John Borstlap and the theodicies of art religion

If Richard Taruskin’s career has been characterized, as I have written previously, in taking aim at Romanticist art-religion and views that music, serious music, has a fundamentally if nebulously sacramental role then a case could be made that the Joker to his Batman might be someone like John Borstlap.  There are many writers who subscribe to a notion that music, serious music; art music has a special function that catalyzes, in a deep and mysterious way, the emotional order of the listener who attentively listens.  John Borstlap and the late Roger Scruton might be the easiest contemporary examples, via their work at the Future Symphony Institute of a throwback to sacramental listening and a sacramental view of the musical fine arts of the sort that Richard Taruskin so often took aim at. 

Schenker and counter-Schenker, coverage and counter-coverage

We've waded a teensy bit into Schenker in the past and I will say up front I'm not a Schenkerian and am grateful that I didn't go to grad school in music in the U.S. (didn't do the grad school path in music) and so was spared having to spend any time on Schenkerian analysis.  I've been interested in the last twenty or more years in fusions of ragtime, jazz, blues, country and American vernacular styles with late Baroque and galant era practices; in other words I've been wanting to write sonata forms based on ragtime strains and fugues based on riffs that could fit into songs by Muddy Waters or Thelonious Monk songs.  I like J. S. Bach and Haydn, Stravinsky, Messiaen, Hindemith (yes),, and contemporary guitar music from central and eastern European composers.  So let me admit up front I haven't been and don't plan to be a Schenkerian.  I have also written about how even the conservative philosopher on the aesthetics of music Roger Scruton (who died last year) concluded that Schenkerian visual analysis was simply not as cogent or useful as its advocates advertised.

HT Bryan Townsend--Rick Beato proposes why people hate jazz (they don't understand it) cross referencing accounts in classical music of why virtuoso variation forms have been frowned on for two centuries

So Bryan Townsend linked to a video explaining why people hate jazz.  He couldn't get past five minutes into it.  I ... skimmed into about ten minutes.  

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2020/08/rick-beato-on-why-people-hate-jazz.html

At The Imaginative Conservative, more Beethoven panegyric that may help some understand why Americans want to "cancel the 19th century"

I don't think we actually need to "cancel the 19th century".  We would not have ragtime or the protean forms of any of the most interesting American musical styles if we cancelled the 19th century, just as we'd also have to "cancel" the guitar if we consistently cancelled the 19th century, whatever that's supposed to ultimately mean.  I've already come up with a counter-proposal that we just cancel the symphony and leave the 19th century otherwise in peace. 

But in the midst of the 250th (and if you know anything about Beethoven then I don't even need to explain the number further) it can be easy to read praise of Beethoven and see how right-thinking progressives can regard Beethoven as the emblem and symptom of everything regarded as wrong with American music education in post-secondary contexts. 

https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2020/03/beethoven-250-price-genius-mark-malvasi.html

At the fourteenth exhibition of the Association of Visual Artists Vienna Secession, held between April 15 and June 27, 1902, the German sculptor Max Klinger unveiled his monument to Ludwig van Beethoven. Conceived as a tribute to Beethoven, the entire celebratory program determined to effect an artistic synthesis, integrating architecture, painting, sculpture, design, and music into a unified aesthetic vision, with Klinger’s statue providing the focal point.[i] Klinger exalted Beethoven as an artistic hero, fittingly enshrined among the gods.

For Klinger and the other contributors to the show, including the architect Josef Hoffmann, who designed the sanctum sanctorum where Beethoven sat, and the painter Gustav Klimt, whose erotic and allegorical frieze illustrated the power of art to vanquish the adversities of life, Beethoven had been instrumental in creating the modern artistic sensibility. He was arguably the first to establish the vision of the artist as genius, serving as an intermediary between God and man. Like the prophets of the Old Testament, Beethoven thought he had an intimate relationship with God. “I know well that God is nearer to me in my art than to others,” he affirmed. “I consort with him without fear: evermore have I acknowledged and understood him.”[ii] Twenty years before Percy Bysshe Shelley declared in 1821 that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” Beethoven had already characterized the artist and even the musician, who had heretofore been no better than a minor household servant, as the spokesmen for a “suffering humanity.”[iii] As the equal of God, Beethoven would tolerate subservience to no mere mortal. 

The status of the artist was thus greater than that of the aristocrat or royal. However consequential such powerful men might be, Beethoven insisted that they could never hope to approximate his brilliance. [emphasis added] They might, he wrote, “hang a decoration around a man’s neck” and “make a privy councilor or a minister,” but their feeble imaginations could not conceive a work of artistic genius.[iv] They must learn their place and must be taught to respect the endowments that they did not themselves possess, or even comprehend.

