Accompanying the Beethoven Violin Sonatas

This weekend, I attended a marathon performance of all of Beethoven's violin sonatas in a single concert, organized by one of my McGill colleagues as a studio project. Each of her students (plus two participants from other violin studios) paired up with a pianist to learn and polish one of Beethoven's ten magnificent violin sonatas. Along the way, a wide range of other colleagues attended studio classes to coach the students (including a modern piano professor, our historical keyboard professor, and me, as a historical violin and musicology professor), and then, this weekend, the whole gang got together to present the cycle in public, moving chronologically from Op. 12 no. 1 all the way through Op. 96. (Studio teachers, take note! This was a fabulous experience for everyone involved.)

I love the Beethoven sonatas dearly, and I know them well, having performed the cycle a few times on period instruments. But as a performer, I've always split the sonatas into three concerts, which in turn could be separated by days or even months. I had never heard the whole cycle live in a single event--and this listening experience alone was edifying and instructive. There is the sheer creative ingenuity Beethoven exhibits across the set. It feels like each work is a fresh attempt to solve the problem of how to write for these two instruments. Not once did my attention flag. I also marveled at Beethoven's creative development across the set. Unlike his piano sonatas, symphonies, and quartets, which are spaced more evenly across his career, the violin sonatas are chronologically lumpy. He composed the first nine within about five years (c.1798-1803) but waited nearly a decade before writing the final sonata, in 1812. This, too, is remarkable. I still find it hard to believe that the first sonata and the "Kreutzer" have only half a decade between them--that an artist can undergo that much growth in such a short span of time, redefining so many formal and expressive features of the genre. And of course, it was equally uplifting to see ten different students, each a true musical individual at a singular stage of development, grappling with the composer, the music, and the instrument.

Watching this inspiring performance, I found myself reflecting on what it is that makes these sonatas so difficult. Flip through the score: there's nothing in the music that "appears" at first glance to be technically impossible--certainly nothing that even begins to approach the challenges posed by, say, Paganini's Caprices, composed 1802-1817 and thus contemporary to the last five of Beethoven's violin sonatas. And yet, despite the seemingly simple notation, these pieces are incredibly hard.

Many of the challenges Beethoven sets for us violinists in these works are expressive rather than technical. If I had to identify the single most important thing for a violinist to keep in mind while playing this music, it would be this: that we are, for much of the time, accompanying the piano. The late 18th-century violin sonata was a genre in which the piano soloist would take center stage, with the violinist often playing quiet whole notes in support; and although Beethoven does expand the role of the violinist beyond mere accompaniment, very often we are there to bolster the pianist. This is even reflected in the way Beethoven and his contemporaries referred to the genre. Although today we think of these as "sonatas for violin and piano," in the late 18th century they were known as "sonatas for piano and violin."

If you're a violinist starting to dig in to these pieces, one way to begin thinking about your role is to ask your pianist play various passages without you. Sometimes, as in the opening phrases of Sonatas 1, 3, 4, and 8, you'll see that absolutely nothing is missing, that the piece is "complete" even without the violin part. Ask yourself, then: in such cases, what exactly is your job? Why did Beethoven bother writing a violin part? One answer is that the violinist's function is to provide aural "background" so that the pianist can act like a soloist. In Sonata no. 3, for instance, the piano part alone sounds like a coherent solo sonata. Add the violin playing those half notes, though, and you suddenly have an "orchestral" background from which the pianist emerges, like a concerto soloist. (In fact, once you see it this way, isn't the opening just like the beginning of the "Emperor" Concerto?) At other times, as in Sonatas 1 and 8, the unison helps the pianist sound more orchestral. And in Sonata 4, the violinist gets to manufacture the illusion of the piano's resonance, so that the pianist is free to play a clear left hand without obscuring the eighth notes with the pedal. With the violinist's help, the pianist can have it both ways, articulating the left hand while also producing a halo of sound that supports the long slur and adds warmth.

Here's how I usually describe all this: the violinist's job in 80% of this music is to make the pianist sound better. Once you take this outlook on board, so many interpretive matters clarify themselves. Vibrato, tone color, articulation, and the like are suddenly to be used in the service of blending with the piano and creating resonance that is unavailable on that instrument alone. Try, as an exercise, having your pianist play just the left hand along with the violin part, so you can coordinate these matters: you'll find, for instance, that if you really focus on supporting the piano, you'll vibrate a lot less on those long notes than you might have otherwise. One of my favorite passages for this exercise is the theme in the slow movement of the "Spring" Sonata (no. 5). Those interjected quarter-note sighs in the first iteration of the theme, and the syncopated eighth notes and gentle sixteenth-and-eighth-note rhythm when it repeats, need to be both audible and truly in the background, supporting what the soloist does without taking attention away. When the violin plays a dissonance that is absent from the piano part (the G flat in m.35, for example), it's a moment to reclaim aural focus. And even when the task isn't to play an accompaniment "with" the pianist, you can benefit from imitating the pianist's style of executing similar figures. In the slow movement of Sonata 6, don't try to sing out every sixteenth-note triplet in the arpeggiated accompaniment passage in the second half of the movement; instead, ask your pianist to play their version of that accompaniment for you, and try to imitate the lilt so easily achieved when a keyboardist plays that figuration.

Perhaps because the violinist spends so much time accompanying, I've always felt a little strange standing in front of my pianist when I play these pieces. So I generally set up the stage with the pianist in front, while I stand behind and read over their shoulder. The very nicest way to do this is to have the pianist actually facing the audience, the end of the instrument pointed directly out, with violinist standing by the pianist's left side. This is how musicians generally set up in the late 18th century, and it works beautifully in this repertoire. It makes it easier to play in the background, since the piano is, quite literally, in front--and it carries the added benefit of allowing you to actually see the pianist's left hand and adjust your playing in response. The benefits accrue everywhere, but are especially palpable when the violin and piano left hand carry joint accompaniments. Of course, being a historical performer, I'm ok doing wacky things like radically rethinking the stage setup for this music, since I'm not contending with the weight of a modern-instrument performance tradition. But as HIP practices become increasingly mainstream, even modern players might want to experiment with this setup. (And, to their great credit, many of the McGill students did this past weekend!) It really allows both players to make these pieces into the chamber masterpieces they are, rather than putting the accompanist out front while the piano soloist, in the back, does much of the work.

Another set of ideas that can help performers find their way through this music involves understanding the gestures that make up Beethoven's expressive arsenal. I hinted briefly already at the value of thinking this way, when discussing the opening "concerto" passage of Sonata 3. Once you recognize the opening four bars as sharing some elements of the "concerto" genre, your pianist might feel emboldened to play those bars out of tempo, like the quasi-cadenzas they appear to be. This idea can be generalized as follows: always ask whether the texture of a given phrase implies some performance directives. To me, the opening of Sonata 1 looks like the start of a symphony; and this means that my job as a violinist is to help the pianist sound like a full orchestra, complete with strings, winds, trumpets, and drums. This means that I'll limit the vibrato and adopt a different tone color than I would in a more melodic setting. Sonatas 2 and 6 open with what seems more a string quartet texture, with the violinist playing either second violin or second violin + viola, and this in turn carries a different set of associations for phrasing and rhythmic feel.

