The Symphony as Model T
The Classical era
1750-1820 CE
Over the three centuries of the Renaissance and Baroque periods music had become incredibly complicated. Critics had given the Baroque era its name, which means “ugly”. They imagined that
Western music couldn’t possibly get more complicated and ugly than it already was. History has shown that the music itself wasn’t so ugly as they thought (after all, they couldn’t even conceive of what would come next, let alone 200 years later when atonality was invented). But there was one respect in which the critics were right: overall Western music could only get simpler and not more complex. The Classical era represents a time in Western music when everything was stripped down and a different kind of revolution took place, a revolution in form and style instead of a revolution in the very nature of organizing sound.
As usual this didn’t happen all at once. Bach’s sons, particularly Carl Phillipe Emanuel Bach, continued to compose complicated music. But the complexity was of a different sort. You can think of it as someone building a vehicle with lots of chrome and fins and grills, things that don’t really need to be there but make the thing look cool. In J. S. Bach’s time the complexity was still an outgrowth of inheriting much of the Renaissance legacy; in other words the musical forms the Baroque developed were pretty basic once you got underneath all the complexity. You had a fancy looking car but the thing ran beautifully. By the time the Baroque era ended, however, the fanciness was a matter of ornament as much as musical substance, probably more ornament. To continue the car metaphor all the filigree and fins made the cars look cool but they started being less fuel efficient and less aerodynamic. From the perspective of a classic Classical music fan things had to get worse before they got better.
To describe the change people were making from the Baroque to the Classic era I need to change metaphors. We’ll still talk in terms of transportation but a new metaphor is in order. People in the Baroque era were drawn around by a lot of horses pulling fancy carriages, or by huge trains that hauled a lot of stuff. They looked cool and carried a lot of weight but they weren’t cutting it with the philosophical, economic, and social changes of the time. People wanted to travel quickly but not quite so far and with more freedom. The time was ripe for someone to invent the car. The metaphor might break down here but people were looking for something that had complexity but had it hidden away in a less obvious place. In Baroque music the complexity was starting to feel too obvious. The symphony, the piano sonata, and the string quartet were on their way to being invented.
The philosophical era to keep in mind for this period is the Enlightenment. Things had to make sense. Whatever musical solutions were invented for this time had to be rational and somehow reflect the order of the natural world. This was the time in which rationalism, secular humanism, and Deism were officially born. This was also the period in which we saw the rise of representative democratic republics (like the United States). The Age of Reason demanded music that wasn’t fraught with conundrums or emotional excess and these were things the Baroque period seemed to have. This was also the period in which a middle-class consumer audience that listened to and aspired to play art music came into being.
In a very real sense the music of the Baroque period was about to collapse under its own weight. It was believed through the Renaissance to the Baroque era that a musical movement had to have one basic tempo and one basic mood. If you changed moods you had to write a new movement or a new piece. J.S. Bach, while breaking this principle when he chose, normally held to it. It worked for a century but after 100 years the dance forms and fugues of the Baroque were starting to lose their appeal. They weren’t bad, really but they didn’t quite reflect the times anymore. The modes had fallen completely out of use even before Bach died. The major and minor keys had completely taken over yet the musical forms available were still mostly based on principles developed at the end of the Renaissance. Beyond Bach and Handel the Baroque style simply could not grow. They had done everything there was to do in the style. Bach’s descendents knew it. What was less certain was what to do about this situation. What music would be the best match for the fully evolved major and minor musical world?
At this point I make a long story very short. Skipping entirely the various transitional composers between the Baroque and Classic eras I’ll start talking about Franz Joseph Haydn. It was Haydn who figured out how to simplify musical form and define the instrumental ensembles that have defined not only the Classical era but also most art music since then: the symphony, the solo piano and the string quartet. Equally important, it was Haydn who encouraged Leopold Mozart to train his son Wolfgang to be a composer. Leopold had no impression that his son was a musician of any unusual talent. Had Haydn not intervened on the boy’s behalf there’s no telling whether we would have had anything by Mozart. Haydn also inspired the young Beethoven. Whether or not you like Haydn’s music there’s no escaping his profound influence on the other important composers of the Classical era and by default on subsequent eras of art music.
Haydn was the court musician for a Prince Eszterhazy not too far from Vienna. Haydn’s job was to make music on order. For a lot of people the idea of composing a symphony on command to please the tastes of your patron doesn’t sound appealing. Depending on your patron it was terrible but Haydn’s boss gave him all this stuff: free medical care, a free house (with the prince voluntarily covering home repairs even after two fires, how many bosses offer to pay every kind of insurance on your house), the freedom to hire and fire whomever he chose, and the freedom to compose whatever and however he saw fit. The prince also gave Haydn a salary that, for the time, was pretty big. There was just one stipulation. Haydn couldn’t leave the court, ever, without direct personal permission. This was a situation where you didn’t want to be liked by your boss so much. It made vacations to cool places a rarity.
So what kind of stuff could Haydn write if he could write whatever he wanted but couldn’t get out much to hear what everyone else was doing? Necessity is the mother of invention, so they say. Haydn invented, as if from the ground up, the traditional four-part sonata cycle we hear throughout classical music. The advantage of this form was that it could be used in any instrumental setting and was pretty easy for even uneducated people to understand. It also lended itself to adjustment to whatever ensemble you had handy. You had a dramatic first movement that was usually fast; a slow movement that was a set of variations, often on an accessible tune; a dance; and then a more complicated, faster dance (think of the difference between a spirited waltz and a foot-stomping line dance). The first movement, especially, has defined a lot of art music since the 1780s. It’s too complex to discuss here but the sonata allegro form essentially replaced the fugue as the musical form of choice for dealing with complex feelings and ideas. What’s more, it was all pretty short, at least when Haydn was writing.
Compared to the sprawling length of Baroque music Haydn’s sonata form might be a half-hour at most and be in four easily digested parts. Haydn had invented the musical equivalent of the Model T. Ford and he could even paint it any color you liked. It wouldn’t be true to say Haydn literally invented all of these forms because the birth of a musical form takes decades and dozens to hundreds of people. On the other hand, Haydn was the first to get this new sonata idea right and keep getting it right. Perhaps more important, he taught people how they could write this new kind of music.
You’re unlikely to hear about this these days but Haydn did things in his music that made him controversial, things we take for granted. For instance, Haydn would state that a composition was in G major and then kick everything in the piece in to g minor anytime he wanted, astounding his audience with pranks. Never before had a composer made a habit of mixing moments of G major and G minor together in a single movement. Critics, especially from northern Germany denounced Haydn as destroying the art of music with empty frippery. The rule had always been one movement, one mood. You couldn’t mix tragic and comic elements freely within seconds of each other. Haydn made this a habit not only in almost every symphony but even within the movements of his symphonies. This came off nothing better than a bad prank for people who were still used to Baroque music.
Haydn didn’t simply play pranks; he could customize pranks for a given audience. Depending on the national habits there were things you weren’t supposed to do. One of them was to use brass instruments in certain keys in Paris. Some of this had to do with temperament and tuning and some of it was tradition. For some of Haydn’s symphonies for Parisian crowds he introduced brass instruments in precisely these off-limit keys, and even saved the brass parts for the second movement so he could make the surprise more shocking. Just at the point when people expected him to be quiet he brought out the loudest instruments he could find in the most inappropriate keys. Haydn’s habit of pulling stunts on his audience made a lasting impression on Mozart and Beethoven alike.
Haydn had also stripped musical form down to the simplest, most accessible (and “popular”) level. This was the era in which all you really needed was a good tune and some supporting chords. Of course other composers were doing this, too. Karl Ditters was another composer from this time who had been working on these same innovations. Haydn was far from the only person doing these kinds of things but he seemed to do it all first and do it better than everyone else. And word got around. People in Paris and Vienna wanted to hear Haydn’s stuff, there was even word that the people in London wanted to hear this new music. Haydn wanted this at least as badly as the Viennese but not just to make money and be popular. He’d never had a chance to really travel anywhere since he became court composer to the Eszterhazy family. After all, no one can write for just patrons or money forever. Something else has to happen.
Of course when you write on order you don’t mind repeating yourself a lot. Haydn wrote a lot of music which today sounds routine and some of it is. But Haydn was far more radical than we can readily appreciate now that we’ve heard Mozart, Beethoven, and everyone else since their time. Haydn's music is more profound than many musicians and listeners give him credit for. His handling of key was radical in his day. Not only did he mix major and minor keys in ways that weren’t usual, he also moved from one key to another in unusual ways. For Haydn counterpoint and independent parts were something to hide so well no ordinary person would know they were still there. Since the end of the Classic era Mozart and Beethoven have been considered the better and more profound composers but this has as much to do with the mythos created for them by subsequent eras. In their own day Mozart and Beethoven considered Haydn their musical father.
As if being a musical innovator weren’t enough, Haydn was the first bona fide international success story in Western music. He was able to do something no one else had done before, pull off an international tour that won over huge audiences, got rave reviews and even earned money! Mozart advised that Haydn not tour because his own international tours had failed but Haydn visited London and wrote his twelve legendary London symphonies anyway. He was able to do this because of his patronage from the Eszterhazy family. In spite of the strict rules of his contract Haydn was able to get some of these restrictions waived by an Eszterhazy prince (the successor to his original employer) who didn’t like music. This gave Haydn the freedom to write on command and take time off to make more money off of his music. After all, his boss wasn’t asking for music anymore so Haydn could write whatever he wanted for whomever he pleased. At last! It was time to go out and see the rest of Europe. So he made visits to England and won them over almost instantly. Haydn by the end of his life had become so popular he was even a fairly well known name in the United States. No composer had ever achieved such popularity before while still alive. Haydn’s fortunes were to be indicative of the options many other composers would soon have. By all accounts Haydn had the dream career. Even his students were of the highest distinction.
Haydn’s artistic successors were Mozart and Beethoven who both studied with him early in their careers. Mozart actually died before Haydn but Mozart always thought of Haydn fondly and didn’t mind saying he owed Haydn for teaching him how to compose. The two became lifelong friends and together their music constitutes most of the Classical music that is still worth listening to. Mozart took his cue from Haydn in writing piano sonatas, string quartets, and symphonies. Mozart, unlike his mentor, was a virtuoso and came naturally to everything Haydn worked for years to achieve. Mozart didn’t introduce so many striking innovations as his mentor by Mozart did everything Haydn did even better than Haydn. Mozart also excelled in opera, something Haydn wanted to be good at but didn’t seem to master. Mozart refined the Classical style to the highest level of polish and skill. Mozart also managed to bring back elements of Baroque music and ingeniously bend it to the new Classical aesthetics. Unfortunately for Mozart his music was considered too dark and weird for the popular taste and Mozart fell into financial ruin, dying well before Haydn. It was only during the 19th century that Mozart would begin to be fully appreciated.
Beethoven, Haydn’s other famous pupil, was more of a problem child. He came from at best a tumultuous family background with a drunken, abusive father and an absentee mother. For Beethoven Haydn’s music was equally inspiring but Beethoven had issues, our modern euphemism for what may be called problems in the head. Beethoven’s unstable temper and musical ambition led him to see the symphony, the piano sonata, and the string quartet as media through which to express his frustration and ambition. This was even more true after he started losing his sense of hearing in his mid-30s. Beethoven experience an early mid-life crisis and his response. The Model T’s he learned to make from Haydn weren’t cutting anymore. He had more baggage and a lot on his mind so his cars needed to be bigger. The symphony, particularly, needed to be bigger for him to say what he had to say.