Dead white guy presenting himself as having a direct line to God, huh? We'll have to come back to that but let's keep going through the Beethoven article:

Beethoven could get away with such impertinence in part because of changing attitudes toward music that had emerged during the early nineteenth century. Traditionally, music was a lesser art form than poetry. Music appealed only to the senses and emotions, while poetry engaged the mind, imagination, and spirit. In addition, unlike poetry, music had no moral content and could thus elicit no moral response. An expression of the sentiments only, music had nothing to do with the reason or virtue that nourished serious, critical thought.[v] Even on those rare occasions when music did affect the mind, its influence was temporary. Devoid of concepts, music was too ephemeral to make a lasting impression.[vi]

By the turn of the nineteenth century, a different, more generous, view of music had come to the fore. It turned out that the very passions music excited made it valuable and important. Music enhanced intuition and self-consciousness. It offered the possibility of insight far exceeding any knowledge that reason alone could impart. Music “made the listener more clearly aware of the workings of the inner self,” explained G.W. F. Hegel. “The special characteristic relating the abstract inner-consciousness most closely to music is emotion, the self-extending subjectivity of the ego.” [vii] Beethoven’s piano sonatas, for instance, conveyed both intimacy and emotion. He, or sometimes his audience, bestowed on them such titles as “Moonlight,” “Pathétique,” and “Appassionata.” Beethoven also used poetry to serve music, as when he famously ended the Ninth Symphony with a chorus singing Friedrich Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” As Henriette, the sister of the philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach, observed, music as no other art form enabled “spirit to speak directly to spirit.” [viii] Music had become the unifying force around which all the other arts cohered. [emphasis added]

We'll come back to that later but for now I'm still quoting extensively from Beethoven panegyric: 

…

 He sought to infuse his music with the most advanced expressions of intellect and emotion, asserting that music was “a higher revelation than the whole of wisdom and philosophy. Music is the electric soil in which the spirit lives, thinks, invents. Philosophy is a striking of music’s electrical spirit. . . . So art always represents the divine, and the relationship of men toward art is religion: What we obtain from art comes from God, is divine inspiration.” [x] Yet, Beethoven was not trying to turn music in particular, or art in general, into a secular faith. A devout, if somewhat unorthodox Roman Catholic, Beethoven believed that music was the way in which human beings came to know God. At the same time, the Romantic Movement that he helped to initiate became a substitute for traditional religion and, whatever his intentions, Beethoven was its priest and prophet.

In the annals of what Richard Taruskin has called Matthew Arnold style art religion the high priests of this Western art-as-religion in the 19th century were arguably Beethoven and then Wagner, the self-selected prophet-priest-kings of art-religion and music-as-the-sublime-art.  Should we ever forget there are writers that can remind us.  Since this is a piece in The Imaginative Conservative there's room to note that not all of the legacy of this divinization of the European composer as artist was necessarily good:

…

The Romantic Movement, (or perhaps more accurately the Romantic state of mind, since Romanticism was amorphous and no organized movement at all), immeasurably enriched Western thought, literature, music, and art. It fashioned new idioms, new musical structures (or infused a new level of emotion into traditional forms), new combinations of color, and new perspectives on the individual, society, and God. Romanticism sought to validate spontaneity and passion without, at the same time, precluding reason and introspection. It ventured to enlarge human experience and to deepen human understanding. Intellect alone was not sufficient to the task. In short, Romanticism offered a host of novel possibilities to thinkers, writers, composers, and artists who wished to see the world with fresh eyes, and to expand their vision of reality.

But in addressing the limits and confronting the errors of the Enlightenment, in attempting to integrate mind and heart, the Romantics introduced unanticipated problems of their own making. Until the advent of Romanticism, Western Civilization had rested on a consensus of values and tastes, drawn both from its classical and Christian heritage. Romanticism destroyed that consensus, or at least presided over its erosion. By rejecting an absolute, objective standard of meaning and by making self-expression and self-realization, innovation and originality, the principal aims of all art, Romanticism undermined the unity and coherence of civilization in the West. Notwithstanding the many works of genius it produced, and the astute insights into the human condition to which it gave voice, Romanticism thus also contributed to the intellectual confusion and the spiritual disarray into which the West has since fallen.

Now Beethoven actually is a composer I have a great deal of admiration and respect for.  His final piano sonata is a remarkable piece of music and I've written about how part of what makes that sonata remarkable is how he shifted the weight of developmental episodes outside of the development section of his sonata movement into the transitions.  Manipulating the conventions of form and sound themselves, however, was very often in the Romantic era presented as if it were ignoring the conventions and rules of stifling society.  