Nor are Beethoven's signals purely textural. Other rhetorical or expressive gestures come in the form of rhythmic patterns that suggest various dance types, which can also offer insight into tempo and phrasing. The last movement of Sonata 2 is a minuet--so, don't play it too fast, and be sure those lovely syncopations tug against the more usual downbeat-centric hierarchy. Likewise, the second movement of Sonata 8 is a minuet--in this case, don't play it too slowly! And make sure the unslurred quarter-note upbeats to the second melody are light. Other dance-like patterns found throughout these works include gigues (last movement of Sonata 1); contredanse (last movement of Sonata 3); gavotte (last movement of Sonata 8). Other rhetorical markers, meanwhile, are broader and say something about the atmosphere of a piece. Particularly well represented in this cycle are features of the "pastoral" style (drone basses, 6/8 meter, woodwind textures), which show up in Sonatas 4, 5, 8, and 10, and may suggest a less virtuosic, and more muted and intimate style, than what you often hear in modern-instrument recordings.

Of course, despite their often simple appearance on the page, these sonatas are exceptionally difficult. But I hope this brief overview of some of their expressive features helps others find a productive point of entry into Beethoven's writing for these two instruments. Although thinking of the music in such ways does not automatically disarm the technical challenges, I've found time and again that the technical difficulties become less acute with these adjustments of mindset--that accompaniment passages become a little easier to play when we stop trying to emphasize every note, and that even the flashier phrases become more approachable when we recognize them as part of an intimate dialogue with the other performer rather than as soloistic flights that demand high-octane delivery. The dance-like movements, too, become easier when we allow the gestures to have some strong notes and some weaker notes, and when we relax our sound and arms on the lighter parts of the bars. Needless to say, these are just a few of the relevant expressive issues, and there are others as well, for instance the sense of humor that imbues these sonatas, and other kinds of expressive characters. I may revisit them in a future blog--but for now, happy practicing!

Embellishing Mozart's C-major Quintet

 For many of us who play music by canonical composers like Mozart, the notated score is sacred. Our job as performers, we might think, is to realize the notation as faithfully as possible--and this means in particular that we can't just change things without Mozart's permission. But this isn't how musical scores were treated during Mozart's lifetime. It's now clear that Mozart and virtually all his contemporaries expected performers to make all kinds of changes to the music they played, especially through the insertion of elaborate cadenzas, lead-ins ("Eingänge") and embellishments.

Research into these topics has been carried out most thoroughly in studies of Mozart's keyboard music. And the practice of improvisation and embellishment in modern-day performing culture are most closely associated with keyboard players, especially Robert Levin, who has recorded highly embellished readings of Mozart's complete piano sonatas and piano concertos. (There are very few exceptions; one of them is Nils-Erik Sparf's lively and daringly unconventional recording of Mozart's violin concertos.) One reason for this keyboard-centrism is the simple, historical fact that Mozart himself identified primarily as a virtuoso pianist for much of his career, and studies of his performing practices therefore often lead back to his activities as a keyboardist. In my own recent book on Mozart, which devotes a chapter each to improvisation and embellishment, keyboard music features more centrally than string music because there's more direct evidence for Mozart's stylistic preferences, in the form of manuscript models, published variants, and pedagogical samples, in his keyboard output.

But I wonder whether there's also another, perhaps more interesting, reason that most Mozartean embellishers are keyboardists. Much of Mozart's keyboard music is written not just for a soloist playing alongside accompanying forces, but rather for an individual player, as in the piano sonatas or in so many concerto passages where the orchestra drops out and the soloist forges on alone. In such context, embellishment presents the fewest possible practical obstacles. The performer who plays entirely alone can do all sorts of things to mess with the musical text, and never needs to worry about the effect this might have on collaborators. Thus, Levin's hilarious reading of the last movement of the Sonata K.283 features madcap textural changes and transpositions, and Andreas Staier's brilliant recording of the last movement of the Sonata K.331 introduces some unexpected contrapuntal tricks during repeated passages--and these kinds of textual interventions would be impossible in the context of a work for multiple performers. For us string players, however, everything we play by Mozart is a work for multiple performers! What are we to do?

I started asking such questions in earnest last year, when I recorded Mozart's violin-viola duos (and I blogged back then about many of the performance decisions, including the embellishments and cadenzas). One of the reasons I selected those pieces as my entry-point into embellishing Mozart's string music is that the players are comparatively unconstrained. Although there are many instances of real textural complexity, there are also plenty of phrases where the violinist plays the tune and the violist accompanies. (This did not stop me from inserting a surprise viola Eingang in the first movement of the B-flat duo!) The practice of writing and performing embellishments for the duos was highly instructive--but at no point did it challenge my fundamental understanding of the topic.

This month, however, I'm performing the great String Quintet in C major, K.515, perhaps the most daring piece Mozart wrote. Part of the pleasure of doing K.515 is, of course, simply to be inside Mozart's mind at this high-point of his compositional life. A nice add-on, however, is that I get to try to embellish in a limit-case: a context where it is always stylistically appropriate but extremely difficult to pull off in a way that seems musically appropriate.

One of the hardest things about embellishing in K.515 is that counterpoint features centrally throughout the work--and this means that very few melodies can be innocently tweaked without wreaking havoc among the other players. For instance, the final theme in the first movement exposition might look like a perfect candidate for embellishment:

However, following those first four bars, the theme is immediately played in octaves between the first and second violins, and imitated contrapuntally by the first viola and cello. The first violinist can embellish mm.132-35, but short of pre-coordinating some embellishments with the other players (a no-go, since it would shatter any sense of improvisatory freedom) this would mean that the embellished theme is followed by a necessarily unembellished restatement. That's something Mozart himself rarely gives us in his composed embellishments. Embellishments are meant to ratchet up the intensity of a melody, not vanish and let the intensity wane.

Then there are passages like this:

Here, it's entirely possible to insert embellishments! First off, the violinist has four bars of sitting on a D dominant 7th chord, and can easily turn those bars into a stylistically-appropriate Eingang of some kind. I jotted this down, but the possibilities are endless:

However, problems pile up in the following phrase. Beginning in m.86, we get another melody that should be eminently embellishable: there's no immediate contrapuntal imitation, and the first violinist is just as free as any soloist, with all four other players holding long notes beneath the tune. But look closer, and once again constraints appear. The voice-leading is such that, when we move from tonic to dominant in m.87 and m.89, the first violinist still needs to hover somewhere around the fifth scale degree, as in the unembellished original. Move anywhere else and we'd hear parallel octaves, since the second violinist controls the third scale degree and the two violists control the first scale degree. What might one do? A possibility would be something like this, a chromatic wiggle that coexists with the original melody for m.86:

As far as embellishments go, I like this one--though it hardly draws attention to itself as a florid embellishment.

This previous example points to the most pervasive difficulty in embellishing Mozart's chamber music. Mozart favored an embellishment style full of chromatic sinews and twisty gestures that circle around the notes they embellish rather than connecting them in a direct scale. But introducing such winding, circuitous embellishments often brings problems of voice-leading in music so densely notated as these string quintets. This is not to say that embellishment is impossible; but the performer who wants to embellish is certainly on a leash.