Where Haydn cranked out symphonies that numbered as high as 104, Beethoven could only pull off nine. But these were all titanic symphonies, bigger than anything heard before. Where Haydn composed 80 string quartets Beethoven wrote just under 20. What Beethoven appeared to lack in productivity was more than made up for by breadth, length, and drama. Beethoven took the fairly straightforward forms of his day and pushed them to their breaking point, grasping harmonies that even Haydn had avoided. Beethoven in his 30s was establishing his heroic style and paving the way for the next age of Western music.
Haydn himself wasn’t sure why Beethoven was going in such strange directions. Haydn wasn’t too proud to admit he’d been surpassed yet again but he had no idea why Beethoven was writing such strange music. Beethoven, for his part, couldn’t figure out whether he wanted to keep his mentor’s approval or cast him off. But by the time he composed his Third and Fifth symphonies, Beethoven couldn’t afford to go back to his earlier style. Almost as soon as the middle class came into being artists couldn’t help craving their attention and hating them at the same time and Beethoven was the first major composer to conspicuously struggle with this, a struggle Haydn never even had to think about.
What Haydn began, musical trickster that he was, Mozart and Beethoven took as far as they could. Things had become simplified through Haydn’s music but Beethoven’s middle and late symphonies, piano sonatas, and string quartets were bringing size and complexity back into Western music, size and a lot of drama. Beethoven even brought back the fugue at just the point when it was starting to be forgotten. His work became more introspective and expansive and people chalked this up to his being insane and/or deaf. Both might have been true but Beethoven had figured out where he thought the musical future lay. He was going to explore every boundary Haydn never thought to look at and push the forms of the Classical era to their breaking point. For that, and for the romantic mythos surround his tortured life, Beethoven has now become one of the greatest idols in musical history—his music pushed beyond the limits of the Classical age defined by Haydn into a new age of Western music. By the time Beethoven died in the 1820s the Classical era had already ended. Perhaps it really ended when Haydn himself died around the dawn of the 19th century.
It was during this time that nationalism was kicking into high gear. The American Revolutionary War was happening and the French Revolution. The ideas of the Enlightenment were about to crash into nationalism and bloodlust. The 18th century was over and Mozart was dead and all of a sudden Haydn’s musical creations somehow seemed out of pace with this new world and Beethoven, insane though many thought him to be, seemed to be paving the way for bigger and longer music. It was the time in Europe when musicians in little nations, and the little nations themselves, were going to get big-headed about everything.
A short list of Classical composers and key works
JOSEPH HAYDN
There are 104 symphonies, 80 string quartets, and probably 60 piano sonatas to choose from, not counting his dozen masses and three or four oratorios. The pieces I most recommend listening to are the following.
The London Symphonies: Nos. 93-104
These dozen symphonies laid the foundations for pretty much every symphony since. They are simple, direct, easy to understand, and fun. After decades of Mozart and Beethoven being elevated to gods Haydn will come off as manufactured and boring by comparison but this is to hear through post-Romantic ears. There are a lot of good recordings of these works.
String Quartets Opus 74, 76, and 77.
These late quartets are Haydn’s best and show what he could do in ensemble playing. Haydn frequently played his own quartets with friends. He, Mozart, and his friend Karl Ditters would get together every so often and play each others quartets. For a good Op.76 recording check out the Tokyo string quartet.
The Creation
This is one of Haydn’s late oratorios. I normally don’t recommend choral music from the Classical period. Most of it is actually quite lame. The price of making cool instrumental music was making choral music that sucked. But Haydn’s Creation is an endearing and accessible piece. He even arranged for an English and German version.
WOLFGANG MOZART
You know, I honestly don’t really like Mozart. He’s good and I respect him but I don’t like him as much as Haydn. He comes off as too slick for my tastes. This doesn’t mean Mozart shouldn’t be listened to, just that I’m not a huge fan of him. His “Haydn” string quartets are good and his “Jupiter” symphony is, too. He, like Haydn, sang in choirs so his choral music is okay if you like the style. His operas and his Requiem are the works to study. I’m occupied with other musical studies right now but I’ll get around to studying his operas eventually.
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN
Not “von”. Beethoven liked to think he was royalty but this was probably him compensating for his short stature. J Don’t pay too much attention to Beethoven’s earlier works since they’re too much like Haydn. They’re not bad, really, they’re just not different enough from Haydn to give you any idea of how Beethoven changed Western music. Under no circumstances listen to the bulk of his choral writing. I know tons of people will disagree with me strongly but Beethoven’s choral writing is on the whole pretty lame. If you like his choral writing, more power to you. I can’t stand it.
The Third Symphony (“Heroic”)
This was the beginning of, surprise, Beethoven’s “heroic” period. It’s also his first major work from his middle years. It bears virtually no connection to Haydn.
The Fifth Symphony
Trust me, literally everyone in the Western world has heard part of this symphony at least once in their lives. It holds up best of all his symphonies. Here again Beethoven has almost no connection to Haydn, although he does start in a minor key and end in a major key (something that almost became a trademark for him). This is one of the most recorded symphonies of all time. It really won’t matter too much which recording you pick.
The Ninth Symphony
“Joyful joyful”. Beethoven butchers Schiller by adding his own verses and the choral writing is not very good but Beethoven gets by on the grandeur and precision of his instrumental writing. This was his last complete symphony and introduces choral writing to what had previously been a strictly instrumental work.
String quartets
All of the string quartets past Op. 18 are worth checking out. The Op. 18 quartets are just too much like Haydn to do much for me. You might like them, though so consider checking them out. His best quartets are arguably his later ones, especially the Op. 130 quartet in B flat (make sure you get a recording with the original ending “the Grand Fugue”). The B flat quartet was the first point where Beethoven wrote a piece he cared about deeply and then sold out in the interest of making the work more publishable, audience friendly, and financially lucrative. Nevertheless, it’s still one of his greatest works. I haven’t heard as many Beethoven recordings but the Tokyo and Emerson String Quartets do a good job
Piano Sonatas.
Of course there’s the notorious “Moonlight Sonata” and you should listen to it provided ou listen to all of it. “The Tempest” is another great sonata, and the “Appasionata” sonata, too (you’ll hear what sounds like a minor version of our national anthem). His best sonata is really his last, the 32nd piano sonata in C minor. Alfred Brendel does a good job recording this piece but you may have trouble finding copies since Beethoven’s really late sonatas don’t seem to appeal to buyers or stores quite as much. There’s where the gems are, though.
Saturday, June 17, 2006
An absurdly brief history of Western music, part 2
We Can Walk And Chew Gum at the Same Time:
The Twin Revolutions of the Baroque era
1650 to 1750 CE
The Renaissance, as a musical period, lasted about two centuries. That’s enough time for the art to be perfected and for people to wonder what else they can do with their time. Palestrina’s music was arguably the most perfect realization of the aesthetic ideals of the West up to that point. But as a choir director I know put it with a chuckle, “It was almost too perfect because he wrote a lot of music that all sounds the same.” Nobody really wanted to get rid of the old Renaissance style as such. After all, it sounded great and everyone knew by now you could get people to perform music in that style. After two centuries you could say people simply wanted something different. Not something new exactly, just something different. That’s what prompted people to experiment with new ways of organizing sound.
In the past music had been modal. This meant you had priorities about what notes went where but not in the usual major and minor key system we’re used to. You had four common modes: dorian, lydian, mixolydian and phrygian. For those of you familiar with keyboards, modes can be considered transpositions of the major scale—of course that’s not what they really are but in this case it’s useful to fudge details for the sake of illustration. Take the scale of C major, for instance. In modes you still play eight notes to get the complete scale and you still play only white keys but you don’t start from C anymore. For dorian you start from D, for lydian you start from F, from mixolydian you start from G, and for phrygian you start from E. Those are the modes and those modes can be played with those intervals from anywhere on any instrument.
If you want modern songs that show you what these modes sound like now the songs are: “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles for the dorian mode (“Hidden Place” by Bjork (Vespertine) is another good example); “Possibly Maybe” by Bjork in the lydian mode; and for the mixolydian mode “Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles (the two Beatles songs are off Revolver). Unfortunately there aren’t many good phrygian examples I can think of off the top of my head. But if you’ve heard Thomas Tallis or Ockeghem you know that the modes as we think of them now and how they were used in the Renaissance were different. The modes were considered strictly melodic. Harmony was simply a convergent property of everyone getting their tunes to fit together. Modes weren’t exploited for mood and color alone, for harmonic ambiance, until later. Before musical modes got this complete make-over from melodic to harmonic patterns (two centuries later than the Baroque era) two significant changes, that we take for granted, had to occur.
The first was the introduction of the aeolian and ionian modes. This sounds arcane but in modern lingo it simply means major and natural minor scales. Precisely why these were introduced I’m not completely sure but the general rule is someone thought they sounded good. My guess is someone was playing around with the keyboards available as the Renaissance played out and made a happy discovery; perhaps someone figured out that the harmonies favored in the Renaissance style had prevailing patterns that suggested the major scale. In any event it’s important to remember that these were modes and not keys in the modern sense. Harmony was still a convergent property of two or more independent yet interdependent melodic lines. Resolutions that don’t sound final to us sounded final to the ears of Renaissance listeners. We’ve become accustomed to the major and minor system. Yet even though they weren’t treated as the keys we now know them to be they set the stage for it, particularly what became the major mode.
Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do would soon be possible and eventually it would show up in The Sound of Music.
Now the reason introducing the major scale was important was that it was fixed. The seven notes of the major scale had to be there for there to be a major scale. This meant that the scale governed harmony as much as melody. Harmony was more a friendly by-product rather than a goal in modal music but now it would become a science unto itself. But now harmony couldn’t simply be a happy afterthought. Things would no longer turn out just right or interesting using the old patterns for regulating individual melodic lines in relationship to each other. Harmony became central, so central that by the time Bach wrote the first prelude of the first book of his Correctly Tempered Keyboard you could make a piece of music that worked on the basis of harmony alone, a cascade of rippling chords.
Let me return to the mass transit metaphor I used for Renaissance music. The Renaissance represented a world in which harmony came about because you had hundreds of cars driving on the freeway in the same direction. This was because nobody wanted to crash into each other. The Baroque era introduced the world of light rail and subways. You were getting the same number of people moving but they were all on trains and all their movements were up and down the train. People crashing into each other inside a train was still an issue so rules were developed on how people had to behave riding on the train. One person can move a long way as long as no one else is moving. Lots of people can move at once so long as the movement isn’t big or disorderly.
So the old rules of what the voice could and couldn’t do still applied but they were changed by the relatively fixed nature of the new keys. As composers and performers grappled with this system they developed guidelines for what collections of notes worked best in what combinations. This now has the unceremonious term “functional harmony”. In other words, “functional harmony” is the stuff that worked in this new style. That’s how the 1, 4 and 5 of tonal music came about. After a lot of work people figured out that in a fixed scale certain chord changes were more satisfying than others. These chord changes were also easier to sing. Of course nobody forgot about melody during this time, either. But this new functional harmony alone was not what redefined Western music.
The other major change was the introduction of meter, or the time signature. In Renaissance music you didn’t have time signatures. If you ever get a chance to look at Gregorian chant and original copies of Renaissance part books you see that the notes were written without time signatures or measures, things most reading musicians take for granted these days. There was no such thing as 4/4 or 3/4 back then, just a long procession of notes and spaces on the music paper. Music was still organized around pulse but this is too complex a subject to talk about here. The Baroque era introduced the innovation of common time and meter. Now everything could be explained in terms of three or four beats at a time.