I'll quote Meyer extensively before long but I think it's necessary to point out that while Beethoven seemed to be breaking the norms and propriety of the 18th century he was still following the conventions of counterpoint and harmony and melody.  He was messing with conventions about form and size but to put it in terms of American fast-food, he didn't invent french fries, he just biggie-sized them and nobody had biggie-sized french fries the way Beethoven had done up to that point so it was new and daring.  As European tuning systems became more uniform across Europe it was easy for philosophers in Europe to regard their continent's music as a universal language able to speak from heart to heart because Western European music had a history of borrowing across ethnic and national divides--Bach's sound was a synthesis of English, German, French, Italian, Polish and Austrian sounds to put it in contemporary terms, but that final fusion became emblematic of the German sound.  That the grand unity of Bach's styles was possibly a post hoc constrution of 19th century theorists and pedagogues would be something for other posts and more formally scholarly writers, too.

Beethoven was free to "break the rules" because he was pushing the envelope of size and breaking the proprietary guidelines for when and where to do things that, in and of themselves, were still perfectly normal things to do within even 18th century musical practice.  He wasn't about to pull an Anton Reicha and write a 5/8 fugue in A major whose answer comes in the key of E flat.  

So we should remember that although Beethoven broke certain conventions and blazed new trails he upheld others.  As the ur-Romantic artist as prophet-priest-king of the soul he's useful to consider in light of Western art-religion even for those who regard Western art-religion as an ultimately negative thing.  But now, finally, let me get to Meyer:

STYLE AND MUSIC: THEORY, HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY
LEONARD B. MEYER
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
COPYRIGHT (C) 1989 BY LEONARD B. MEYER
ISBN 0-226-52152-4

page 163-164

But the romanticism that we will be concerned with--the movement begun in the eighteenth century and continued into our own time--is not merely different. It is not just that it seems more extreme and pervasive. Rather it constitutes a radical departure--a difference in kind.

The latest romanticism differs from all other romanticisms in this: Instead of being but a phase within a periodic swing in the inclinations and beliefs of the artistic/intellectual community, this romanticism formed part of a profound change--revolution is not too strong a term--in social, political, and ideological outlook. ... At its core, I will argue, was an unequivocal and uncompromising repudiation of a social order based on arbitrary, inherited class distinctions. This rejection was not confined to the arts or philosophy; rather it penetrated every corner of culture and all levels of society. It was, and is, Romanticism with a capital R.

Although the roots of this Romanticism extended back to the Renaissance and Reformation--for instance, to the growing emphasis on the worth of the individual, the widened perspective fostered by the discovery of new lands and cultures, and the dazzling achievements of the natural sciences--its prime driving force was a political and social radicalism that defined itself "as the antithesis of feudal Christianity ... ."

Which could be why, no surprise, contributors to The Imaginative Conservative might find the net and cumulative effects of that kind of Romanticism to be mixed. Perhaps the bitterest irony of the Romantic era European white guys who inveighed against the corruptions of residual feudal Christendom and clericalism is that over the course of a century or two it seems as though the prophet-priest-king artists and poets and musicians managed to replicate the vices they saw in the ancient regime.  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss as a famous rock song puts it.

page 176

... The Romantic affirmation of the primacy of unconscious, spontaneous inspiration growing out of individual emotion, and the concomitant denial and denigration of the claims of consciousness and shared rationality, result in a curious, almost paradoxical dichotomy between the creative act and the aesthetic object. For though reason plays virtually no role in inspired creation, the relationships that are prized in works of art result from the inevitability and inner logic of organic development. 

page 195
... Emphasis on the centrality of concealed underlying processes or principles has continued, affecting twentieth-century thought in many fields of inquiry, including, for example, linguistics (deep structure), psychology (Freudian theory), and anthropology (structuralism). In aesthetic theory, as elsewhere, there tended to be reification; the concealed principle, instead of being understood as a provisional hypothesis inferred from actual perceived phenomena, became what was real, while the sights and sounds of the world were appearance--surface manifestations of a more fundamental principle. From this point of view, organicism is Platonism in biological clothing.

Both the composition of music and especially the concepts informing theory and criticism were, as we shall see, significantly affected by this strand of Romanticism. In composition, the ultimate consequences were methods such as those of serial and statistical music in which the compositional "seed" was explicitly and consciously contrived--an ironic outcome for an ideology that particularly valued unconscious, spontaneous inspiration!  The same ideological strand was at least partly responsible for the exegetic character of much music theory and criticism. For if the principles governing relationships in music lie concealed behind less important surface features, then it becomes the task of the theorist and critic to reveal this inner essence, wheter it be Schenkerian Ursatz, a motivic germ, or a Fibonacci series. Thus theorists and critics become comparable to theologians or seers interpreting the divinely inspired message of the creator. 

The stance and style of 20th century high modernism was ultimately Romantic, which was why Meyer saw fit to refer to the likes of Stravinsky and Schoenberg as late late Romantic composers. He even went so far as to suggest that on the basis of the ideological and aesthetic stance of John Cage that Cage was the archetypal Romantic.  I've written about Cage and Meyer and the self-extinguishing potential of the avant garde elsewhere.  Meyer pointed out that while the Romantics repudiated convention at an ideological level they found themselves in a tight spot when it came to figuring out how to organize their music, art and poetry.

page 201

... the Romantic repudiation of convention (and especially of neo-Aristotelian aesthetics, which had been associated with the ancien regime), coupled with the denigration and weakening of syntactic relationships, highlighted the presence of diversity. As a result, the basis of coherence and unity became an issue: How did disparate and individualized themes, diverse modes of organization, and contrasts of expression--all intensified by the valuing of originality--form an organic whole? How did the several parts of a set of piano pieces or the different movements of a symphony or chamber work constitute a cohesive composition?