In the slow movement, these effects are slightly diminished. The recurring theme calls out for embellishments, as to all repeated themes in Mozart, and here the soloistic nature of the first violin line makes intervention easier than it was in the first movement. One of the interesting questions here is how to treat the many short rests (an eighth note, a quarter note) in the first violin part--whether florid embellishments can just cross over those silences, as Mozart's own embellishments often do in his keyboard music, or whether the silences need to be observed in order to clear aural space for interjections from other players. My solution has generally been to cross over the rests; thus, this cadential figure returns twice and can be treated with various embellishments--perhaps a diatonic arpeggio on its first recurrence and a twisting, chromatic scale on its second:

Then there are passages where playful imitation occurs between the players, and embellishments in the first violin part will be a spur to creative invention for the first violist:

So far I've composed embellishments for the first violin part in the first two movements. The minuet, like the first movement, offers very few possibilities (though I'll certainly come up with some chromatic variants for the cadence gesture in m.9 (and m.23 of the Trio). But it's the last movement I'm most excited to do, where the rondo theme repeats a few times across the movement and feels very much like the soloistic rondos elsewhere in Mozart. It should offer plenty of opportunities for embellishment--and, as with the previous movements, I'm sure I'll learn a lot in the process of writing them!

In the meantime, here's a messy draft of my embellishments for the slow movement, in case others are interested in seeing them and playing them--or taking inspiration from these ideas and trying their own hands at composing different embellishments. These generally follow Mozart's melodic style as closely as possible--though I'm certain that these will change once we start rehearsing in two weeks:

Diary of a Recording: Mozart's Violin-Viola Duos

I've been a Mozart fanatic for as long as I can remember, and his music is absolutely central to my life -- outside my career as a violinist, that is. I've conducted his operas, symphonies, and concertos; I've written a book on interpreting his instrumental works; I jump at any opportunity to coach his chamber music; I routinely try to pick my way through the solo parts of his piano concertos at home when nobody's listening...and yet for some reason I've rarely found occasion to actually perform his string music, preferring instead to engage with it as a conductor, teacher, or author. Maybe I've been just a wee bit scared of the enormous challenges, both interpretive and technical, he throws at us violinists!

But this summer, my relationship with Mozart changed. I finally gathered the courage to embark on a recording project exploring his string writing. I experimented quite a bit along the way, and I learned a lot in the process!

Where does one begin when trying to get inside Mozart's violin music? Pianists have it easier than we do, since the piano concerto served as an artistic vehicle for the entirety of Mozart's life and career, meaning that any point of entry into the repertoire is sure to yield interpretive riches. Mozart first dipped his toes into the genre of the piano concerto at age 11, with four pastiche concertos arranged from music by contemporary composers, and he wrote his last piano concerto in 1791, his own final year. This means that his piano concertos chronicle a good 25 years of his stylistic explorations. By contrast, his violin concertos are youthful pieces, all dating from his teens. They provide a snapshot of his development at a single moment, but they are not mature masterworks. And even broadening the purview to include pieces outside his official five concertos, such as the "Haffner" Serenade K.250, or the spectacular Sinfonia Concertante K.364, we remain in the early phases of Mozart's musical development. The "Haffner" dates from 1776, only a year after the A-major violin concerto, and the Sinfonia Concertante from 1779, when the composer was just 23. The music is great by any measure; yet it clusters at a single moment of his life, and it can feel limited.

Why does Mozart turn away from the violin concerto at this point in his life? It's not that he abandoned string writing altogether -- though he did announce to his father, in a letter of 7 February 1778, that he planned to stop performing publicly on the violin in order to focus his efforts on the piano and composition. And with this turn away from public performing as a violinist, his innovations with the instrument shifted away from music for the concert stage, relocating instead to the home and salon, where Mozart continued to play the violin and viola as a chamber musician. It comes as no surprise, then, that beginning in the early 1780s, the string writing in his chamber music became more daring and more complex. Thus, I elected to begin my explorations in that world -- not with the quartets or quintets, but with the two extraordinary duos for violin and viola, K.423 and K.424. I spent spring and summer of this year preparing these remarkable pieces with the intrepid Catherine Cosbey of the Cavani Quartet and McGill's violin faculty, and we took them into the recording studio in June. The other works on recording are the Violin Sonata in A major K.305 in an anonymous arrangement for two violins published around 1799, as well as selections from Mozart's final opera La Clemenza di Tito in an arrangement published around 1800. Although Catherine is primarily a modern violinist, we used a period-instrument setup. I played viola for half the recording and violin for the other half. Despite my longtime professional association with Mozart, the experience was by turns challenging and revelatory.

Perhaps the primary discovery I made during this process -- maybe it sounds obvious in hindsight, but I didn't take it for granted at the start! -- was just how good Mozart's violin-viola duos are. Of course I had played them recreationally before, but I had never actually learned them properly or interpreted them, and I was unprepared for their astonishingly high quality. Many academic discussions of the duos focus on the fact that Mozart wrote them as a favor to Michael Haydn, who was unable to finish a set of six duos and requested that Mozart provide the remaining two. In such discussions there's often an implication that Mozart tailored his duos to match the quality of Michael Haydn's less inventive efforts. But nothing could be further from the truth. I discovered, approaching the pieces this year, that there isn't a lazy phrase to be found. This is true, first of all, on the level of sheer compositional technique. Mozart's craftsmanship is always astonishing. Consider, for instance, the first movement of the G-major duo K.423, whose second theme is full of subtle wit. The melody seems unassuming enough, but look closely and you see that each zigzagging interval is one step larger than the previous one. The theme begins (m. 27) with an ascending second, followed by a descending third, ascending fourth, descending fifth, ascending sixth, and descending seventh - a fun effect in itself, since Mozart somehow manages to bring this off without warping that old standby of a chord progression, I-V-vi-IV, or undermining the tune's lyricism. After this wedge-shaped bit of melody, in m. 29 the sixths and sevenths catch on and spin out into a melodic answer in their own right, even as they continue to push lower and lower, the harmonic rhythm increasing before steering to a cadence.

So far so good. But in the recap, when the theme returns, the descending answer runs away with itself. The viola begins the gesture in m. 118. But instead of successfully bringing about a cadence, as the violin did previously, the two players get tangled up, endlessly tossing the melody back and forth and continuing to desperately transpose up so as not to crash into the bottom of their instruments' ranges. They keep this process going for so long that, if we removed the ascending leaps, the whole passage would plunge down more than four octaves. Meanwhile, as the players get lost in the tangle, chromaticism creeps in, and by the time the violist starts in on the sixteenth notes in m.121, things seem to be spiraling out of control! Yet somehow we arrive back on the necessary predominant in m.122 and come, once again, to the polite cadence a bar later.