The advent of meter and functional harmony had the following significance. If your music was organized by a fixed number of beats then you could start thinking about the strong and weak beats of the meter in recurring patterns. You could start thinking in terms of these recurring rhythmic units. The relatively static nature of the major/minor system meant that melodic leaps that were forbidden in Renaissance music became permissible in the emerging Baroque style. Why? Because with functional harmony came a fixed set of chords set within a key. You could make descending melodic leaps that weren’t possible before because this time around you knew where you would land. There were at most a few options. In the older style there was almost no telling where you could land in relationship to anyone else’s parts and that made intonation and singing harder to manage.
With the advent of organizing music into beats came a more liberal treatment of discordant tones. If you settled on a discord on the strong beat of a measure in 4/4, for instance, you’d be okay as long as you eventually resolved the discord. The rhythm of the music, being predictable, could carry you along. And, if you chose, you could upset the rhythm. These things had always been done but in the new system there was room for new experiments. The apparent simplification of the musical language made room for the same level of complexity.
Why did this matter? Because instrumental music, particularly dance music, began to flourish in the Baroque period. The end of the Renaissance brought with it a good number of methods for tuning and tempering instruments and more affordable means of producing them. You could finally get a keyboard to play in tune and stay in tune and play a tolerable number of notes that all sounded good together (transpositions of modes if you will, or keys, usually just four to eight of 24 possible major and minor keys until about J. S. Bach’s time). The upshot of this was a revolution in instrumental music. Music could now be played in almost any key and the complexity of the old Renaissance style could be welded into the newer style.
The best example of where this was done in a musical work called the fugue. The fugue was a descendant of the singing-together pieces from the Renaissance. Now the principles of vocal writing were applied to works for the keyboard. Someone would start with a melody and someone else would come in with a new melody after the first person started singing something else and it would go down the line for up to five or six different parts. As the Baroque era developed composers started adapting this principle to keyboard music.
How this could work in an actual fugue for keyboard worked something like this: your left hand would start playing a melody and your right hand would play the same melody at a different pitch when your left hand was done playing the tune. Meanwhile your left hand would play something new underneath the melody the right hand was now playing. By the time the right hand was done playing the melody your left hand would play the original melody again and some other new material while your right hand played the new material your left hand had already played. If this sounds it hard there’s a reason. Depending on how complicated the melody was you could add five voices to the texture or as few as two. The best example of this new way of writing music is found in J. S. Bach’s second fugue from the first book of The Well Tempered Clavier. Not only is this an example of how the old rules of the Renaissance were retained but how they were changed by the introduction of meter and key. In this fugue we even have a great example of how all of this was incorporated into the dance rhythms and forms that defined the Baroque period.
There were two styles available now, simply called “old” and “new”, the modal and tonal systems. And a lot of people hated the new style with its major and minor keys. They called it “baroque”. Read “ugly”. The era of Monteverdi, Schutz, Buxtehude, Vivaldi, Telemann, Bach, Purcell, and Handel was known as the “ugly” era. Compared to the old style people felt this “new” style was too ornate, too crude, and far too ugly. Keys that were considered completely off limits in the old style, keys that were almost impossible to have correctly tuned and tempered, were starting to get used specifically for their “demonic” or discordant character. This had been done in earlier periods but not in this new style and not so systematically. What’s more the new style was more liberal in handling dissonance. In fact the new major and minor scales were so liberal in comparison to the old style they permitted almost completely chromatic music. A piano piece could have a long succession of half steps before going anywhere else. A great example of this is the f minor fugue from the first book of J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (probably better translated the Correctly Tempered Keyboard).
In this respect a composer like Bach was as radical in his era as Schoenberg in the 20th century, breaking open a world of harmonic possibilities. The new style Bach and other Baroque composers developed became the style from which all subsequent Western music descended and by which all subsequent Western music may be judged. Many people don’t know, though, that this “new” style had as its foundation the “old”. Yet the rules for writing for voice didn’t change and even with the advent of fully functioning orchestras instrumental parts were still written interchangeably with vocal parts in the new style just as in the old. And most of these composers knew how to compose in the old style, too. That could be a lesson for musicians today. You don’t have to play only rock, jazz, or classical. The Baroque masters could pull off writing in two styles and it was, as the colloquial saying has it, walking and chewing gum at the same time. If there’s any reason a modern musician should admire Baroque composers this should be one of them. The Baroque era reached a level of complexity and directness that can only be equaled. The next musical revolution lay in further simplifying the Western musical language.
A short list of Baroque composers and significant works
Without a doubt the most important and best known composers of the Baroque era are George Frederick Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach (there’s fifteen generations of them so the full name is necessary so you don’t confuse him with Johann Christoph Bach). Both composers were immensely prolific and wrote music for every conceivable ensemble available to them.
Below are a smattering of works by the two composers to check out. Baroque composers are still so popular there won’t be much trouble finding a decent recording.
By J. S. Bach:
St. Matthew Passion.
Bach’s most profound work, a setting of Matthew’s account of the death and burial of Jesus with profuse interpolations of other texts. There’s an excellent recording by Helmuth Rilling on the Haensler label. Rilling is a well-established Bach specialist and plays the music with more attention to the dance qualities of the period. Herbert van Karajan’s recording isn’t terrible but he takes most of the movements too slowly and makes the Passion more ponderous than even the Passion needs to be.
The Well Tempered Clavier
This pedagogical, two-volume work has unalterably changed the shape of keyboard music in the West. Many of these pieces are so famous you’ll recognize them even if you don’t think you’ve heard them before, particularly many fugues from the first book. There are so many recordings of this work that it will be easy to find a copy to listen to at any library.
Cantatas (virtually any of them).
Bach wrote a vast array of secular and sacred cantatas and you could literally pick one at random and get a great example of the unaccompanied choral style of the Baroque period.
By G. F. Handel:
I’m not as familiar with Handel. I know of The Messiah and his Concerto Grossi. I can’t think of as many works to recommend since I haven’t listened to as much of his work but I know he wrote quite a few oratorios in addition to The Messiah. He was held in very low repute among the Puritans for writing theater music (the theater has long considered a hotbed for homosexuality and all around decadent living). It is now believed that Handel had bipolar disorder.
The Baroque period had several other important composers. By and large it was good to be Lutheran in this period! The Bach family alone has assured a huge body of Lutheran music. Here’s just a few of the other composers you should consider checking out.
Antonio Vivaldi
Most people are likely to have heard parts of The Four Seasons and it’s his most popular work. If you haven’t heard Vivaldi The Four Seasons is a good place to start. Recordings should be easy to get ahold of. He’s not as titanic a composer as Bach or Handel but he’s still worth checking out. Be warned, a lot of his works tend to sound the same. Many have joked his favorite composing method today would be running his work through a copy machine! That’s not quite fair but it’s not completely inaccurate either! Vivaldi was despised by many composers in his day for being a self-plagiarist. Nevertheless, self-plagiarists have their moments and Rod Stewart could only hope to copy himself as effectively.
Heinrich Schutz
Schutz was known as “the musical preacher”. His theological acumen was as great as his musical skill. He and Bach were the two composers who arguably had the best balance of comprehensive musical and theological training. Schutz is possibly the only composer of any period to have set the entirety of Psalm 119 to music! Schutz was the most important of the early or “low” Baroque composers. “Low” in this case simply refers to the simplicity of his music compared to the “high” Baroque composers (Bach and Handel) who came later. The pieces to check out would be his Christmas oratorio and what’s often known as his German requiem (not to be confused with anything by Brahms).
Hans Leo Hassler
If you’ve ever sung “O Sacred Head” then you sang this man’s song. Hassler composed a lot of sacred choral music, most of it good even when it’s been sung and played to death (particularly the motet “Verbum Caro Factum Est”).
Henry Purcell
The Baroque period gave rise to a couple of good composers in England but Purcell is the greatest. After the Baroque era English music was pretty lame until the end of the 19th century (not counting the Wesleys, who somehow managed to make some memorable music). Purcell wrote a lot but the signature piece he’s come to be known for is the English language opera Dido and Aeneus. It wasn’t until Benjamin Britten worked in opera 200 years later that English serious opera had anything of note.
Dietrich Buxtehude
Buxtehude was an important north German predecessor of Bach. It was Buxtehude’s keyboard music, particularly his fugues, that laid much of the foundation that Bach would build on.
Georg Telemann
It was Telemann and not Bach who was the most sought after musician of his day. Very little of his music has survived for us to study now but this has more to do with the carpet bombing of Germany during the Second World War than any artistic shortcoming on Telemann’s part.
Claudio Monteverdi
If there was a “first” Baroque composer Monteverdi would be the one. Compared to most of the subsequent Baroque composers I just don’t find him that interesting but he, more than the others, represents the transitional time of the “low” Baroque when the two styles were on a pretty equal footing.
The Twin Revolutions of the Baroque era
1650 to 1750 CE
The Renaissance, as a musical period, lasted about two centuries. That’s enough time for the art to be perfected and for people to wonder what else they can do with their time. Palestrina’s music was arguably the most perfect realization of the aesthetic ideals of the West up to that point. But as a choir director I know put it with a chuckle, “It was almost too perfect because he wrote a lot of music that all sounds the same.” Nobody really wanted to get rid of the old Renaissance style as such. After all, it sounded great and everyone knew by now you could get people to perform music in that style. After two centuries you could say people simply wanted something different. Not something new exactly, just something different. That’s what prompted people to experiment with new ways of organizing sound.
In the past music had been modal. This meant you had priorities about what notes went where but not in the usual major and minor key system we’re used to. You had four common modes: dorian, lydian, mixolydian and phrygian. For those of you familiar with keyboards, modes can be considered transpositions of the major scale—of course that’s not what they really are but in this case it’s useful to fudge details for the sake of illustration. Take the scale of C major, for instance. In modes you still play eight notes to get the complete scale and you still play only white keys but you don’t start from C anymore. For dorian you start from D, for lydian you start from F, from mixolydian you start from G, and for phrygian you start from E. Those are the modes and those modes can be played with those intervals from anywhere on any instrument.
If you want modern songs that show you what these modes sound like now the songs are: “Eleanor Rigby” by the Beatles for the dorian mode (“Hidden Place” by Bjork (Vespertine) is another good example); “Possibly Maybe” by Bjork in the lydian mode; and for the mixolydian mode “Tomorrow Never Knows” by the Beatles (the two Beatles songs are off Revolver). Unfortunately there aren’t many good phrygian examples I can think of off the top of my head. But if you’ve heard Thomas Tallis or Ockeghem you know that the modes as we think of them now and how they were used in the Renaissance were different. The modes were considered strictly melodic. Harmony was simply a convergent property of everyone getting their tunes to fit together. Modes weren’t exploited for mood and color alone, for harmonic ambiance, until later. Before musical modes got this complete make-over from melodic to harmonic patterns (two centuries later than the Baroque era) two significant changes, that we take for granted, had to occur.
The first was the introduction of the aeolian and ionian modes. This sounds arcane but in modern lingo it simply means major and natural minor scales. Precisely why these were introduced I’m not completely sure but the general rule is someone thought they sounded good. My guess is someone was playing around with the keyboards available as the Renaissance played out and made a happy discovery; perhaps someone figured out that the harmonies favored in the Renaissance style had prevailing patterns that suggested the major scale. In any event it’s important to remember that these were modes and not keys in the modern sense. Harmony was still a convergent property of two or more independent yet interdependent melodic lines. Resolutions that don’t sound final to us sounded final to the ears of Renaissance listeners. We’ve become accustomed to the major and minor system. Yet even though they weren’t treated as the keys we now know them to be they set the stage for it, particularly what became the major mode.
Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do would soon be possible and eventually it would show up in The Sound of Music.
Now the reason introducing the major scale was important was that it was fixed. The seven notes of the major scale had to be there for there to be a major scale. This meant that the scale governed harmony as much as melody. Harmony was more a friendly by-product rather than a goal in modal music but now it would become a science unto itself. But now harmony couldn’t simply be a happy afterthought. Things would no longer turn out just right or interesting using the old patterns for regulating individual melodic lines in relationship to each other. Harmony became central, so central that by the time Bach wrote the first prelude of the first book of his Correctly Tempered Keyboard you could make a piece of music that worked on the basis of harmony alone, a cascade of rippling chords.
Let me return to the mass transit metaphor I used for Renaissance music. The Renaissance represented a world in which harmony came about because you had hundreds of cars driving on the freeway in the same direction. This was because nobody wanted to crash into each other. The Baroque era introduced the world of light rail and subways. You were getting the same number of people moving but they were all on trains and all their movements were up and down the train. People crashing into each other inside a train was still an issue so rules were developed on how people had to behave riding on the train. One person can move a long way as long as no one else is moving. Lots of people can move at once so long as the movement isn’t big or disorderly.
So the old rules of what the voice could and couldn’t do still applied but they were changed by the relatively fixed nature of the new keys. As composers and performers grappled with this system they developed guidelines for what collections of notes worked best in what combinations. This now has the unceremonious term “functional harmony”. In other words, “functional harmony” is the stuff that worked in this new style. That’s how the 1, 4 and 5 of tonal music came about. After a lot of work people figured out that in a fixed scale certain chord changes were more satisfying than others. These chord changes were also easier to sing. Of course nobody forgot about melody during this time, either. But this new functional harmony alone was not what redefined Western music.
The other major change was the introduction of meter, or the time signature. In Renaissance music you didn’t have time signatures. If you ever get a chance to look at Gregorian chant and original copies of Renaissance part books you see that the notes were written without time signatures or measures, things most reading musicians take for granted these days. There was no such thing as 4/4 or 3/4 back then, just a long procession of notes and spaces on the music paper. Music was still organized around pulse but this is too complex a subject to talk about here. The Baroque era introduced the innovation of common time and meter. Now everything could be explained in terms of three or four beats at a time.
The advent of meter and functional harmony had the following significance. If your music was organized by a fixed number of beats then you could start thinking about the strong and weak beats of the meter in recurring patterns. You could start thinking in terms of these recurring rhythmic units. The relatively static nature of the major/minor system meant that melodic leaps that were forbidden in Renaissance music became permissible in the emerging Baroque style. Why? Because with functional harmony came a fixed set of chords set within a key. You could make descending melodic leaps that weren’t possible before because this time around you knew where you would land. There were at most a few options. In the older style there was almost no telling where you could land in relationship to anyone else’s parts and that made intonation and singing harder to manage.
With the advent of organizing music into beats came a more liberal treatment of discordant tones. If you settled on a discord on the strong beat of a measure in 4/4, for instance, you’d be okay as long as you eventually resolved the discord. The rhythm of the music, being predictable, could carry you along. And, if you chose, you could upset the rhythm. These things had always been done but in the new system there was room for new experiments. The apparent simplification of the musical language made room for the same level of complexity.
Why did this matter? Because instrumental music, particularly dance music, began to flourish in the Baroque period. The end of the Renaissance brought with it a good number of methods for tuning and tempering instruments and more affordable means of producing them. You could finally get a keyboard to play in tune and stay in tune and play a tolerable number of notes that all sounded good together (transpositions of modes if you will, or keys, usually just four to eight of 24 possible major and minor keys until about J. S. Bach’s time). The upshot of this was a revolution in instrumental music. Music could now be played in almost any key and the complexity of the old Renaissance style could be welded into the newer style.
The best example of where this was done in a musical work called the fugue. The fugue was a descendant of the singing-together pieces from the Renaissance. Now the principles of vocal writing were applied to works for the keyboard. Someone would start with a melody and someone else would come in with a new melody after the first person started singing something else and it would go down the line for up to five or six different parts. As the Baroque era developed composers started adapting this principle to keyboard music.
How this could work in an actual fugue for keyboard worked something like this: your left hand would start playing a melody and your right hand would play the same melody at a different pitch when your left hand was done playing the tune. Meanwhile your left hand would play something new underneath the melody the right hand was now playing. By the time the right hand was done playing the melody your left hand would play the original melody again and some other new material while your right hand played the new material your left hand had already played. If this sounds it hard there’s a reason. Depending on how complicated the melody was you could add five voices to the texture or as few as two. The best example of this new way of writing music is found in J. S. Bach’s second fugue from the first book of The Well Tempered Clavier. Not only is this an example of how the old rules of the Renaissance were retained but how they were changed by the introduction of meter and key. In this fugue we even have a great example of how all of this was incorporated into the dance rhythms and forms that defined the Baroque period.
There were two styles available now, simply called “old” and “new”, the modal and tonal systems. And a lot of people hated the new style with its major and minor keys. They called it “baroque”. Read “ugly”. The era of Monteverdi, Schutz, Buxtehude, Vivaldi, Telemann, Bach, Purcell, and Handel was known as the “ugly” era. Compared to the old style people felt this “new” style was too ornate, too crude, and far too ugly. Keys that were considered completely off limits in the old style, keys that were almost impossible to have correctly tuned and tempered, were starting to get used specifically for their “demonic” or discordant character. This had been done in earlier periods but not in this new style and not so systematically. What’s more the new style was more liberal in handling dissonance. In fact the new major and minor scales were so liberal in comparison to the old style they permitted almost completely chromatic music. A piano piece could have a long succession of half steps before going anywhere else. A great example of this is the f minor fugue from the first book of J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier (probably better translated the Correctly Tempered Keyboard).
In this respect a composer like Bach was as radical in his era as Schoenberg in the 20th century, breaking open a world of harmonic possibilities. The new style Bach and other Baroque composers developed became the style from which all subsequent Western music descended and by which all subsequent Western music may be judged. Many people don’t know, though, that this “new” style had as its foundation the “old”. Yet the rules for writing for voice didn’t change and even with the advent of fully functioning orchestras instrumental parts were still written interchangeably with vocal parts in the new style just as in the old. And most of these composers knew how to compose in the old style, too. That could be a lesson for musicians today. You don’t have to play only rock, jazz, or classical. The Baroque masters could pull off writing in two styles and it was, as the colloquial saying has it, walking and chewing gum at the same time. If there’s any reason a modern musician should admire Baroque composers this should be one of them. The Baroque era reached a level of complexity and directness that can only be equaled. The next musical revolution lay in further simplifying the Western musical language.
A short list of Baroque composers and significant works
Without a doubt the most important and best known composers of the Baroque era are George Frederick Handel and Johann Sebastian Bach (there’s fifteen generations of them so the full name is necessary so you don’t confuse him with Johann Christoph Bach). Both composers were immensely prolific and wrote music for every conceivable ensemble available to them.
Below are a smattering of works by the two composers to check out. Baroque composers are still so popular there won’t be much trouble finding a decent recording.
By J. S. Bach:
St. Matthew Passion.
Bach’s most profound work, a setting of Matthew’s account of the death and burial of Jesus with profuse interpolations of other texts. There’s an excellent recording by Helmuth Rilling on the Haensler label. Rilling is a well-established Bach specialist and plays the music with more attention to the dance qualities of the period. Herbert van Karajan’s recording isn’t terrible but he takes most of the movements too slowly and makes the Passion more ponderous than even the Passion needs to be.
The Well Tempered Clavier
This pedagogical, two-volume work has unalterably changed the shape of keyboard music in the West. Many of these pieces are so famous you’ll recognize them even if you don’t think you’ve heard them before, particularly many fugues from the first book. There are so many recordings of this work that it will be easy to find a copy to listen to at any library.
Cantatas (virtually any of them).
Bach wrote a vast array of secular and sacred cantatas and you could literally pick one at random and get a great example of the unaccompanied choral style of the Baroque period.
By G. F. Handel:
I’m not as familiar with Handel. I know of The Messiah and his Concerto Grossi. I can’t think of as many works to recommend since I haven’t listened to as much of his work but I know he wrote quite a few oratorios in addition to The Messiah. He was held in very low repute among the Puritans for writing theater music (the theater has long considered a hotbed for homosexuality and all around decadent living). It is now believed that Handel had bipolar disorder.
The Baroque period had several other important composers. By and large it was good to be Lutheran in this period! The Bach family alone has assured a huge body of Lutheran music. Here’s just a few of the other composers you should consider checking out.
Antonio Vivaldi
Most people are likely to have heard parts of The Four Seasons and it’s his most popular work. If you haven’t heard Vivaldi The Four Seasons is a good place to start. Recordings should be easy to get ahold of. He’s not as titanic a composer as Bach or Handel but he’s still worth checking out. Be warned, a lot of his works tend to sound the same. Many have joked his favorite composing method today would be running his work through a copy machine! That’s not quite fair but it’s not completely inaccurate either! Vivaldi was despised by many composers in his day for being a self-plagiarist. Nevertheless, self-plagiarists have their moments and Rod Stewart could only hope to copy himself as effectively.
Heinrich Schutz
Schutz was known as “the musical preacher”. His theological acumen was as great as his musical skill. He and Bach were the two composers who arguably had the best balance of comprehensive musical and theological training. Schutz is possibly the only composer of any period to have set the entirety of Psalm 119 to music! Schutz was the most important of the early or “low” Baroque composers. “Low” in this case simply refers to the simplicity of his music compared to the “high” Baroque composers (Bach and Handel) who came later. The pieces to check out would be his Christmas oratorio and what’s often known as his German requiem (not to be confused with anything by Brahms).
Hans Leo Hassler
If you’ve ever sung “O Sacred Head” then you sang this man’s song. Hassler composed a lot of sacred choral music, most of it good even when it’s been sung and played to death (particularly the motet “Verbum Caro Factum Est”).
Henry Purcell
The Baroque period gave rise to a couple of good composers in England but Purcell is the greatest. After the Baroque era English music was pretty lame until the end of the 19th century (not counting the Wesleys, who somehow managed to make some memorable music). Purcell wrote a lot but the signature piece he’s come to be known for is the English language opera Dido and Aeneus. It wasn’t until Benjamin Britten worked in opera 200 years later that English serious opera had anything of note.
Dietrich Buxtehude
Buxtehude was an important north German predecessor of Bach. It was Buxtehude’s keyboard music, particularly his fugues, that laid much of the foundation that Bach would build on.
Georg Telemann
It was Telemann and not Bach who was the most sought after musician of his day. Very little of his music has survived for us to study now but this has more to do with the carpet bombing of Germany during the Second World War than any artistic shortcoming on Telemann’s part.
Claudio Monteverdi
If there was a “first” Baroque composer Monteverdi would be the one. Compared to most of the subsequent Baroque composers I just don’t find him that interesting but he, more than the others, represents the transitional time of the “low” Baroque when the two styles were on a pretty equal footing.
An absurdly truncated history of Western music, part 1
What if We All Sang Together?