The problem was especially acute in the aesthetics of music. In literature, significant weakening of syntactic constraints and hierarchic organization were never really viable options, and in the visual arts, at least until the twentieth century, coherence was significantly dependent upon iconicity. In both realms, the representation of human and physical nature--often with convention disguised by historical or ethnic exoticism--played an important role in creating artistic unity. But in instrumental music, "unity through representation" was not a possibility, except of course in program music. And it is not implausible to argue that program music flourished in the nineteenth century partly because the use of a program was a way of establishing coherence and, in particular, accounting for the juxtaposition and succession of palpably different moods, connotations, and the like. 

A variation of "let me tell what is going to happen and what it's going to mean so that when it happens you get what was supposed to happen".  The program of the music was the insurance policy against the possibility that the music as music might not send a message from heart to heart after all.

page 221

The valuing of individual inner experience is evident in the shift from the eighteenth-century idea that music represented emotions (affects) to the nineteenth century belief that music expressed the feeling of the composer. 

Goethe:

Feeling is all in all; the name is sound and smoke, obscuring heaven's pure glow.


The nicest way to interpret this sentimentalist glop is to propose that what the Romantics aspired to was that what Daniel Kahneman called System 1 could be allowed to do the majority of the work in appreciating and apprehending the cosmos. 

The most potently distilled observation Meyer made about Romanticism as a group of ideologies in the arts may be the following:

page 222

In music, one of the discoveries of Romanticism was how to hide convention, yet have it too. 

page 231

Of the many factors serving to disguise the presence of schemata in nineteenth century music, perhaps none is more obvious than magnitude.  ...

Magnitude tends to mask schemata, --especially those defined by syntactic relationships--because of the constraints of aural memory. ...


They were officially repudiating conventions while at a practical level they were disguising the conventions they leaned upon. Yes, yes, I know that there was a trajectory away from the circle of fifths to chains of thirds in tonal organization and I'm reading George Rochberg's writing on that shift and why it was really revolutionary in Western music to switch from music defined by assymetrical scalar organization to increasingly symmetrical scalar systems.  But Meyer and other scholars have a point in pointing out that a lot of the revolution of the Romantics was, I'll put this indelicately, posing as much as composing.  It's not a surprise to me if in revolutionizing some aspects of music the Romantics became really boring in other realms.  They were revolutionizing harmony, I grant, but for me their overall rhythmic approach could often feel tedious.  Big soaring plangent endless melodies and, meh.  Chopin, I grant, wrote a lot of fun music, though.  

I'm not categorically against 19th century music, but I think I've been clear so far that what I dispute is the whole six-pack of ideologies associated with the Romantic era.  I love a lot of music from Josquin up through Beethoven and then I start to get bored in the 19th century and I find Wagner tedious musically and aggravating personally.  Then we get to about Brahms and Debussy and I'm okay with composers again and we get to Stravinsky, Bartok and Hindemith and I am more excited about where music goes.  

Perhaps I can put it like this, Beethoven is like a Stanley Kubrick for music.  I don't mind his work but I find the preening elitism and self-congratulation of his fans generally insufferable.  That Beethoven more or less billed himself as the prophet-priest-king of music the supreme art is so inextricable from his legacy and what academics now refer to as the reception history of the Beethoven cult it would be hard to separate the egoism of the artist-genius cult from the music itself.

I like Rick Robinson's ideas that we find ways to advocate for this music of the past without relying on superlatives but relying on the superlatives is pretty clearly what a range of conservative or "conservative" writers do, even those who are persuaded to the bottom of their souls they stand for Enlightenment ideals.  You can only go so many centuries with this kind of post-Beethoven cult of the artist-genius before others qualify for the status or people object to the nature of this kind of cult-forming tendency in letters.

I still admire Beethoven's music.  The Op. 111 piano sonata is a great deal of fun and has moments of striking beauty and violent activity.  Beethoven's Grosse Fugue can be heard in all its complexity as taking the shape of a giant contrapuntal five-part rondo.  We don't have to only talk about his music as though "nobody got it" in his day.  Clearly many people did, as noted in the article at The Imaginative Conservative. 

