seems to unravel.