A Simplified History of Choral Music in the Renaissance
est 1450 to 1650 CE
Perhaps a brief history of Renaissance music is beyond me. Perhaps I’ll end up being fair to the Renaissance and not to the Medieval period because the seeds of the music of the Renaissance lie in the Medieval period. The sketch presented below is a simplification as most summaries of musical periods must be. I trust any professional musicologists specializing in Renaissance or Medieval music who might read this will forgive me since I’m not claiming to write an academic treatise.
In so far as we think of Gregorian chant when we think of the medieval music we also think of a lot of “fa la la la la” and other fancy singing when we think of the Renaissance. With my apology in advance, the entire Renaissance can be defined as a revolution in Western music founded on the idea that lots of people singing together can sing independent parts and that a keyboard can be used to play more than one tune simultaneously. With such a revolution, of course, was the obligatory debate as to whether and how things out to be done.
This isn’t about singing something like “kyrie eleison dona eis requiem” in parallel fifths while bringing out the Holy Hand Grenade (that’s not how Medieval “organum” actually worked anyway, never mind that Monty Python & the Holy Grail was funny). This is about a fiery time in the history of Church politics and Church music. The Church splintered off into many directions in the West and people spent time trying to determine what true Christianity was and to defend it. Naturally everyone else was supposed to look bad in the process. This period saw the reemergence of the city-state and as these spread their power over provinces they sought to extend their newfound power even further. The world seemed to be looking bigger all the time and many people in Europe started getting the faintest idea that it would be nice to have more of that world. The Renaissance and Reformation are roughly parallel so I’ll touch briefly on the Reformation. Much of the changes in this period happened within church music as much as anywhere else..
Between the 1450s and the 1650s Luther and various other reformers within the Roman church began to break from Rome over doctrinal and liturgical disputes. Among these concerns were the authority of the papacy and priests, the desire for vernacular worship, translation of the Bible and literacy, political independence of state rulers from Roman church authorities and, perhaps as always, concerns about the links between the Church, political leaders, and organized crime (after all, crime and sin aren’t always so different).
Another famous concern just prior the Reformation was the selling of indulgences. If I don’t get this right I’ll be nailed for it and will make any needed corrections later so here I go: Suppose the performance of a set of actions in church was considered effective as a pleasing sacrifice to God, a repentance of sin and an offering of thanks (Mass, for instance), in short a sanctifying grace. Suppose then that during this time you would pay your regular tithe, tax, whatever you wish to call it. Suppose further that you want to do something the Roman church considered sin or blasphemy (say you’re married and you like oral sex, for instance). Perhaps this thing is so fun you fail to attend church or a friend or loved one does this stuff regularly and you want to preserve them from being sent to Hell.
The indulgence served as a kind of absentee vote, a way to get absolution without having to actually go through the motions in the cathedral or the confessional booth or where ever all that was done. This was also something you could do on behalf of the degenerate cousin of yours on the other side of the village. Indulgences could also be obtained for already departed souls thought to be in purgatory and the sale of indulgences in this case especially became lucrative.
Keep in mind all these “absentee votes” were for confessions and for rituals done in Latin, a language very few people used in daily life. In the sale of indulgences all the social, political, and religious controversies of the day came to a head. Through this you could end up paying a lot of money for people to pretend your cousin was better than he was by having ceremonies paid for (but not done as such) that were held in a language you didn’t necessarily understand; and this might fund a building project you had no influence on. And while the promise was that an indulgence would count as saving the soul of your degenerate cousin from limbo you never saw that cousin getting better. In fact, it sure looked as if rich people were the only people to benefit from this. It was this institute that came under fire from Luther and other Reformers.
In response to this and other issues the Reformation emphasized vernacular worship (if you’re German you worship in German) and promoted the idea that if people could read Scripture for themselves they could discern what true Christianity was supposed to be. It was a period defined by the beginning of what we may call anticlericalism. This simply meant that established church authority and organized religion (if only in their existing form) were considered suspicious. It also sowed seeds for nationalism. If you weren’t all members of the Roman Church you could be members of tribes like the Swabians or the Prussians or the Saxons (not that it wasn’t this way already).
Parallel to this development of anticlericalism and the independent political state was the rise of humanism (not the kind you hear about from the likes of Tim LaHaye as such, since that form of humanism is a short hand for secular humanism or logical positivism). Defined broadly humanism was the idea that the individual human being mattered. Humanism also included an interest in the humanities (the fine and performing arts and the natural sciences in contrast to theology). Where art and music were concerned this meant that secular work came to receive as much promotion and patronage as church music.
Why was all of this significant? Guilt by association. Into all this came people singing either for the Church or for other patrons. By now the political climate was so tumultuous the musical climate couldn’t help changing. Up until the Renaissance and Reformation liturgical music didn’t have much harmony. After centuries of everyone singing the same melody or a melody in lockstep with another melody (organum, more or less) people wanted some change. A lot of change.
The truth is that most of these changes had begun to happen in the Medieval period with Leonin and Perotin and Guilliame Machaut. The first two composers wrote a lot of two-part chants where one started the chant and another followed, and Machaut wrote music in which people sang harmonizing parts. People already wanted to sing independent parts. It wasn’t that people didn’t want to sing something like “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. They wanted to sing the melody in something besides unison. What if one person sang the melody first and another person sang the melody but started singing it a little bit later? Yes, that’s a great idea. They weren’t singing that song by any means but I’m just illustrating the kind of thing that started happening all over Europe during the Renaissance. Where before it was somewhat rare in the Renaissance it started to become the rule.
But as people started running with this idea of different people singing different tunes came the need to get these tunes to work together. It had to all sound like one piece of music, not just a bunch of people singing different parts that didn’t relate. With the advent of this powerful idea, of setting different notes in motion at the same time, there quickly arose the need for some kind of order. The modes inherited from Gregorian chant still sounded good but how could four people wanting to sing different parts still sing in the same mode and not have everything sound bad? The answer was to tinker with individual parts of a musical work until the whole thing sounded like it was being sung in a mode. After two centuries of this kind of experimentation the result was voice leading. The rules were summed up in one general principle: don’t write music that people can’t sing or music that people can’t sing well.
In practice this is immensely complicated because the human voice, for all its expressive power, has more and more profound limitations than any other instrument. There are certain intervals two people can’t sing together without having a ruinous tendency to screw up. There are melodies boys can sing that men can’t sing except in a lower range (there was little chance of women singing in this era). You start getting the idea. Quickly people had to make a note of every musical experiment people kept wanting to try that never yielded pleasing results. After a few centuries of never getting something to work it was considered a general rule that you didn’t want to do that thing.
The Renaissance is defined chiefly by choral music because instruments were generally too expensive to have in large supply. Yet when instruments became cheaper and had better quality control courts and churches began to build small orchestras of brass and string instruments. The question was then how to write for these new ensembles? The Renaissance answer was this: If it works for the motorcycle it works for the car. Everybody drives on the road in exactly the same way. More or less, that was how it worked. Vocal writing and instrumental writing was done pretty much the same way. Put on a recording of a piece of brass music by Gabrieli and a choral work by Orlando de Lassus and you still get that Renaissance vibe.
But there was more afoot in this era than musical revolution. There were the nagging questions of what to do with all this new stuff and some old controversies showed up, too. The debates on church music are a great case in point. A controversy over the use of secular music in church settings had raged off and on for some time.
Many people know the talk about how Martin Luther used drinking songs as melodies for hymns (there are some scholars of early Western music who contest this) but Luther was just one case in point. Some of the followers of the Reformer John Calvin banned this idea of corporate singing in which everyone got different parts. Once again the principle was guilt by association. If the Catholics did it you couldn’t do it because the Catholic Church is full of antichrists and you can’t sing music that sounds like their music. The Roman church had these fat castrated men singing all these fancy melodies using just a single phrase like “quoniam tu solus sanctus”. By the time that fat man was done singing that single line it was practically time to get out of church and go home. As if that weren’t enough there were five or six of these guys (some of them weren’t castrated) all doing the same thing at different times and it could last forever! Why spend forever listening to fat castrated men and men with their testicles who weren’t much better? What’s more those castrated men were certainly man-whores for some perverted dukes and cardinals! And they were all singing for a heretic church at that. Talk about pretense! Nope, none of that! Not while I’m around!
Then you had the Catholics looking at folks like the Calvinists singing “church” music in the vulgar tongues of the ordinary people (no respect for the sacred); perverting the Bible by translating it according to their own whims; singing trash music only fit to be sung by whores and gamblers and murderers with the thinnest possible musical substance; and this twaddle was accompanied by nothing more than the terrible singing of a bunch of Church hating heretics who couldn’t sing and who surely didn’t comprehend the awesome and centuries-old heritage of the one true Church. They were just toadies for those usurping landowners who wanted to be free of the influence of the Church. Real Christian music shouldn’t sound anything like the worthless contemporary sound these numbskulls had. They might have one or two legitimate complaints but by and large their music wasn’t the proper alternative. The Reformers were all antichrists and haters of Scripture so you couldn’t make music that sounded like their music.
It’s not much of a surprise that people spent a lot of time burning each other’s music and trying to kill each other. Just try being a church musician in a climate like this. Some folks, like the English composer William Byrd, had to write for the Church of England (recently separated from Rome) while trying to find a way to preserve his own Catholic faith and write Catholic music. Other composers, like Palestrina, were settled with titanic restrictions in musical expression in the post-Council of Trent Counter Reformation, in which the idea of groups of people singing together with independent parts was greatly limited.
It might be an exaggeration but Christian music at this time was an enterprise almost as risky as writing music in the Soviet Union under Stalinism! You might not get killed but, who knew, you might get excommunicated which in the eternal scheme of things looked a lot worse. The other side might suddenly take over and have you sacked, to put it nicely. Still, there were a number of composers who rose to the challenge and managed to stay sort of happy. The secular composers didn’t face precisely the same restraints so when they followed their muse, as the Genoan composer Carlo Gesualdo did, only the sanity of a normal man with tempered taste was your limit. If you were insane, as Gesualdo most likely was, there was no telling what you could write.
The only thing that would limit you were the singers. If the singers couldn’t do it then you couldn’t make them. That was the most important musical discovery of Renaissance choral music and it has laid the foundation for musical aesthetics in the West in both harmony and melody ever since. For Eastern ears this was the end of the end for Western music (Gregorian chant was already going too far for them). Harmony became the dominant force in Western music and harmony was defined by the choir. For better and worse the choir was often defined by the Church.
Postscript: A short list of Renaissance composers
There are several excellent choral groups that specialize in “Early Music”. Among the ensembles that have done excellent recordings of all the composers below are the Tallis Scholars, The Cambridge Singers, and the Hilliard Ensemble (who also record a lot by the modern composer Arvo Part). The Tallis Scholars record on Gimmell, their own label. The Hilliard Ensemble seems to do a lot of recording on the ECM label. Most of the recordings aren’t especially cheap but they’re always excellent.
The Renaissance composers consistently wrote very high quality choral music and were often prolific so you can start with virtually anything. Usually only the most influential works by these composers are regularly recorded and performed. Byrd wrote a great deal of English and Latin music for Catholic and Anglican liturgies.
Johannes Ockeghem
Josquin desPrez
“Absalom Absalom” is his most famous work. The Tallis Scholars have a great recording of this piece.
Piere de Luigi Palestrina
Virtually anything Palestrina wrote is worth checking out and only the most important of his numerous works get regularly recorded. Again, go with the Tallis Scholars for a recording of this work.