But as I get older I find that though I still like Beethoven half the time I find his choral music insipid and awkward, whereas Haydn continues to grow on me and I've loved Haydn's music since my twenties.  In an era in which popular and concert music traditions have ossified and insulated and the balkanization of their advocates has gotten seemingly as bad as it can get, a composer like Haydn who, as Charles Rosen put it, wrote in a learned style that was suffused with the virtues of street song seems more what we "need".  We "need" composers who are not continuing the artist as prophet-priest-king in the post-Wagnerian Art-Religion of Beethoven and Wagner, but can retain some kind of populist interest (which Beethoven did have, a bit) in conciliating a variety of styles that partisans want segregated.  Particularly since the election of 45 I have noticed that there has been a tendency among professional artists to define populist concerns in such pejorative terms that you'd think that a large swath of college-educated professional musicians have collapsed any notion of populism with the current executive. 

Beethoven's iconic status as an iconoclast has become a paradox, a double-bind in which the rule-breaker has been regarded as the norm-maker but the maker of forget-the-norms-and-express-your-heart.  The likelihood that most of us love and like in terms of cliches doesn't have much room for a post-Beethoven cult, a cult that Meyer described in his monograph on Romanticism as the ideology of elite egalitarians.  Two and a half centuries since Beethoven's day a potentially impassable rift between the elite accomplishments of canonized artist-heroes and the egalitarian impulses they formally expressed may remain impassable.  The mixture of head and heart that was, in his time, though perhaps more powerfully in posthumous glory, achieved by Beethoven through his music hasn't been replicated.  Many musicians and music scholars would ask why it even needs to be reproduced in our time. 

But it has been, arguably, in figures like Michael Jackson or The Beatles.  The grand act of reconciliation valued in Western arts shifts and the "what" of the reconciliation can change.  In Beethoven's time maybe the great rift was between "head" and "heart" within an intra-European set of concerns.  In the twenty-first century, however, with a probably declining United States at the focal point of a crumbling Atlanticist alliance it may be that the problem hasn't been Beethoven but the obsolescence of the Beethoven cult and of the Romantic nexus of ideologies that have catalyzed Western art.  The taste-makers and power-brokers of our epoch don't find Beethoven as useful as The Beatles or Michael Jackson or Madonna or Elvis or Beyonce. 

As Beethoven's music became more daring and rarified in his later career whatever delicate balance of learned technique and populist appeal that Rosen found in Haydn and Mozart began to get cast aside.  Beethoven solved the great aesthetic challenges that people felt needed to be addressed in his time and place, but the Beethoven cult has created a set of problems for which academic musicologists and music historians seem unable to find solutions to.  Nor should we expect academics to find solutions to the kinds of problems that, were we to take some of the Beethoven cult of the artist arguments at face value, only the artists can solve.  It's left, then, to people who write about music more than they write music to perform some mixture genuflecting before or fulminating against figures like Beethoven, their music, and their reception history. 

Beethoven, Piano Sonata No. 32 (Op. 111) video with score--a sonata movement that shifted the development out of the development section and into the expository and recapitulatory transitions

yes, yes, the link will say No. 31 but I meant No. 32 and, in any case, Op. 111 but hit publish too fast.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7urbQpfCqU

Thousands of words have already been written about Beethoven's last piano sonata and I hardly feel like I need to write too many more, although I probably could.  Some composers are drawn to the giant variation-finale and it's a wonderful movement, too.  But I admit that as a guitarist who started by aspiring to play Pinkfloyd and Bob Dylan songs I'm a sucker for the mercurial first movement.

What makes the sonata movement so fascinating to me decades after I first heard it and read through the score listening to Brendel's recording back in college was how Beethoven seemed to have such a puny development section.  Supposedly sonata forms are supposed to have a development section that shows how much a composer can do with thematic materials.  Beethoven, so to speak, was the composer who began to "biggie size" developments and codas in sonata forms.

Yet for all that scholastic mythology what's fascinating about Op. 111 is that there's a ton of intense, really intense gestural development in the sonata movement but it all takes place primarily within the exposition.  Furthermore, what inspires me and amuses me as a composer going through Beethoven's last piano sonata is that the most intensive development processes for his thematic ideas are never in the themes but in the transitions!  Yeah, he's got a formal development section in the sonata form because that's what is supposed to be in there but at a gestural level the development seems to call back less to the themes of the exposition than to the introduction.  The rising scalar motion from G through A and B to C of some kind is part of Theme 1, of course, but it's also an anticipatory gesture that appears in the introduction.  So in a sense we could say that the development is drawing from elements of Theme 1 but in a way that calls back more to the introduction than to the exposition proper.

I hesitate to say that Op. 111 is necessarily revolutionary, though.  All of the themes show up syntactically where you might expect them to.  There's an introduction, a theme 1, a transition, and a theme 2. There wasn't exactly a rulebook to say what "had" to happen.  One of the things that has come up in formal analysis and historical work on what is now called "sonata form" is an observation that there wasn't really a thing called sonata form in the 18th century theory or practice.  There were references to grand binary form or a prescribed pattern for first movements but not necessarily in a way that amounted to what 19th century theorists and pedagogues called a sonata form or a "real" sonata form.