Beyond such compositional cleverness, the duos are impressive for their expressive range. We find in them a massive store of operatic references -- there are phrases and melodies in the last movement of the G-major duo that come to feature in Don Giovanni, and throughout the B-flat duo that come to feature in Die Zauberflöte. Most of all, however, I'm struck by Mozart's textural ingenuity. Even with only two instruments at his disposal, he simulates a dizzying number of non-duo textures, from the string quartet (when both musicians play double-stops, yielding four-part writing) to horn calls, symphonic fanfares, an aria, and more. Taking this in, and considering that Mozart composed the duos in late 1783, I found myself understanding that this is where he really learned how to write for strings. By the time he wrote the two duos, he had completed only one of the mature, "celebrated" string quartets, and in the duos' immediate aftermath he would write five more in relatively rapid succession. Perhaps the burgeoning textural and instrumental ingenuity in those quartets was sparked by the creative constraints he faced here, in writing for only two instruments.

All this was on my mind while preparing the recording. But the duos, like all of Mozart's music, also present considerable interpretive challenges that performers have to face.

One of my Mozartian obsessions is musical character. It's often said that Mozart's output is fundamentally operatic, and I wholeheartedly agree. Every phrase suggests a character of some sort, and the duos are no exception, whether in the literal operatic references (for instance, Donna Elvira's aria "Mi tradì" makes a brief appearance in the last movement of the G-major duo, m. 96-97) or through more general references -- here a gesture implying the gravitas and menace of The Count, there an amorous march redolent of The Countess, elsewhere the patter of Figaro or Masetto. The question I sometimes wonder about, however, is not whether there are "characters" present in the music, but how to tell where one character ends and another begins. Do we divvy up expression at the level of the entire phrase? Of the half-phrase? Perhaps by the bar, or even the beat? I feel that this may be the most pressing challenge I face when interpreting Mozart.

In some rare cases, Mozart makes it very easy to tell where one character ends and the next begins. Consider, as an example from a different work, the familiar first movement of the G-major violin concerto, mm. 64-68. The contrast between the staccato marks and slurs, which suggests a broader expressive contrast between implied fanfares and swooping, lyrical gestures, makes it clear that the passage implies a dialogue, and that the characters shift back-and-forth by the bar. No problem there! But the situation is usually more ambiguous. How many expressive stances might we find, for instance, in this unassuming passage from the slow movement of the G-major duo K.423?

On first glance, it might seem like just one: some sort of a "singing" melody in the violin, tied together with the two rhyming downbeats of m.9 and 10, all above an unobtrusive accompaniment in the viola. But, looking more closely, each bar also carries its own expressive implications, and the whole progression tracks a series of highly distinct gestures, perhaps even a hint of dramatic narrative. The first bar shown here, m. 8, features a slinky, intense chromatic line. Indeed, when we hit G# on the downbeat of m.9, there's even a small moment of uncertainty: is it an A flat, and have we just veered into F minor? (The movement is marked Adagio, so between the slow tempo and a touch of rubato to elongate the G sharp slightly, the suspense is not negligible!) But then the note resolves up to A, and we remain safely harbored in F major. ("Phew! That was a close call!") The ascending figure later in m.9, with its delightful dotted rhythms, seems to laugh after this brief musical double entendre. ("Did someone say F minor? Not me! Hah!") The bar might be played in a way that is dainty, almost coy. And then the trill-and-scale in m.10 seems altogether more lyrical, confident, and operatic. Viewed thus, the character changes by the bar -- and this rapid succession of implied expressive states is a challenge to bring out. Both performers need to remain constantly alert for opportunities to deploy those small shifts of inflection so as to convey the whole story.

The situation is largely the same in the fast movements. In the B-flat duo first movement, the second theme runs:

Here too, it isn't obvious how many characters we should imagine. It might be just one -- another largely lyrical melodic line. But maybe the pantomime unfolds more quickly. Perhaps the upbeat (m.43) is playful, slowing down with the ascending chromatic line and hesitating ever so slightly to create another moment of suspense: something new is coming! What kind of theme will follow? In m. 44, we find out that the theme is lyrical. The arpeggiated line can swoop forward and up. The real question is about m. 45: are the trills joking, even teasing? Or do they remain lyrical? That the repetition of the theme in the subsequent phrase places the trills in both instrumental parts (m. 49) makes me think the gesture in m.45 is more delightful than lyrical, less a continuation of m. 44 than a new, interrupting idea that takes hold and humorously distracts both players away from the songlike theme that began the phrase. Then, m.46 stops the trilling delight and re-introduces melodic sincerity.

In the above examples, nothing conclusive can be said about these changes of character. They may simply be a matter of taste: how playful, how irreverent, how mercurial do you like your Mozart? Those with a high tolerance for Mozartian volatility will accept more rapid changes of character; those who prefer a more staid Mozart will find my suggestions implausible. But there's little in the music itself to adjudicate the matter. The interpretive approach I find useful in such cases, and one I explore at greater length in the final chapter of my book, is to really focus on what specific expectations are plausible at each individual musical moment. To do this, I imagine that I am, truly, encountering the piece for the first time. This isn't a cliché -- it suggests a very specific stance, one that lives in the moment and ignores our knowledge about how each phrase will actually unfold. In the case of the K.423 slow movement, with that G-sharp discussed above, the very idea that we should pretend it "might be an A flat" relies on this outlook. Sure, in some sense we know that the G sharp is, in fact, a G sharp, that it will resolve up to A, and that the F major chord will continue through the bar. But if we pretend just for a moment that we don't know that, then a whole new interpretive mindset presents itself. The viola accompaniment doesn't make it clear whether the chord is major or minor. We can easily try to imagine that the note might in fact be an A flat, and that it will move down to F and set off a soaring, dark F minor arpeggio. The entire notion that the phrase is somehow dangerous, that the character might have to change by the bar, follows irresistibly when we begin to think of music in this way, adopting a stance of make-believe ignorance, responding to each successive moment on its own terms and pretending that the interpretation isn't premeditated. Applying this approach to Mozart often leads to readings that are alert, dramatic, even wild. We are able to hear, and thus to play, each piece as though it is, in fact, unfolding in real time from a series of compositional decisions. Asking at every opportunity what Mozart "might have done" differently and comparing the options, can spark a more complex and nuanced way of approaching the issue both of character and of character-shift.

In other cases, meanwhile, the question of how quickly expressive states shift is moot: it might be clear that one character persists over a long stretch of music. Even in those cases, however, identifying a phrase's expressive world is not always a simple matter. For me, playing viola in K.424, I faced this challenge most directly in the slow movement. The violinist doesn't need to entertain any doubt: Mozart marks the movement "cantabile" and spins out one of his most operatic melodies:

For the violist, however, the nature of the phrase is far less obvious! What kind of accompaniment is this? Preparing for our recording, we experimented with a range of options. The usual approach, and the first we tried, is to play the accompaniment fully legato, in the style of a wind serenade -- as if scored for basset horns and bassoons. We also experimented with bowings, trying both linked and unlinked versions of the quarter-eighth rhythm. Then we explored a totally different conception of the piece, playing the viola part very staccato (except when there are slurs), and imagining the accompaniment as if scored for a strummed instrument like guitar or lute. I even tried it pizzicato once or twice! We tried, too, a middle-of-the-road version -- what I thought of as staccato with a dab of "fake reverb". For the recording, we ultimately settled on doing it mostly staccato: not actually plucked, but light and short enough that it would sound song-like. But, even though that's how we recorded it, it's clear that the choice might be wrong. The piece remains elusive, and I have no doubt that when I next perform it, I'll feel differently about the articulation and, by extension, the expressive nature of the movement.