Carlo Gesualdo
This man became as famous for killing his cheating wife as for the music he wrote. He wrote his own texts (they’re terrible!) and set them in such a maudlin way it’s hard to believe his music is as important as it is. But he, perhaps by dint of insanity, pushed the harmonic boundaries of Renaissance music out so far it took J. S. Bach’s monstrous output to be so far-reaching. Do yourself a favor and avoid his keyboard music!
Thomas Tallis
Spem in Alleum is the apotheosis of academic counterpoint in this period. It doesn’t get more complex than this. Tallils was one of the great English choral composers during the Renaissance. There were actually a lot of great English composers during this period but Tallis is a good place to start.
William Byrd
Probably the most important of the English Renaissance composers. Byrd wrote Catholic and Anglican church music (the Catholic music was circulated underground since it was officially banned). Byrd’s Masses and The Great Service are good examples of his art. The Tallis Scholars have fantastic recordings of Byrd. Byrd also wrote a mountain of keyboard music which has been committed to CD in the last year or so. I haven’t had the chance to hear it yet but I hope it’s more interesting than Gesualdo’s keyboard music!
A Simplified History of Choral Music in the Renaissance
est 1450 to 1650 CE
Perhaps a brief history of Renaissance music is beyond me. Perhaps I’ll end up being fair to the Renaissance and not to the Medieval period because the seeds of the music of the Renaissance lie in the Medieval period. The sketch presented below is a simplification as most summaries of musical periods must be. I trust any professional musicologists specializing in Renaissance or Medieval music who might read this will forgive me since I’m not claiming to write an academic treatise.
In so far as we think of Gregorian chant when we think of the medieval music we also think of a lot of “fa la la la la” and other fancy singing when we think of the Renaissance. With my apology in advance, the entire Renaissance can be defined as a revolution in Western music founded on the idea that lots of people singing together can sing independent parts and that a keyboard can be used to play more than one tune simultaneously. With such a revolution, of course, was the obligatory debate as to whether and how things out to be done.
This isn’t about singing something like “kyrie eleison dona eis requiem” in parallel fifths while bringing out the Holy Hand Grenade (that’s not how Medieval “organum” actually worked anyway, never mind that Monty Python & the Holy Grail was funny). This is about a fiery time in the history of Church politics and Church music. The Church splintered off into many directions in the West and people spent time trying to determine what true Christianity was and to defend it. Naturally everyone else was supposed to look bad in the process. This period saw the reemergence of the city-state and as these spread their power over provinces they sought to extend their newfound power even further. The world seemed to be looking bigger all the time and many people in Europe started getting the faintest idea that it would be nice to have more of that world. The Renaissance and Reformation are roughly parallel so I’ll touch briefly on the Reformation. Much of the changes in this period happened within church music as much as anywhere else..
Between the 1450s and the 1650s Luther and various other reformers within the Roman church began to break from Rome over doctrinal and liturgical disputes. Among these concerns were the authority of the papacy and priests, the desire for vernacular worship, translation of the Bible and literacy, political independence of state rulers from Roman church authorities and, perhaps as always, concerns about the links between the Church, political leaders, and organized crime (after all, crime and sin aren’t always so different).
Another famous concern just prior the Reformation was the selling of indulgences. If I don’t get this right I’ll be nailed for it and will make any needed corrections later so here I go: Suppose the performance of a set of actions in church was considered effective as a pleasing sacrifice to God, a repentance of sin and an offering of thanks (Mass, for instance), in short a sanctifying grace. Suppose then that during this time you would pay your regular tithe, tax, whatever you wish to call it. Suppose further that you want to do something the Roman church considered sin or blasphemy (say you’re married and you like oral sex, for instance). Perhaps this thing is so fun you fail to attend church or a friend or loved one does this stuff regularly and you want to preserve them from being sent to Hell.
The indulgence served as a kind of absentee vote, a way to get absolution without having to actually go through the motions in the cathedral or the confessional booth or where ever all that was done. This was also something you could do on behalf of the degenerate cousin of yours on the other side of the village. Indulgences could also be obtained for already departed souls thought to be in purgatory and the sale of indulgences in this case especially became lucrative.
Keep in mind all these “absentee votes” were for confessions and for rituals done in Latin, a language very few people used in daily life. In the sale of indulgences all the social, political, and religious controversies of the day came to a head. Through this you could end up paying a lot of money for people to pretend your cousin was better than he was by having ceremonies paid for (but not done as such) that were held in a language you didn’t necessarily understand; and this might fund a building project you had no influence on. And while the promise was that an indulgence would count as saving the soul of your degenerate cousin from limbo you never saw that cousin getting better. In fact, it sure looked as if rich people were the only people to benefit from this. It was this institute that came under fire from Luther and other Reformers.
In response to this and other issues the Reformation emphasized vernacular worship (if you’re German you worship in German) and promoted the idea that if people could read Scripture for themselves they could discern what true Christianity was supposed to be. It was a period defined by the beginning of what we may call anticlericalism. This simply meant that established church authority and organized religion (if only in their existing form) were considered suspicious. It also sowed seeds for nationalism. If you weren’t all members of the Roman Church you could be members of tribes like the Swabians or the Prussians or the Saxons (not that it wasn’t this way already).
Parallel to this development of anticlericalism and the independent political state was the rise of humanism (not the kind you hear about from the likes of Tim LaHaye as such, since that form of humanism is a short hand for secular humanism or logical positivism). Defined broadly humanism was the idea that the individual human being mattered. Humanism also included an interest in the humanities (the fine and performing arts and the natural sciences in contrast to theology). Where art and music were concerned this meant that secular work came to receive as much promotion and patronage as church music.
Why was all of this significant? Guilt by association. Into all this came people singing either for the Church or for other patrons. By now the political climate was so tumultuous the musical climate couldn’t help changing. Up until the Renaissance and Reformation liturgical music didn’t have much harmony. After centuries of everyone singing the same melody or a melody in lockstep with another melody (organum, more or less) people wanted some change. A lot of change.
The truth is that most of these changes had begun to happen in the Medieval period with Leonin and Perotin and Guilliame Machaut. The first two composers wrote a lot of two-part chants where one started the chant and another followed, and Machaut wrote music in which people sang harmonizing parts. People already wanted to sing independent parts. It wasn’t that people didn’t want to sing something like “Mary Had a Little Lamb”. They wanted to sing the melody in something besides unison. What if one person sang the melody first and another person sang the melody but started singing it a little bit later? Yes, that’s a great idea. They weren’t singing that song by any means but I’m just illustrating the kind of thing that started happening all over Europe during the Renaissance. Where before it was somewhat rare in the Renaissance it started to become the rule.
But as people started running with this idea of different people singing different tunes came the need to get these tunes to work together. It had to all sound like one piece of music, not just a bunch of people singing different parts that didn’t relate. With the advent of this powerful idea, of setting different notes in motion at the same time, there quickly arose the need for some kind of order. The modes inherited from Gregorian chant still sounded good but how could four people wanting to sing different parts still sing in the same mode and not have everything sound bad? The answer was to tinker with individual parts of a musical work until the whole thing sounded like it was being sung in a mode. After two centuries of this kind of experimentation the result was voice leading. The rules were summed up in one general principle: don’t write music that people can’t sing or music that people can’t sing well.
In practice this is immensely complicated because the human voice, for all its expressive power, has more and more profound limitations than any other instrument. There are certain intervals two people can’t sing together without having a ruinous tendency to screw up. There are melodies boys can sing that men can’t sing except in a lower range (there was little chance of women singing in this era). You start getting the idea. Quickly people had to make a note of every musical experiment people kept wanting to try that never yielded pleasing results. After a few centuries of never getting something to work it was considered a general rule that you didn’t want to do that thing.
The Renaissance is defined chiefly by choral music because instruments were generally too expensive to have in large supply. Yet when instruments became cheaper and had better quality control courts and churches began to build small orchestras of brass and string instruments. The question was then how to write for these new ensembles? The Renaissance answer was this: If it works for the motorcycle it works for the car. Everybody drives on the road in exactly the same way. More or less, that was how it worked. Vocal writing and instrumental writing was done pretty much the same way. Put on a recording of a piece of brass music by Gabrieli and a choral work by Orlando de Lassus and you still get that Renaissance vibe.
But there was more afoot in this era than musical revolution. There were the nagging questions of what to do with all this new stuff and some old controversies showed up, too. The debates on church music are a great case in point. A controversy over the use of secular music in church settings had raged off and on for some time.
Many people know the talk about how Martin Luther used drinking songs as melodies for hymns (there are some scholars of early Western music who contest this) but Luther was just one case in point. Some of the followers of the Reformer John Calvin banned this idea of corporate singing in which everyone got different parts. Once again the principle was guilt by association. If the Catholics did it you couldn’t do it because the Catholic Church is full of antichrists and you can’t sing music that sounds like their music. The Roman church had these fat castrated men singing all these fancy melodies using just a single phrase like “quoniam tu solus sanctus”. By the time that fat man was done singing that single line it was practically time to get out of church and go home. As if that weren’t enough there were five or six of these guys (some of them weren’t castrated) all doing the same thing at different times and it could last forever! Why spend forever listening to fat castrated men and men with their testicles who weren’t much better? What’s more those castrated men were certainly man-whores for some perverted dukes and cardinals! And they were all singing for a heretic church at that. Talk about pretense! Nope, none of that! Not while I’m around!
Then you had the Catholics looking at folks like the Calvinists singing “church” music in the vulgar tongues of the ordinary people (no respect for the sacred); perverting the Bible by translating it according to their own whims; singing trash music only fit to be sung by whores and gamblers and murderers with the thinnest possible musical substance; and this twaddle was accompanied by nothing more than the terrible singing of a bunch of Church hating heretics who couldn’t sing and who surely didn’t comprehend the awesome and centuries-old heritage of the one true Church. They were just toadies for those usurping landowners who wanted to be free of the influence of the Church. Real Christian music shouldn’t sound anything like the worthless contemporary sound these numbskulls had. They might have one or two legitimate complaints but by and large their music wasn’t the proper alternative. The Reformers were all antichrists and haters of Scripture so you couldn’t make music that sounded like their music.
It’s not much of a surprise that people spent a lot of time burning each other’s music and trying to kill each other. Just try being a church musician in a climate like this. Some folks, like the English composer William Byrd, had to write for the Church of England (recently separated from Rome) while trying to find a way to preserve his own Catholic faith and write Catholic music. Other composers, like Palestrina, were settled with titanic restrictions in musical expression in the post-Council of Trent Counter Reformation, in which the idea of groups of people singing together with independent parts was greatly limited.
It might be an exaggeration but Christian music at this time was an enterprise almost as risky as writing music in the Soviet Union under Stalinism! You might not get killed but, who knew, you might get excommunicated which in the eternal scheme of things looked a lot worse. The other side might suddenly take over and have you sacked, to put it nicely. Still, there were a number of composers who rose to the challenge and managed to stay sort of happy. The secular composers didn’t face precisely the same restraints so when they followed their muse, as the Genoan composer Carlo Gesualdo did, only the sanity of a normal man with tempered taste was your limit. If you were insane, as Gesualdo most likely was, there was no telling what you could write.
The only thing that would limit you were the singers. If the singers couldn’t do it then you couldn’t make them. That was the most important musical discovery of Renaissance choral music and it has laid the foundation for musical aesthetics in the West in both harmony and melody ever since. For Eastern ears this was the end of the end for Western music (Gregorian chant was already going too far for them). Harmony became the dominant force in Western music and harmony was defined by the choir. For better and worse the choir was often defined by the Church.