Which is why bromides about how this or that 19th century composer didn't observe the rules of sonata form seems dubious in historical terms.  Maybe someone like Schubert didn't compose sonatas based on the rules that might have been credited to Reicha or maybe a Cherubini or an A. B. Marx.  But if merely not composing textbook sonata forms was enough to make a composer a genius of first order then why don't we talk about the guitar sonatas of Wenzel Matiegka?  Schubert adapted one of Matiegka's chamber works into a quartet.  This is not to say Schubert hasn't written music I enjoy, it's saying that a mythology that Schubert broke the rules of sonata form seems like an anachronism at best and a misleading depiction of composerly approaches to large-scale forms.

I've written so much about Matiegka's approach to sonata forms that, even though I plan to do more of that, I don't want to digress too much into that just now--my point is that one of the shortcomings of a kind of Western religion of the highest of high art is that it ignores a lot of composers who would be considered second, third or fourth-rate in craft.  Matiegka is not going to be anybody's idea of a "first-rate" composer.  I like a good chunk of his guitar sonatas, however, and I can see from what has been written about Matiegka is just about anyone who knows who he is is aware that Schubert liked one of his chamber works enough to adapt it into a quartet that his name (Schubert's) is attached to.   Matiegka has a few sonatas where Theme 1 in an exposition doesn't come back or comes back in an attenuated or substantially modified form.  Haydn was known to recompose recapitulation spaces.

Which is to say, with respect to Beethoven, that it was not necessarily revolutionary to not observe a whole raft of rules that had not really been codified yet.  Beethoven may have subverted conventions and expectations about what was supposed to happen in what section, but I'm playing with the idea that if Beethoven's Op. 111 could be considered revolutionary it could be on the basis of shifting his most intense developmental activity into the transitions of his exposition and recapitulation and away from the formal development.  But this wouldn't even count as a subversion of conventions.  I might suggest, a bit impudently, that what made Beethoven's work so brilliant was that he was composing in a way that, if you will, manipulated the conventions themselves.

His work is valuable to study because you can see within a late sonata like this how a paradigm can be at work.  Let me put it this way, if you're a composer like Beethoven who strictly respects the order in which your themes appear (Hepokoski and Darcy call this "rotation" in Elements of Sonata Theory) then you can flamboyantly subvert expectations or conventions in some other way throughout the course of your work.  Being strict in the sequential presentation of introduction, Theme 1 and Theme 2 in the macro-level allowed Beethoven to substantially breach the expectation that the development section, however defined, would or should be where most of the gestural development and transformation took place.

Had Beethoven composed a conventionally super-sized development section of the sort that a "textbook" sonata form would "require", the surprise of shifting development into the transitions of the exposition and recapitulation would be completely lost.  You wouldn't be able to hear those passages for what they are in terms of the form.

I know people love to write about how sublime and powerful this piano sonata is and it's one of my favorite piano sonatas so I'm not really going to contest any of that.  But as a composer what I have wanted to do for a while is to share what I love about this sonata at a level that, perhaps, only fellow composers might really be able to appreciate.  I love that Beethoven shifted his development sections into his transitions in this sonata.  He wasn't breaking the rules that hadn't been codified or ossified yet; he was playing with conventions in a way that subverted some expectations violently but offsetting that subversion with a carefully and strictly observed presentation at another level that is exactly what would be expected for a sonata movement.

All of this is to say that this is a sonata that can give composers a lesson.  If you are strict in observing one organization rule, convention or paradigm at one level, that is what allows you to ostentatiously breach a rule, convention or expectation at another level while still giving a performer or a prospective audience a way to "get" the nature of the musical game you're playing.  Haydn was absolutely a master at that sort of musical game-playing.

Having recently finished a book by Elaine Sisman on Haydn and variation form (probably deserves a whole separate post for a review of that book), I remember one of Sisman's points about Beethoven and variation technique/variation form was to point out that what Beethoven did was not necessarily revolutionary in terms of "what" he did.  Lots o composers did virtuoso variation movements we don't know about, wouldn't care about, and probably shouldn't care about.  Beethoven didn't "break rules" at the level of techniques or large-scale forms in his variation movements so much as he breached a range of expectations about what sorts of variations were supposed to show up where.  18th century expectation and practice had it that you introduced progressively more complex or esoteric derivations or embellishments of a theme the farther along in a variation movement you got.  For Beethoven to introduce, for instance, a fugato variation on a theme early in a movement was a breach, but not of technique or rules in  some form-identifying or form-establishing kind of way.   He was not trying to build, as it were, a chair with three legs.  He was breaching expectations of propriety as to what conventions would be observed in variation forms in an earlier generation.  Beethoven could play with how far afield from the surface details of a theme he could get while still observing its underlying structure.