Although in this particular case I don't feel that I personally hit on the one "right" answer, there's a more general principle at work. One of the fundamental goals I always pursue when interpreting Mozart is to be alert to possibilities for simulating the sounds and styles of other instruments. Sure, I'm actually playing the violin or viola (or talking to a member of an orchestra, as the case may be); but often Mozart writes music that seems ventriloquistic, where one instrument is meant to embody the timbre or attitude of another. This is the thought behind my deliberations on the slow movement of K.424 and the question of basset-horn vs. guitar. In addition to that example, there are plenty of other phrases in the duos where such antics take place: at times, for instance, the viola part approximates a horn call (K.423 last movement, mm. 34-39), and perhaps this means that the violin during this phrase is really meant to feel a bit like an oboe -- boisterous and reedy. Elsewhere, including much of the first movement of K.424, it feels like both instruments are referencing a wind serenade. And needless to say, this idea applies across Mozart's output, far beyond the duos. In the string chamber repertoire alone, we find countless horn calls (famously at the outset of the E-flat major string quintet), and the same might be said of the concertos -- consider the G-major concerto, where in the first movement (mm. 76-77) the soloist joins a melody previously played by the winds. But these questions struck me as being particularly acute in the context of the duos, where the instrumental forces are uniquely limited. In the concerto, the soloist plays with the winds but is not necessarily ventriloquizing a wind line, whereas in the duos there is a much more visceral approximation of a wide variety of instrumental writing, and thus a relentless challenge to the performers to adopt the right kind of "voice" for each phrase.

One final realm of experimentation in this recording was embellishment. This, too, has been central to my Mozartian explorations in the past -- I write about it in Chapter 4 of my book, as well as in this open-access article. Although we know that Mozart himself was a habitual ornamenter, and he expected his contemporaries to creatively intervene in his works by adding extensive embellishments, many string players have been slow to take up the challenge. Period-instrument pianists are generally more willing -- Robert Levin's complete cycle of Mozart's piano sonatas is a fascinating example of the interpretive riches that flow when a performer is sufficiently uninhibited! -- and in approaching the duos we set ourselves the task of bringing the same ethos into Mozart's string music. Of course, the situation in a duo is a little different from that in a sonata: an individual pianist can intervene in a musical text without worrying about how any embellishments might affect other performers' lines, whereas in a duo the players need to respond to each other. Even so, in this recording we went all-out.

We started by adding significant embellishments in all repeated passages, which was Mozart's own practice. This means that embellishments -- sometimes so dense that they seem more like wholesale variations -- feature in the repeated exposition from the first movement of K.423 as well as in smaller-scale formal repeats, such as reprises of the rondo theme in the last movement of K.423 and all the repeats in the variation movement of K.424. Throughout, we attempted to mirror the style of embellishments Mozart uses in the handful of movements for which he provided models. Here's what we came up with, for instance for the rondo-finale of K.423. Mozart's original theme runs:

Our embellishments for one of the melodic reprises (the handwritten passage pasted into the score):

We wrote different embellishments for each appearance of the theme, increasing the density of additional notes every time the theme recurs. In another case, in the slow movement of K.423, we drew embellishments from the first edition of the piece, published shortly after Mozart's death. The Bärenreiter edition excludes these because they can't be confirmed to have originated from Mozart; but we thought the style was convincing, so we re-introduced them! And even if they weren't written by Mozart himself, they are contemporaneous, so they certainly reflect historically-appropriate practices:

Finally, we added cadenzas at every fermata, and even placed one or two brief extra cadenzas in the outer movements of K.424 where no fermata is indicated but where we thought Mozart might have expected a touch of improvisation. We generally tried to base these, too, on models: for instance, the cadenza we added in the K.424 variation movement imitates the cadenza Mozart wrote for a piano variation set. For the other cadenzas, we drew from motifs in each movement and did our best to match Mozart's style.

It's been an exhilarating and rewarding experience to get inside this music and to try to give it fresh, creative life. The final product is due for release in November. I certainly hope this will be but the first step in a longer-term project featuring similar expressive experimentation with Mozart's other, later string chamber music -- but in the meantime, we have another round of edits to check!

Utopia and its discontents

What comes to mind when we hear the word "Utopia"? Perhaps a particular set of texts, mostly from the worlds of philosophy or political theory. More likely, we think of a place--one that is Edenic and flawless, a paradise for its inhabitants, albeit one that is impossible to actually construct. But what I've always found strange about the idea of Utopia is the divergence between these idyllic associations that the noun-form of the word has accumulated, on the one hand, and on the other, the negative associations called up by its adjective, "Utopian." Popper and many of his followers in the tradition of classical liberalism leveled this term as a criticism against Marxism. Someone who engages in Utopian thinking chases fantasies of societal perfection while subjecting actual people to all manner of injustices. Indeed, one of the problems with Utopian pursuits is that they seem to offer a blank check to those held in their sway; since if one is pursuing what one genuinely believes to be an infinite good end, then any means needed to achieve that end will come to seem justifiable.

These critiques of Utopianism apply to a surprising number of dystopian worlds--not only the Marxist societies that were the subject of Popper's arguments, but the Sparta-like police-state described in Plato's Republic (a subject of different discussions by Popper!) as well as the fictional Oceania of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Indeed, encountering these dystopias, we may be struck by the fact that they are Utopian for at least some of their inhabitants (for instance, for those who directly benefit from the societal structures, i.e. those at the top of the ladder who are able to maintain power by controlling the thoughts and actions of others). And even some ostensibly Utopian fictions--for instance, Skinner's Walden Two--may easily come to seem distinctly dystopian when viewed from another angle--say, in the case of Walden Two, when viewed as something akin to what Oceania might feel like to its happier, Big-Brother-touting inhabitants. (Even if we dismiss this particular possibility for Walden Two, and claim that the society described in those pages actually is "perfect" in some sense, the fact would remain that it seems like an incredibly dull place to live, and thus would be Utopia only for a people with specific personalities....)

The fact that utopianism can so easily seem like the other side of the dystopian coin makes me wonder: is there a deeper attribute that all of these imagined societies share? I think the answer is yes--and that attribute is: these are societies entirely devoid of problems. In the case of the worlds that are supposed to look like utopias (Republic, Walden Two, and so forth), the problem-free environment is meant as a "feature"--one that will make life easy and pleasant for the inhabitants. For the worlds that are supposed to look like dystopias, the problem-free environment, tenaciously enforced through (in Orwell) torture, brainwashing, Newspeak, the rewriting of history, the erasure of truth, and so forth, is precisely what makes the fictional societies look so bleak. But, despite the different valence these and other authors give to their worlds, the underlying logic is the same. A superficial form of "contentment" is maintained by preventing people from seeing problems and trying to solve them. The enforced avoidance of problems may be well-intentioned, yet whatever the rulers' intentions, the picture that emerges is of a static society, in which growth, discovery, novelty, excitement, and further exploration and understanding are impossible. This underlying logic is why the very idea of Utopia as it is frequently understood is, in fact, so dark.