Postscript: A short list of Renaissance composers
There are several excellent choral groups that specialize in “Early Music”. Among the ensembles that have done excellent recordings of all the composers below are the Tallis Scholars, The Cambridge Singers, and the Hilliard Ensemble (who also record a lot by the modern composer Arvo Part). The Tallis Scholars record on Gimmell, their own label. The Hilliard Ensemble seems to do a lot of recording on the ECM label. Most of the recordings aren’t especially cheap but they’re always excellent.
The Renaissance composers consistently wrote very high quality choral music and were often prolific so you can start with virtually anything. Usually only the most influential works by these composers are regularly recorded and performed. Byrd wrote a great deal of English and Latin music for Catholic and Anglican liturgies.
Johannes Ockeghem
Josquin desPrez
“Absalom Absalom” is his most famous work. The Tallis Scholars have a great recording of this piece.
Piere de Luigi Palestrina
Virtually anything Palestrina wrote is worth checking out and only the most important of his numerous works get regularly recorded. Again, go with the Tallis Scholars for a recording of this work.
Carlo Gesualdo
This man became as famous for killing his cheating wife as for the music he wrote. He wrote his own texts (they’re terrible!) and set them in such a maudlin way it’s hard to believe his music is as important as it is. But he, perhaps by dint of insanity, pushed the harmonic boundaries of Renaissance music out so far it took J. S. Bach’s monstrous output to be so far-reaching. Do yourself a favor and avoid his keyboard music!
Thomas Tallis
Spem in Alleum is the apotheosis of academic counterpoint in this period. It doesn’t get more complex than this. Tallils was one of the great English choral composers during the Renaissance. There were actually a lot of great English composers during this period but Tallis is a good place to start.
William Byrd
Probably the most important of the English Renaissance composers. Byrd wrote Catholic and Anglican church music (the Catholic music was circulated underground since it was officially banned). Byrd’s Masses and The Great Service are good examples of his art. The Tallis Scholars have fantastic recordings of Byrd. Byrd also wrote a mountain of keyboard music which has been committed to CD in the last year or so. I haven’t had the chance to hear it yet but I hope it’s more interesting than Gesualdo’s keyboard music!
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
finally, on AlL Rise
Meh
Parts of it I like. The vibe is kinda cool but the music sprawls all over the place and I began to feel nostalgic, for reasons I can't quite explain, for Steve Reich's The Desert Music (which is an awesome example of minimalism if you're into that style).
I like the IDEA of a jazz/classical fusion but I'm not digging Marsalis' EXECUTION. He gets the surface details and even does a good job with cross-movement modd and key changes but I feel like he needs to scale back his ideas.
Of course my bias is that of a composer using monothematic cross movement developmental principles so obsessively that I try to spin out an eleven minute sonata form in three movements from just a fifteen second idea. I guess I can't fairly say Marsalis should do the same but for my personal set of aesthetics I feel like he's approaching the fusion of jazz and classical from such a rambling starting point he misses the fun of jazz and even a lot of classical music, tightness and precision of musical form.
Then again, Wynton Marsalis is the professional musician and I'm just an amateur.
Parts of it I like. The vibe is kinda cool but the music sprawls all over the place and I began to feel nostalgic, for reasons I can't quite explain, for Steve Reich's The Desert Music (which is an awesome example of minimalism if you're into that style).
I like the IDEA of a jazz/classical fusion but I'm not digging Marsalis' EXECUTION. He gets the surface details and even does a good job with cross-movement modd and key changes but I feel like he needs to scale back his ideas.
Of course my bias is that of a composer using monothematic cross movement developmental principles so obsessively that I try to spin out an eleven minute sonata form in three movements from just a fifteen second idea. I guess I can't fairly say Marsalis should do the same but for my personal set of aesthetics I feel like he's approaching the fusion of jazz and classical from such a rambling starting point he misses the fun of jazz and even a lot of classical music, tightness and precision of musical form.
Then again, Wynton Marsalis is the professional musician and I'm just an amateur.
on recent posts
I have posted most of the material from an essay project I've tentatively called "Penis Music and other Rock and Roll Conundrums". I thought about adding my ancient essay "The Composer in the Evi lEmpire" but maybe I should save that for later. Still, this for people who grew up during the Reagan years the title I just threw out telegraphs the subject of my pending blog post. For those less attuned to Cold War terminology I've got a Shostakovich essay in the works. I'll be taking umbrage with some statements by Robert Craft and will see to it his works (which are cool even when I don't agree with them)( get properly quoted and all.
But if I post more I might get you all bored. So think of the recent posts as making up for lost time. I've been sick and have done some travelling lately, though by no means have I travelled far.
But if I post more I might get you all bored. So think of the recent posts as making up for lost time. I've been sick and have done some travelling lately, though by no means have I travelled far.
Counterpoint According to Stevie Wonder
This was another essay I wrote in response to a suggestion of a friend that I tackle different aspects of Western music c. Stevie Wonder's "Living For the City" was one of the formative inspirations for me when I started hearing pop and rock music for the first time. It's an unforgettable song and one of the wonderful ironies of my educated life was that it took me a couple of years studying music theory and harmony and counterpoint before I actually began to understand, musically speaking, what Stevie Wonder was doing in his song. Emotionally and intellectually I had no real problem grasping what Stevie was singing about even at the age of thirteen. I consider that a credit to the greatness of his musicianship and the ideas in his song.
So all that is to say this essay below is an unabashed mash note to his music.
****
Counterpoint is simply the art of writing two melodies that can be presented at the same time in a single piece of music. These melodies may have nothing to do with each other or they might share traits. If you can have one person singing one tune and another person singing another tune at the same time and it sounds natural you’ve mastered counterpoint. Everything else is just a matter of degree. And if you can present and represent the same melody in different ways at the same time you’ve also figured out something about counterpoint. I submit, therefore, that in the annals of popular music there is at least one musician who has mastered a great deal of what classical composers and theoreticians call counterpoint.
Stevie Wonder.
We can call him Stevland Morse if we want, since that was his given name, but that would not make us better advocates of the “love-mentalism” he wrote about. It would also do nothing to explicate or appreciate his musical genius. Whether we call him Stevland Morse or Stevie Wonder we’re talking about the same man and the same songs. After studying traditional theory and counterpoint and 20th century art music I have come back to loving Stevie Wonder’s music more than before I knew anything about invertible counterpoint and sonata form. I don’t care if the man “knows” what he’s doing; the man knows what he’s doing.
People stumble over that truism, especially if they don’t compose. Just because you don’t know what you want by its theoretical name doesn’t mean you don’t know what you want. Babies don’t need to know words to know when they’re hungry. Of course I know where that analogy breaks down. Don’t take it as a belittling one. It’s my attempt to show that a person with natural musical gifts doesn’t have to have the formal vocabulary to know what it is he or she wants; music is a function of hearing both in fact and, more importantly, in the mind (Wonder even touches on this with the album title Music of My Mind). Knowing the theory just makes it easier for you to explain what you’re hearing in terms session musicians can understand and that makes it easier for them to play what you want them to play.
Now Wonder worked on and delayed the release of Songs in the Key of Life for about two years. What should we suppose he was doing all that time? Was he smoking a lot of pot or something? We know, at any rate, he had a daughter or “Isn’t She Lovely?” wouldn’t be on the album. Wonder was probably working his tail off during those two years trying to get the songs to sound just right. Wonder’s genius wasn’t (and isn’t) that he doesn’t “know” what he’s doing where theory is concerned. I defy you to listen to “Contusion” and say he didn’t plan that piece out in virtually every detail. The real marvel is that Wonder could work on an album for two years and get the end result sounding as if he’d written it all on a busy weekend. To give spontaneous, vibrant performances of songs you’ve worked on that long … now that’s genius, especially when the songs are as great as those on Songs in the Key of Life.
In case people are wondering, no, I’m not saying Stevie Wonder is greater than Bach or any other classical composer. Such a comparison is unfair to begin with, just as it’s unfair to compare Mozart to Bach as if one must be found wanting. Nor am I saying that Wonder’s handling of counterpoint is even close to exhaustive. What I’m saying is this: just as calling the man Stevland or Stevie doesn’t mean you’re talking about two different men talking about counterpoint as a concept doesn’t change whether you’re talking about Bach or Stevie Wonder. Nobody gets good at counterpoint without first honing a melodic gift, and that Stevie has in spades. Once you develop your melodic gift it’s a matter of time before you can sing one great tune over or under another. There may be a difference in degree but I’m convinced that difference is not in intrinsic quality. Even if he only uses a handful of contrapuntal devices compared to Bach or Brahms Stevie Wonder is still an immensely gifted musician and one of the greatest songwriters of our time. Whether or not his command of counterpoint is natural or acquired is moot; it is, in any case, a manifest attribute of his musical genius.
There are two broad kinds of counterpoint. There’s imitation and then there’s countermelody or countersubject. Now imitation comes in all sorts of forms but the simplest is imitation at pitch or at the octave. The best “textbook” example of imitation is canon where you have a melody in one voice that is taken up by another voice at the same pitch. And the best “textbook” example of canonic imitation in Stevie Wonder is “Superstition” (Talking Book, 1973). Listen to the brass arrangement throughout the song, especially to how it changes at the end. You’ll hear the sax take the melody and then the trumpet follows four beats after it. Notice that the brass melodies are played in unison for most of the song until the end and then the unison lines are broken up and played against each other. A better, more straightforward example of canonic imitation in a pop song couldn’t be found. A similar example can be found in the middle of the song “Don’t You Worry `Bout a Thing” (Innervisions, 1973). Wonder starts singing a form of the tune he sings in the verse and harmonizes with himself by singing the same melody moments later.
As a rule Wonder uses canonic imitation in the middle or end of a song but in other settings he uses imitation at the beginning of songs. I said earlier that there’s more than one kind of imitation. For the beginning of several of his songs Wonder likes to use an imitative procedure called stretto. This is what happens when the second voice starts imitating the first voice before the first voice is done playing or singing the tune. The finest example of this in Wonder’s output is his introduction to “Superwoman” (Music of My Mind, 1972). He plays a simple triad in one register and starts playing the same pattern in a lower octave before the pattern is complete. As he keeps going the pattern is continually repeated between these two registers but at shorter and shorter intervals. This is the essence of stretto, not simply that the imitation starts in the second voice before the first voice is done but that the succeeding entrances are at shorter and shorter intervals. The result is a dramatic compression of the idea that builds towards a climax. In this case the climax is chord that starts the first verse of “Superwoman”.
But while he’s fond of having a melody passed off from one voice to another, just as often Wonder chooses to complement his primary melody with a supporting one. This is what we call a countermelody or countersubject (the latter term is properly applied to the writing of fugues but the principle of the complementary melody is pretty much the same). This is where Wonder’s melodic gifts are most pronounced. He usually saves this technique for the chorus of a song and usually harmonizes the primary melody with a two-voiced supporting chorale with its own tune. My favorite example is the first chorus of “Sir Duke” (Songs in the Key of Life, 1976). While he sings “You can feel it all over people” the saxophones respond with a buoyant pair of lines that rise up and down underneath him.
At times these supporting melodies can assume almost equal footing with Wonder’s vocal. The interweaving brass lines in the pre-chorus of “I Wish” (also on Songs in the Key of Life) are a great example. This is a case where the countermelody is even used in free imitation against itself. More often the melodies work in tandem like the backing vocals that appear under the frenetic guitar/keyboard unison of “Contusion” (Songs in the Key of Life). In “Contusion” especially we see that counterpoint is more than the sum of its parts. A more restrained but equally pleasing example is the relationship between the lead vocal and the supporting chorale in the second and subsequent choruses of “Superwoman”. The expressive richness of Wonder’s singing doesn’t come from his lyrics, which are often shopworn, but from the amazing interaction of the vocal parts with each other, giving the text more depth than it could possibly have on its own.