Which, I suppose, gets back to my earlier comment about how a skilled composer can seem to break a "rule" at a flamboyant level but we can see in a composer like Beethoven that however distant his variations from a theme might seem to get in style or tone from the originating theme, there's some element of that theme you can hear in the variations.

there are a lot of ways in which this can play out.  Let's take, oh, a piece by Schubert (I'm honestly not a huge fan of Schubert overall), the Wanderer Fantasy.  The first movement has the schematic indicators of a sonata form but the recapitulatory section comes back in what could be regarded as "wrong" keys.  Well, they're not necessarily wrong keys.  The closing fugue re-establishes the "right" key firmly enough but that's not quite what I'm getting at, I'm proposing that in the Schubert a stable procession of thematic ideas at a structural level was what gave the composer wiggle room to drastically alter another convention, the expectation as to which key regions should show up in the exposition and recapitulation of a more or less sonata movement.

Composers who set out to break all the rules are probably setting themselves up for irrelevance because the rules, whatever they are, seem informed by the cognitive constraints and strengths of the human brain as mediated and engaged by artists of all sorts over millenia.  History is full of great artists who did not so much break rules or invent rules but had attained a level of learning and craft to manipulate conventions themselves for artistic aims.  If that seems abstract, well, it is.  Manipulating the conventions through which art gets made is pretty abstract.  It can also seem a whole lot less revolutionary than the high-flung rhetoric of many a 19th century era Romantic.  I love 18th century music and I love 20th century music but a lot of 19th century music leaves me indifferent.  I admire work by Chopin, I "can" enjoy Lizst, I don't really care much for Schubert and even though I'm a guitarist myself it's hard for me to get into Berlioz.  I can respect these composers, however, even if I don't always find myself in awe of them.  But what I'm trying to get at is that for me the 18th century composers worked to formulate a set of conventions that were supposedly set as "rules" in 19th century pedagogy.  Leonard B Meyer wrote a book on the Romantic era where he pointed out something that was a lightning bolt for me--

STYLE AND MUSIC: THEORY, HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY
LEONARD B. MEYER
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
COPYRIGHT (C) 1989 BY LEONARD B. MEYER
ISBN 0-226-52152-4

page 201

... the Romantic repudiation of convention (and especially of neo-Aristotelian aesthetics, which had been associated with the ancien regime), coupled with the denigration and weakening of syntactic relationships, highlighted the presence of diversity. As a result, the basis of coherence and unity became an issue: How did disparate and individualized themes, diverse modes of organization, and contrasts of expression--all intensified by the valuing of originality--form an organic whole? How did the several parts of a set of piano pieces or the different movements of a symphony or chamber work constitute a cohesive composition?

The problem was especially acute in the aesthetics of music. In literature, significant weakening of syntactic constraints and hierarchic organization were never really viable options, and in the visual arts, at least until the twentieth century, coherence was significantly dependent upon iconicity. In both realms, the representation of human and physical nature--often with convention disguised by historical or ethnic exoticism--played an important role in creating artistic unity. But in instrumental music, "unity through representation" was not a possibility, except of course in program music. And it is not implausible to argue that program music flourished in the nineteenth century partly because the use of a program was a way of establishing coherence and, in particular, accounting for the juxtaposition and succession of palpably different moods, connotations, and the like. 

page 220
Put aphoristically: radical individualism seeks to undermine the norms on which its expression depends

page 222
In music, one of the discoveries of Romanticism was how to hide convention, yet have it too. [emphasis added]

page 225
... Organicism, which posits the naturalness and virtues of gradual transformation, encourages the emergence of a syntactic gesture from earlier materials; such emergence, at the same time, tends to disguise the presence of the conventional. 

page 231
Of the many factors serving to disguise the presence of schemata in nineteenth century music, perhaps none is more obvious than magnitude.  ...

Magnitude tends to mask schemata, --especially those defined by syntactic relationships--because of the constraints of aural memory. [emphasis added]...

I'm going to put this in the most polemical way possible, the Romantics were total posers.  They pretended to break rules throughout a century in which both equal-tempered tuning was more or less taken as standard on the one hand, and in which major and minor key tonality was also taken as a given.  Theorizing about what a sonata form was and what did or didn't count as a solid rondo, this sort of thing emerged in 19th century music pedagogy and theory while the ideal of ignoring the rules was endorsed as a stance.  It can seem to a 21st century guitarist composer like an absurd double-bind.  