There is a twist. If dystopias (and dystopic "Utopias") aspire to be problem-free worlds, then it would follow that an actual Utopia--not a society simply called that, but a society that actually does allow for flourishing in its fullest sense--would be full of unsolved problems, which the inhabitants would pursue freely and as they pleased. This dovetails with Robert Nozick's view, described in the final part of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, of Utopia as not a single kind of place, but a "meta" world in which vast numbers of different societies and associations, each tailored to the different interests of different kinds of people, would emerge. Nozick's Utopia, too, is full of problems, both for those individual societies (whose task, he says, is partly to facilitate the discovery of what good societies might look like--thus implying that this is not yet known, and thus can't be perfectly instantiated even in principle) and for the meta-Utopia, whose problem will involve, for instance, the peaceful interactions and integrations of its constituent societies. Of course, most importantly, the problems that arise in such a meta-Utopia and its constituent Utopias would also exist on the level of individual inhabitants, who, unlike the inhabitants of the Republic, Oceania, Walden Two, and so many other "Utopian" worlds, would be free to imagine different, perhaps better worlds, and thus would be faced constantly with the personal problem of how to reshape their circumstances in pursuit of those dreams.

Of course, one cannot help but be struck by how decidedly unglamorous this account of Utopia sounds. Indeed, a "society full of problems, in which people go about trying to solve their problems" sounds not only unglamorous, but downright mundane. No wonder fictionalized false-Utopias and Dystopias seem to outnumber fictionalized real-Utopias.

However, here too, there is a twist. Yes, there are a handful of actually-optimistic Utopian fictions (some Le Guin comes to mind); but, there is also a sense in which most fiction is Utopian in the positive meaning of the term--that is, most fiction is about everyday people with lots of problems trying to do stuff that will make their lives better. In this view, the genuine champions of the Utopian vision are novelists like Jane Austen and George Eliot, whose characters may "rest in unvisited tombs," but who nonetheless show us a model of striving in which problems are present, but problem-solving is not thwarted by some oppressive autocrat. Indeed, perhaps this explains my abiding love of rom-com movies, whose plots tend to track the same processes. Rom-coms often highlight the problems and dissatisfactions of individual people, yet they also do so in a way that is fundamentally comic, and in which the overcoming of those problems is allowed even as success is never guaranteed.

Perhaps this is also why my intuitions about works like Così fan tutte or Into the Woods diverge from the intuitions of other listeners with whom I've compared notes. Many over the years have been tempted to see in these narratives a fall from grace--a loss of perfection and a confrontation with the tarnished reality of human life. And yes, that is one view: no character in these two works survives unscathed. But in both cases, what we witness is a process in which problems denied in Act I are recognized in Act II--and, in both cases, the end of Act II brings a loosening of authority and control, and with it a sense that, perhaps, problem-solving in the future will be possible for the characters. In Così, Don Alfonso steps back and allows the lovers to pursue their problem-filled lives without interference. Perhaps, after the end of the opera, the lovers' relationships will grow into authenticity. And in Into the Woods, the narrator is, literally, vanquished, as are the Witch's meddling, supernatural powers. What we are left with at the end is, in some sense, a fallen world. In another sense, however, it is a world that, for the first time in the musical, will allow its inhabitants to "just pursue [their] lives." That their strivings will never come to an end--that Cinderella begins to say "I wish..." even as the music stops--is itself a point of hope for the nascent, optimistic Utopia we see taking shape.

What's Wrong with Don Giovanni?

My colleague Patrick Hansen, director of Opera McGill, recently wrote a blog post discussing the challenges of producing Mozart's Don Giovanni - a retelling of the Don Juan story - during the era of #MeToo and other related social movements. Patrick makes the following points: 1) watching a serial seducer take advantage of women is no longer ok, though it might have seemed less obviously objectionable in previous centuries; 2) defending the character on the grounds that he sings beautiful music is also impossible; and 3) the quality of the opera's music overall is so high that the work cannot simply be jettisoned from the repertory.

Patrick's solution, demonstrated during this weekend's staged productions of the opera, was to set the story as a vampire tale, turning Giovanni into an actual monster who kills rather than sleeps with his victims. This strikes me as ingenious, for two reasons: first, it meets Patrick's explicit aim of forestalling objections to the nature of the story, by making it very clear that the production is in no way lionizing the actions of this character (after all, even if some old-fashioned types might be inclined to condone Don Giovanni's sexual exploits, none will praise him if he is a murderer rather than a seducer); and second, because it retains some elemental links with the character's sexual frenzies as depicted in the original plot. As is often pointed out, "undead" characters such as vampires embody aspects of Freud's conception of libido, which is both impossible to satisfy and impossible to kill. By setting the opera as a vampire story, Patrick is able to have it both ways, giving us a title character who is not-a-sexual-predator and yet still infused with many layers of archetypal sexual implications.

Although I appreciated and wholly support Patrick's solution to the "Don Giovanni problem," his discussion of the problem itself got me thinking. I'm always sad to hear people say that recent social or political movements have rendered an old and great artwork unsuitable for modern-day consumers - especially when the piece in question features such excellent music. So, in this case, I found myself wondering whether the opera is, in fact, as problematic as people often suggest it is. There are a number of viable arguments in favor of Don Giovanni - and, as far as I can tell, only one strong argument against it.

The argument against Don Giovanni is, in brief, that the mere depiction of a sexual predator renders the opera unsuitable for modern-day audiences. (Either on the grounds that some viewers might be triggered by them, or simply because depiction, even when ironic or skeptical, may be seen as a kind of approbation.) Many of my own arguments in support of the opera involve the idea that this work, or any, can show behavior without condoning it: that, in other words, the stance the artwork takes towards its own characters, plot, or moral content should structure the way we interpret and engage with that content. This, in turn, rests on the idea that the mere "facts" of the plot do not capture the full extent of what is ultimately being said - a proposition that I take to be largely self-evident, but that many do not. I appreciate that there are legitimate reasons people may wish to avoid an opera with this kind of plot. Although I disagree with them, I think this basically comes down to personal preferences, and I don't expect my arguments to change many minds. So, although I don't personally buy the depiction-is-bad-in-itself argument, I recognize that anything I say in support of the opera will seem a non-sequitur to someone who does buy it.

Nonetheless, here are some ways of thinking about the plot of Don Giovanni that make it seem less problematic than is often assumed. I'm not sure all of these are persuasive, but they should at least give us pause before we reject the original plot as being immoral.

1. Perhaps what is said about Giovanni, including Leporello's valorizing account of his exploits in the "Catalogue Aria," is simply false. To put it plainly, the first possibility is that Giovanni simply isn't a serial seducer. Consider the events of the opera. Over the two acts, we witness: a botched attempt to seduce Donna Anna (so botched that it culminates in a murder, which we need to assume is not Giovanni's normal strategy, since either the law or previous angry family members and their friends would have intervened in the past); a botched attempt to evade an angry ex; a botched attempt to seduce Zerlina (although it has been argued, including by me, that her imitation of his melody in their Act I duet is proof of her willingness - so perhaps this is the one successful seduction in the opera); a botched attempt to re-seduce Zerlina during the Act I Finale; and a botched attempt to exchange clothes with Leporello and seduce Elvira's maid.

