Late Brahms

Manchester City 0 Tottenham Hotspur 1
Mancini Must Go

Striking is the crab-like progression of Brahms’s productions. He has certainly never been able to raise himself above the level of mediocrity, but such nullity, emptiness, and hypocrisy as prevail in the E minor Symphony have come to light in no other of his works. The art of composing without ideas has decidedly found its most worthy representative in Brahms.

(Hugo Wolf, Wiener Salonblatt, October 1885)

I am referring to those jewels found in Op. 116, 117, 118, and 119. These are among my favourite works for solo piano.

I am partial to the Op. 116 No. 6 Intermezzo, the lovely Intermezzo in A minor of Op. 117, the mighty Op. 118 No. 3 Ballade, and the Op. 119 No. 4 Rhapsody, a triumphant finish to this collection of mostly dark, minor-key works. And when I am in a sentimental mood, the Intermezzo Op. 118 No. 2 and the Romance Op. 118 No. 5 are lovely as well.

I have Kempff playing them.

They are connoisseur pieces, outside the ken of even many sophisticated listeners. They belong somewhere with the late Beethoven bagatelles or the late Haydn sonatas: not exactly forgotten, not exactly neglected, but in some netherworld one step short of the sunlight of general appreciation.

I seem to recall reading somewhere that Brahms lived just long enough to have heard the very earliest ragtime piano pieces from America and, evidently, some piano rags were played for him late in life. That conjures up a wonderful mental image for me – Brahms sitting in his flat in Vienna listening to someone play ragtime on his piano! Anyway, he supposedly liked what he heard and even expressed a desire to compose a piece of ragtime himself. Wouldn’t it be fascinating if among Brahms’ late piano music there were “Viennese Two-Step Rag as picked by Johannes Brahms” or something like that?

Apocryphal, no doubt. I seem to remember the story comes from a book called The Unknown Brahms by Robert Schauffler, published around 1933. My young friend Melissa tells me the book is not factually reliable.

This Modern Music

A piece of music resembles in some respects a photograph album, displaying under changing circumstances the life of its basic idea – its basic motive.

(Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition)

Here are some questions thrown at me by my young friend Melissa:

I think that many composers try to compose music that specifically and intentionally sounds “modern”. I wonder why they choose to do so. Isn’t it better to write music without trying to make it sound modern? What happened to purity of music and composition? Are they trying to copy the famous modern composers? Is it because they are incapable of finding their own distinctive style? Their music would be considered more “important” or “serious” because it sounds modern?

There could be many reasons but none of them seem convincing …

What would be the use of trying to sound like the old masters? Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, etc., have already done their work far better than most could ever emulate. Therefore the only options for serious musicians are to strike out in new directions or to find another set of musical tools: Oriental or other Asian scales, African-influenced polyrhythms, asymmetric rhythms such as you find in Bulgaria, and so on. (I have yet to hear a composer successfully combine Native American and classical idioms, although I have heard of one in the early 20th century, not one I had ever heard of before.) Such music may offend a few new music diehards but it will secure future audiences who love not mere novelty, but music that is different than others have done, music that breaks old moulds and creates new ones.

I think it was Lutoslawski who said “I try to write the music that I’d like to hear”. For the most part, that’s what composers are doing.

Of course, if you’re a composer in the 21st century, you have a huge range of potential influences which will inflect your musical preferences and style. It’s hardly surprising if some of them are “modern” in nature. Some of them also aren’t, even for “modern” composers: I find it impossible to conceive of Carter finding his late style without Mozart and Haydn – they’re such a massive influence on it.

Speaking as a composer I can only say that I don’t try to make my music sound like anything other than what I want it to sound like. I don’t know any composers who would say otherwise.

The music a composer writes is simply the sum of all the music he’s ever listened to and enjoyed, hopefully with enough original ideas thrown in to give the resulting mix a distinctive stamp. So if I happen to enjoy modern music, I’m going to have to practice a lot of self-censorship to keep it out of the music I write.

I would add that even the music I don’t enjoy makes a contribution. This would make a good compositional exercise, and I can think of a few composers who ought to try it: take some piece of music that you don’t like. It doesn’t even have to be a modern piece, maybe Wagner or Schubert for instance. It just has to be something that you know a lot of musicians greatly admire but you don’t. Try to copy that music and change whatever it is about that music that you don’t like; make it so that some essential part of it is still there, but altered in such a way that it suits your temperament, altered in such a way that you can call it your own.

For instance, recently I found myself composing something with the spare textures of post-Webern serialism. Well, I hate post-Webern serialism, but somehow what I was writing called for that sound, so the task was to see how to achieve it and still own up to it as my music. I was pleased that the resulting music sounded so much like what I think of as “me” even though a listener will definitely say “R.A.D. you’ve been taking your Webern pills again”.

Miles Davis once said the only reason to write new music was to that you were dissatisfied with what currently exists. There is no possible artistic reason to write music today in the style of Mendelssohn or Brahms or Schoenberg. We already have Mendelssohn, Brahms & Schoenberg. A composer today has to meaningfully address the question of what it means to write new music in this tradition in 2010. The answer is not to throw out the last 100 years of composition (and “atonal” music is now that old). Composers must both acknowledge the tradition they inherit and not be bound by it. This is an increasingly difficult task for each generation of composers, as they have to digest and adapt to all that has come before them.

Pollocks

When it was suggested that Indonesian gamelan music, with its endless flow of repetitious pattern, accompany Hans Namuth’s film of Pollock painting, the artist protested. “I’m an American painter,” he said, and the American composer Morton Feldman was commissioned to supply a score.

(Carter Ratcliff, Jackson Pollock’s American Sublime)

I was just talking about Jackson Pollock (Jack the Dripper) with my young friend Melissa not long ago, when she and I saw some of his work. One of her first comments was, “Oh, now I get it. You really have to see these in person!”, and although that’s true of pretty much any artist, it’s even more so with Pollock.

What doesn’t come through in reproductions is the size of most of his paintings, which are extremely large, and the texture of the paint, which in many of his works looks to be almost one inch thick. All of which is lost in translation to the printed page. But when you see them in person, there is something really magical going on.

So, OK, everyone could drizzle paint on a canvas and create abstract art like this, but there are two problems. First, you could do it, but you’re not going to achieve the same results (and really, you couldn’t do it with the same technique. It takes skill to achieve interesting patterns and textures in an abstract work, look at Mondrian’s work for example). And second, you’d be about 60 years too late to splatter paint on a canvas and call it art. In art, much like music, originality is highly prized. If you want to be a famous artist, you’d better be the first person to do something … or raise the bar on something that’s been done before. How many composers living today write music like Beethoven’s? His piano music led to developments in the technology of the instrument that have hardly been improved in almost two centuries since his death.