What happened in the 20th century was composers began to actually break all the rules that the Romantics pretended to break for a few generations. Equal temperament?  Why?  Fixed diatonic major and minor modes?  We can bend that a bit.  So there's a lot of 18th century music I love (particularly J. S. Bach and Haydn). There's a lot of 20th century music I love.  And, yes, I even love a lot of music from what's sometimes called "the long 19th century".  After all, no guitarist can ultimately ignore 19th century literature. It's when our six-stringed guitar as we know and love it was actually developed.  So I enjoy some of the works by the early guitarist-composers Sor, Giuliani, Diabelli, Matiegka, even some Carulli.  Less keen on Molitor but I hope you're getting my point--it's not that I can't appreciate 19th century concert music, it's that I ultimately am not willing to buy at any level that the Romantic era was as revolutionary as its devotees, particularly in academic contexts have tended to present it as being.  I'm not really one for making a religion of art.  I'm just fine with religion being religion, possibly something a person could expect of a Presbyterian ... . 

When I look at the debates and discussions that have been happening in musicology I get this strong sense that the people who are most dead set against any potential fusion of high and low musical idioms are the Romantics.  Advocates of Baroque or Classic or even early music can seem more open to the idea that high and low can mix and match more than advocates of Romantic repertoire.  Why?  If I had to guess it would be because Romantic art religion has its canon of divines and there's not really a whole lot you can add to it.  The canon of truly divine revelation is closed for the Romantics.  Being a Presbyterian I'm more set on the idea that the Bible as a canon of religious texts is closed and for art?  All bets are off until Christ returns which, if you've read this far, we can accept could be far enough in the future that though the scriptures tell us His coming is sooner than when we first believed (true), there is still time for religious artists to make art.  And thus in the 20th century we got Catholics like Messiaen composing some gloriously weird avant garde music.  

To put things in a more prosaic way, I heard somewhere it was said by Robert Fripp that to be daring and radical in his art he needed a quotidian and pedestrian home life.  

I haven't written as much as I used to and some of that has to do with "irl" things and some of it has to do with the kind of thinking I've been doing.  

I've wanted to write about music since the start of this blog but it's challenging to write about music if you're using a blog and there's only so much you can do by way of presenting scores or linking to audio.  How do you write about music in such a way that you can convey things about it to readers who may never have heard the music you're writing about or are unable to read scores?  We have access to potential solutions for some of that now by way of videos that have audio and read-along scores.  But you can spend years looking at a score and listening to a recording without  necessarily gaining much by way of understanding what you're hearing and seeing.  This would be, traditionally, when and where and why and how music teachers advocate for music lessons.  It's a fair concern but in the kind of educational-industrial complex the United States has become I'm very, very cautious about suggesting people blow tens of thousands of dollars of money that might have to be obtained via loans to get that sort of musical education, for instance.  And to go by many polemics by many scholars and music-lovers a certain kind of theory and pedagogy seems to be suffocating for musical appreciation and to go by the tales and legends ... it seems to be 19th century era pedagogy.  

It's hardly a master's thesis or anything but it's an interesting musing for a weekend night that the Romantic era music and art that seemed to seek such transcendence was accompanied with a range of theories and pedagogy that seemed to be regarded as soul-killing.  The rules were being handed down in the same era in which the maxim that you not care for the rules ... 

A more plausible and persuasive way to put what I think maybe the Romantics were trying to suggest is what I've outlined above in looking at Beethoven's last piano sonata.  If you carefully respect a range of conventions or expectations at one level you can drastically breach expectations at another level without completely confounding a would-be audience.  I'm not going to claim that's an original thought on my part.  The basic idea was articulated in a more general form by Kyle Gann over at his blog years ago.  All I've done is apply that general observation to a piano sonata I know that both Kyle Gann and I admire greatly, and found a way to show how what Gann was talking about could be demonstrated in a Beethoven piano sonata--you can really break one "rule" at a time in fantastic ways as long as you respect enough other conventions to let people know where you're going.    

Many of the failures of the 20th century avant garde came from an effort to either "break all the rules" at the same time without coming up with any compelling alternatives or, alternately, trying to impose a fleet of expectations on audiences that a series of invented conventions would be something an audience could understand because, well, I put all that in the score on pages, right?  They should get it!  No, they're supposed to be able to hear what you're doing.  You can see and hear that Beethoven shifted all of his developmental work into the transitions of Op. 111.  Even with something as grand as the Grosse Fugue Beethoven can bracket a lot of violent and surreal counterpoint into a macro-structural form that could be, depending on how you map it out, a fairly straightforward five-part rondo!  All of the surface complexity in even late Beethoven is often offset by a beautifully simple handling of the highest-level structural units in his larger movements.   And that's why people still listen to later string quartets by Beethoven and why, honestly, I doubt people will be doing that for the string quartets of Elliot Carter in the same way even now.  By contrast I enjoy works by Varese and pundits ranging from Theodore Adorno to George Rochberg have had an explanation for why that would be, he let his ear guide him.  My own conviction (and everyone is welcome to disagree) has been that when it comes to music you can gently break two or three conventions at a time so long as you're being gentle about it but if you're going to outright detonate a convention you can probably only manage to detonate one convention at a time.  And that, I submit, is a lesson that can be learned from studying the work of a composer like Beethoven, his actual works, not the gushing mythologizing that his work was subjected to.