If we are to believe what Leporello claims about his master during the Catalogue Aria, then Giovanni can't afford to have off-days like this one. If we take the day portrayed in the opera as a representative episode from the Don's life, then Leporello's account is false, and we'd be watching not an actual serial-seducer but simply an incompetent wannabe. I recognize that this conjecture is problematic, since it still leaves open the possibility that the characters, especially Leporello, think of serial seduction as a goal worth aspiring to. Though maybe this is softened by my next point:

2. Perhaps the opera itself condemns the Don. This seems to me the obvious choice in defending the opera: it's clear that although the plot depicts his (attempted) sexual conquests, in fact the opera is about his punishment. Indeed, "Il dissoluto punito" - "the dissolute man, punished" - was the title at the work's 1787 premiere, with "Don Giovanni" as the subtitle. On the level of plot, I think it's misleading to say that the opera depicts the actions of a serial seducer. More accurate is that what's on display is the intentions of a serial-seducer, plus the punishment meted out to the seducer. The musical structures confirm that this is, indeed, how we are meant to take in the work. The fact that Mozart introduces the statue's music as the first section of the overture is his statement that we are not watching, unbiased, as the Don pursues his various activities on stage, but rather watching with the knowledge of the supernatural censure in which his activities will result. Imagine if the Don Giovanni overture more closely resembled the Figaro overture, without any hint of the ombra music. Were this the case, the moral outlook of the opera would feel very different, since our starting-point would be in the less judgmental comic world, and we would watch the Don operate in a related, non-judgmental frame of mind. In reality, however, the opera introduces itself with the immediate announcement that what follows will be a story of judgment and damnation.

Of course, the fact that the Don is condemned by every other character, including ultimately by Leporello during Elvira's attempted intervention in the Act II Finale, also counts. Even Leporello's support throughout the opera, felt perhaps most keenly in the Catalogue Aria, is flimsy: the servant tries many times to denounce the master's lifestyle and quit his service, but is never allowed. The opera thus makes it clear that the Don's actions are bad both by terrestrial and celestial standards. Given that this point is so self-evident, I'm surprised that people who are on board with recent social movements haven't more enthusiastically embraced the opera, which, like Figaro, can be read plausibly as a statement of feminism avant la lettre.

3. Perhaps the opera is not really about sex. This final possibility may seem counterintuitive given...the actual literal contents of the libretto. But in much 19th-century criticism, including Kierkegaard's extended analysis of the opera in Either/Or, it is pointed out that the Don's sexual needs are exaggerated to the point of absurdity, and that perhaps the point of his character is to represent not sexuality, but rather the extreme limits of appetite as such - free of any particular impulse. (This reading also meshes nicely with Patrick's vampire theme, since with vampires, too, the fact of the appetite itself is far more salient than the particular need to which it is drawn.) Many authors have approached Don Giovanni from this angle. Nicholas Till, in Mozart and the Enlightenment, sees the piece as an essay both on Christianity and early theories of liberalism, particularly given the paean to freedom in the Act I Finale (Viva la libertà!). Karol Berger, too (in Bach's Cycle, Mozart's Arrow) sees it as a tract on freedom, on transgression, on politics, on the nature of individuals vs collectives in society. Indeed, so much does Berger take it for granted that sex is of no real importance to the opera's meaning, that he spends a chapter likening Giovanni to Faustus, a character for whom the pursuit of knowledge rather than physical pleasure is the abstracted, undead drive. Others, meanwhile (most famously Wendy Allanbrook) liken Giovanni to an Odyssean "No-Man": a symbol rather than a human figure. In all of these readings, even where the authors diverge on particulars, we find a shared conviction that Giovanni is not so much a sexual predator as a transgressor of normative moral values, and that sex simply serves as the plot-device through which Mozart and Da Ponte explore these bigger societal and human questions.

If listeners find at least one of these readings to be plausible, then the opera deserves to be accepted on its own terms, even with stagings that depict the actions described in the original libretto. At best, detractors who think that #MeToo poses a fatal problem for Don Giovanni should find that the opera takes an anti-Giovanni position and defends modern-day social values. And those motivated not specifically by #MeToo but by broader moral concerns should find that the opera's condemnation of this character is decisive and unambiguous.

Sondheim's most underrated show?

I've always been obsessed with Sondheim's musicals. In general, however, my fascination is entangled with broad features of his technique and aesthetic vision, rather than with any particular work. In the former category, I love the clarity with which he discusses the details of his craft. He often stated in interviews and lectures that writers/composers should be able to defend every word of their librettos and every note of their scores, and this is an ideal he certainly pursued - and indeed, this self-awareness is something that unites all of the artists in my pantheon, especially Mozart. In the second category, I resonate particularly with the ambivalence so many of Sondheim's characters experience, as well as the philosophical acuity of his shows (something I wrote about at the end of last year). 

Nonetheless, even if my intellectual interest in Sondheim is bound up with aspects of his technique and vision that apply to all of his shows, I can't help but have developed favorites. These works, to which I return again and again, are, perhaps unsurprisingly, beloved in mainstream culture as well. I find Sweeney Todd to contain some of Sondheim's best musical storytelling; I find Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods to be his most philosophically stimulating and meaningful shows (even compared with the rest of his extremely meaningful output); and I love the musical classicism of A Little Night Music, the verbal brilliance of Follies, and the cleverness of Pacific Overtures. None of these choices is unusual; none cuts against the cultural grain.

But in the course of revisiting much of Sondheim's work over the past few months, I've started to wonder whether Merrily We Roll Along could be his most underrated work. It was commercially unsuccessful (though this isn't saying much, since by this standard most of his output is criminally underrated). But my impression is that Merrily is also underrated by many critics and musicians. I had certainly dismissed it for most of my life, as had many of my family and friends. I've never seen it performed live, nor have I seen a theatrical recording that seemed to do it justice. Thus, I can't speak to the overarching effect of the show as a piece of theater. However, from the point of view of the songs, it has some of the best and most impressive writing I've encountered in Sondheim's oeuvre. These are better than much of Follies and Pacific Overtures, and Night Music, at least, and I could imagine that the show as a whole might be better in some ways than Sweeney or Into the Woods.

Performances of three particularly good songs:

"Not a day goes by" (it's amazing how much Sondheim can do with a simple minor triad, not to mention the power of the text and the extraordinary performance):

"Opening doors" (one of Sondheim's epic puzzle songs, complete with a joke about Stravinsky in the middle, here sung by the original cast at the 20-year reunion - an easier rendition to follow than in their earlier studio recording):

"Our time":

The fact that Merrily strikes me as being underrated also raises the (related) question of whether some of his other shows are overrated. In general, I don't think that this is the case; Sondheim's work is so good that even now it's probably, on the whole, a bit underrated. (And I'd also guess that even many of his devotees don't realize just how great he was, and thus that he's in that sense underrated, even by those who do love his shows.) Nonetheless, I suspect that some other of his shows have received more attention than they deserve in comparison with Merrily. For instance, Pacific Overtures does have some nice moments, but its score isn't as consistently great as Merrily's; and Night Music has wonderful music, but the play is extremely shabby both in conception and especially in execution.

The post formerly known as: Is "Bad Music Love" Equivalent to "Bad Movie Love"?

In mid-January 2022, I wrote a somewhat informal blog-review of Matthew Strohl's excellent, recent book, Why It's OK to Love Bad Movies. As it happens, I ended up reviewing the book a few months later for the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism - and once I had signed the journal's publishing agreement, I needed to remove the blog post, which overlaps a great deal with my review. When the review is officially published, I will place a link on this page; however, in the meantime, I have deleted any passages that made it into my review...and am leaving whatever passages are unique to the blog post. Although the material that remains is probably fairly impossible to understand, I wanted to preserve these thoughts, since they seem interesting and relevant to other ideas (even if they remain in a somewhat incomprehensible state when isolated like this).

---

The best book I have read so far this year is Matthew Strohl's recently released Why It's OK to Love Bad Movies. Granted, the year has only just begun; yet I think this is probably the best book on the philosophy of art I've read in a long time. The writing is spectacular; the arguments are convincing; and most of all, the sheer love of film conveyed throughout the book is wonderful. Strohl accomplishes in a breezy 194 pages what many other philosophers require many hundreds of pages to do.

Strohl's book is ostensibly about movies; but in fact, it is a defense of the good life. The argument he builds is, initially, focused only on film. He begins by defining a stance of aesthetic appreciation for bad movies, termed Bad Movie Love. It goes like this. When saying that a movie is "so bad it's good,"

"'Good' is being used in the final sense while 'bad' has a special meaning. ...One recognizes that there is some limited sense in which the movie is bad, but...one ultimately judges it to be aesthetically valuable, in part because it's bad in this limited sense." (p.4)

This is a fine place to start, though at first the idea seems like it might veer into question-begging, since even if a bad movie is judged aesthetically valuable, it isn't initially clear why we'd want to dwell on bad movies when there are so many good movies around. I agree with Strohl that Batman and Robin is "so bad it's good"; but for a decent portion of the book I don't yet see why such a film is more worthy of my time than Vertigo, which, let's face it, is "so good it's good". (Or In the Mood for Love, or Adaptation, or Mad Men, or any of the other good-good things I've watched or re-watched recently.)

....

I'm fully convinced by this. I now feel personally liberated to enjoy some of my guilty-pleasure films. Indeed, I'm not only convinced by the arguments, but inspired by them.

It's natural to ask, though, particularly in light of my other interests, whether these arguments apply equally to other areas of aesthetic pursuit. Being both a musician and an avid reader, I can't help but wonder whether Bad Music Love (or Bad Novel Love) is as permissible as Bad Movie Love.

My guess is that, at least in the case of music, the answer is: no. Bad Music Love might be far, far worse than Bad Movie Love. Why? First, the disclaimer: I don't think that I'm biased by being a musicologist. True, my professional work demands that I have discerning musical tastes, and do I spend a lot of time trying to articulate why various compositions are good or bad. And I recognize that my general disposition may seem to place me in the same category as Strohl's imaginary "Professor Stuffypants". But I don't think these biases impinge on my reasoning about this particular point (though my friends might say otherwise...).

My hypothesis involves both the relative quantity of bad music vs. bad movies, and the relative quality of bad music vs. bad movies. I suspect that there is far more bad music in the world than there are bad movies, and that the bad music is infinitely badder than the bad movies.

...

I could write a bad piano sonata today, alone in my apartment, with no money or resources beyond some paper and a pencil. (I don't even need an eraser! This is supposed to be bad; why bother revising?) I would have a harder time making a bad movie. Perhaps I could pull it off with my phone and a selfie-stick...but this would not be the kind of bad movie Strohl would watch, since it would have no reliable distribution, and thus would be unlikely to make its way to his TV. This question of distribution raises another point: it isn't only that bad movies take more time and effort to make than bad music, but that their chances of being preserved and distributed is relatively low. Anyone can write bad music on a manuscript leaf and find that, a couple hundred years later, it will be digitized in the Duben Collection or in the Dresden State Library, awaiting discovery by zealous archivist period-performers who want to play bad music; but not so for bad movies.

The barriers to the distribution of bad movies are not the only salient considerations. Movies (even bad ones) require more people to make than music. This also has its effect. Except in some exceptional cases in which a bad filmmaker has unchecked power (cf. Strohl's discussion of Plan 9 from Outer Space), most movies are made with the involvement and input of more people. This alone almost guarantees the presence of error-correcting mechanisms, since even a bad director may collaborate with people who end up improving the final product. For this reason, I suspect that even most "bad movies" aren't really all that bad--a suspicion corroborated by Strohl's book, which argues that many of these movies, even the Twilight films, are actually rather good. Bad music, on the other hand, can be profoundly bad. Often, no external ear has been engaged to criticize and correct the final product; it is the composer's own intuitions, errors and all, that features in what we end up hearing. (Incidentally, this has changed in the modern era of pop music, where songs are very often written by a performer in collaboration with others behind the scenes...and it's probably for this reason that the percentage of competent pop songs I encounter is far higher than the percentage of competent non-Mozart/non-Haydn 18th-century symphonies I encounter.)

Does any of this change what I make of Strohl's arguments? I suspect so. Perhaps his defense of bad movies is not really a compelling defense of bad movies, but a defense of medium-bad or even pretty-good-but-not-great movies. The movies Strohl discusses are, ultimately still worth our time. We may not be in the mood to ingest Vertigo (just as we may not be in the mood to follow Bach fugues or parse a Schoenberg piano sonata); but in Strohl's hands many movies that seem superficially bad can still contribute much to our life. This is more than I would say of most musical compositions I encounter.

...

Perhaps the saving grace in the case of novels is that, as with film, books require the involvement of multiple people along the path from manuscript to published edition, and thus present opportunities for improvement and error-correction. Much of the art-music produced over the past 700 years survives only in manuscript, or in early published editions, and is thus hit-or-miss in a way that may not apply to published novels or professionally distributed films. Of course, according to Sturgeon's Law, most work in any given domain is bad--and this applies everywhere, including to published novels and professional films. But the error-correcting processes in these media nonetheless seem to function reasonably well in improving overall quality.

One final--contentious--possible explanation for the general high quality of film in comparison with older music and older texts is that aesthetic standards overall have improved over the past century, and thus that art-forms invented more recently have the benefit of having developed within a context of greater artistic and aesthetic understanding. The fact that composers like Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven figured out how to write reliably great music during the 18th century is, when you think about it, completely remarkable considering just how little progress had yet been made in many other areas of cultural, technological, scientific, and philosophical life. That they did succeed where so many of their contemporaries failed is testament both to whatever progress had occurred during and just before their lifetimes; and to the intellectual labor each one of these artists did in improving aesthetic knowledge. (There was probably also a lot of luck involved.) Yet as more general cultural and scientific knowledge improved, so too did artistic standards: thus, my experience suggests that there is a very high likelihood that an unknown, non-canonical piece of music written after around 1850 will be pretty decent; whereas I can't say the same for the period 1750-1800. That film was invented in the 20th century may be at least a partial explanation for the fact that, as Strohl shows, even bad movies can be aesthetically valuable.

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!