There is also at least one case in which Wonder uses counterpoint and the material is completely free. Free counterpoint is the hardest kind to write. There may be imitation but this isn’t required and even the idea of a countermelody doesn’t hold because the melodies could be of equal significance. For this reason the dueling harmonica solos on “Too High” (Innervisions, 1973) represent one of Wonder’s greatest contrapuntal experiments. In this case the foundation for the duet rests on the dorian mode. Dorian is a symmetrical scale, the same notes appear in the same order even when the notes are inverted. This means that creating a dramatic line is difficult but it also means that there’s virtually no wrong note. Dorian is also the diatonic mode most amenable to blues and lends a circular, detached mood to the music, perfect for the song’s textual reference to drug use. Wonder chose his harmonic material wisely. Maybe he knew he was using the dorian mode or maybe he tried every key and kind of harmonica he could find until he got the sounds he wanted. Whether he “knew” what he was doing doesn’t detract from the importance of his creative decision.
The romantic ideal, the myth, would have it that musicians like Stevie Wonder are musical shamans who channel spiritual or musical inspiration they can’t possibly analyze. It’s hard for these people to deal with the fact that musicians like Wonder know what they want. Harder still is the thought that such a gifted musician could struggle with his material to find out what sounds best. It’s easier to assume it’s all a mystery and that it all happens at once. If that were true we could all be professional musicians—we’d probably all be homeless, too. Still, there is a little, barely visible kernel of truth to this shaman fantasy. The last three minutes of “Living for the City” (Innervisions, 1973) are as astonishing to me now as when I first heard them and I wonder how he came up with the tune that turned into that amazing chorus. How a composer gets a melody is mysterious and always will be. What needn’t be mysterious is what the composer does with a melody. The botanist doesn’t stop loving flowers for knowing how they grow, even after knowing something of the secret life of plants. The plant is still there for us to enjoy. A song by Stevie Wonder is as beautiful now for its melodic charm and contrapuntal brilliance as it was before we knew what he was doing. Like I said earlier, even if the man doesn’t “know” what he’s doing he still knows what he’s doing.
So all that is to say this essay below is an unabashed mash note to his music.
****
Counterpoint is simply the art of writing two melodies that can be presented at the same time in a single piece of music. These melodies may have nothing to do with each other or they might share traits. If you can have one person singing one tune and another person singing another tune at the same time and it sounds natural you’ve mastered counterpoint. Everything else is just a matter of degree. And if you can present and represent the same melody in different ways at the same time you’ve also figured out something about counterpoint. I submit, therefore, that in the annals of popular music there is at least one musician who has mastered a great deal of what classical composers and theoreticians call counterpoint.
Stevie Wonder.
We can call him Stevland Morse if we want, since that was his given name, but that would not make us better advocates of the “love-mentalism” he wrote about. It would also do nothing to explicate or appreciate his musical genius. Whether we call him Stevland Morse or Stevie Wonder we’re talking about the same man and the same songs. After studying traditional theory and counterpoint and 20th century art music I have come back to loving Stevie Wonder’s music more than before I knew anything about invertible counterpoint and sonata form. I don’t care if the man “knows” what he’s doing; the man knows what he’s doing.
People stumble over that truism, especially if they don’t compose. Just because you don’t know what you want by its theoretical name doesn’t mean you don’t know what you want. Babies don’t need to know words to know when they’re hungry. Of course I know where that analogy breaks down. Don’t take it as a belittling one. It’s my attempt to show that a person with natural musical gifts doesn’t have to have the formal vocabulary to know what it is he or she wants; music is a function of hearing both in fact and, more importantly, in the mind (Wonder even touches on this with the album title Music of My Mind). Knowing the theory just makes it easier for you to explain what you’re hearing in terms session musicians can understand and that makes it easier for them to play what you want them to play.
Now Wonder worked on and delayed the release of Songs in the Key of Life for about two years. What should we suppose he was doing all that time? Was he smoking a lot of pot or something? We know, at any rate, he had a daughter or “Isn’t She Lovely?” wouldn’t be on the album. Wonder was probably working his tail off during those two years trying to get the songs to sound just right. Wonder’s genius wasn’t (and isn’t) that he doesn’t “know” what he’s doing where theory is concerned. I defy you to listen to “Contusion” and say he didn’t plan that piece out in virtually every detail. The real marvel is that Wonder could work on an album for two years and get the end result sounding as if he’d written it all on a busy weekend. To give spontaneous, vibrant performances of songs you’ve worked on that long … now that’s genius, especially when the songs are as great as those on Songs in the Key of Life.
In case people are wondering, no, I’m not saying Stevie Wonder is greater than Bach or any other classical composer. Such a comparison is unfair to begin with, just as it’s unfair to compare Mozart to Bach as if one must be found wanting. Nor am I saying that Wonder’s handling of counterpoint is even close to exhaustive. What I’m saying is this: just as calling the man Stevland or Stevie doesn’t mean you’re talking about two different men talking about counterpoint as a concept doesn’t change whether you’re talking about Bach or Stevie Wonder. Nobody gets good at counterpoint without first honing a melodic gift, and that Stevie has in spades. Once you develop your melodic gift it’s a matter of time before you can sing one great tune over or under another. There may be a difference in degree but I’m convinced that difference is not in intrinsic quality. Even if he only uses a handful of contrapuntal devices compared to Bach or Brahms Stevie Wonder is still an immensely gifted musician and one of the greatest songwriters of our time. Whether or not his command of counterpoint is natural or acquired is moot; it is, in any case, a manifest attribute of his musical genius.
There are two broad kinds of counterpoint. There’s imitation and then there’s countermelody or countersubject. Now imitation comes in all sorts of forms but the simplest is imitation at pitch or at the octave. The best “textbook” example of imitation is canon where you have a melody in one voice that is taken up by another voice at the same pitch. And the best “textbook” example of canonic imitation in Stevie Wonder is “Superstition” (Talking Book, 1973). Listen to the brass arrangement throughout the song, especially to how it changes at the end. You’ll hear the sax take the melody and then the trumpet follows four beats after it. Notice that the brass melodies are played in unison for most of the song until the end and then the unison lines are broken up and played against each other. A better, more straightforward example of canonic imitation in a pop song couldn’t be found. A similar example can be found in the middle of the song “Don’t You Worry `Bout a Thing” (Innervisions, 1973). Wonder starts singing a form of the tune he sings in the verse and harmonizes with himself by singing the same melody moments later.
As a rule Wonder uses canonic imitation in the middle or end of a song but in other settings he uses imitation at the beginning of songs. I said earlier that there’s more than one kind of imitation. For the beginning of several of his songs Wonder likes to use an imitative procedure called stretto. This is what happens when the second voice starts imitating the first voice before the first voice is done playing or singing the tune. The finest example of this in Wonder’s output is his introduction to “Superwoman” (Music of My Mind, 1972). He plays a simple triad in one register and starts playing the same pattern in a lower octave before the pattern is complete. As he keeps going the pattern is continually repeated between these two registers but at shorter and shorter intervals. This is the essence of stretto, not simply that the imitation starts in the second voice before the first voice is done but that the succeeding entrances are at shorter and shorter intervals. The result is a dramatic compression of the idea that builds towards a climax. In this case the climax is chord that starts the first verse of “Superwoman”.
But while he’s fond of having a melody passed off from one voice to another, just as often Wonder chooses to complement his primary melody with a supporting one. This is what we call a countermelody or countersubject (the latter term is properly applied to the writing of fugues but the principle of the complementary melody is pretty much the same). This is where Wonder’s melodic gifts are most pronounced. He usually saves this technique for the chorus of a song and usually harmonizes the primary melody with a two-voiced supporting chorale with its own tune. My favorite example is the first chorus of “Sir Duke” (Songs in the Key of Life, 1976). While he sings “You can feel it all over people” the saxophones respond with a buoyant pair of lines that rise up and down underneath him.
At times these supporting melodies can assume almost equal footing with Wonder’s vocal. The interweaving brass lines in the pre-chorus of “I Wish” (also on Songs in the Key of Life) are a great example. This is a case where the countermelody is even used in free imitation against itself. More often the melodies work in tandem like the backing vocals that appear under the frenetic guitar/keyboard unison of “Contusion” (Songs in the Key of Life). In “Contusion” especially we see that counterpoint is more than the sum of its parts. A more restrained but equally pleasing example is the relationship between the lead vocal and the supporting chorale in the second and subsequent choruses of “Superwoman”. The expressive richness of Wonder’s singing doesn’t come from his lyrics, which are often shopworn, but from the amazing interaction of the vocal parts with each other, giving the text more depth than it could possibly have on its own.
There is also at least one case in which Wonder uses counterpoint and the material is completely free. Free counterpoint is the hardest kind to write. There may be imitation but this isn’t required and even the idea of a countermelody doesn’t hold because the melodies could be of equal significance. For this reason the dueling harmonica solos on “Too High” (Innervisions, 1973) represent one of Wonder’s greatest contrapuntal experiments. In this case the foundation for the duet rests on the dorian mode. Dorian is a symmetrical scale, the same notes appear in the same order even when the notes are inverted. This means that creating a dramatic line is difficult but it also means that there’s virtually no wrong note. Dorian is also the diatonic mode most amenable to blues and lends a circular, detached mood to the music, perfect for the song’s textual reference to drug use. Wonder chose his harmonic material wisely. Maybe he knew he was using the dorian mode or maybe he tried every key and kind of harmonica he could find until he got the sounds he wanted. Whether he “knew” what he was doing doesn’t detract from the importance of his creative decision.
The romantic ideal, the myth, would have it that musicians like Stevie Wonder are musical shamans who channel spiritual or musical inspiration they can’t possibly analyze. It’s hard for these people to deal with the fact that musicians like Wonder know what they want. Harder still is the thought that such a gifted musician could struggle with his material to find out what sounds best. It’s easier to assume it’s all a mystery and that it all happens at once. If that were true we could all be professional musicians—we’d probably all be homeless, too. Still, there is a little, barely visible kernel of truth to this shaman fantasy. The last three minutes of “Living for the City” (Innervisions, 1973) are as astonishing to me now as when I first heard them and I wonder how he came up with the tune that turned into that amazing chorus. How a composer gets a melody is mysterious and always will be. What needn’t be mysterious is what the composer does with a melody. The botanist doesn’t stop loving flowers for knowing how they grow, even after knowing something of the secret life of plants. The plant is still there for us to enjoy. A song by Stevie Wonder is as beautiful now for its melodic charm and contrapuntal brilliance as it was before we knew what he was doing. Like I said earlier, even if the man doesn’t “know” what he’s doing he still knows what he’s doing.
Pop Gets Crucified on a Cross of Rock (But the Song Remains the Same)
Led Zeppelin was right. The song remains the same. This isn’t to deny that there’s a nearly endless variety of actual songs but the song as an idea is always the human voice carrying some kind of speech through singing and as Ecclesiastes says so bluntly, there’s nothing new under the sun. There’s probably more than one song called something like “Gross-Out Booger Breakdown”. Okay, maybe not, but more than one person has thought of the title.
But we fool ourselves into thinking that songs are different when they aren’t as different as we want them to be. We tell ourselves that style makes a bigger difference than it often does. At least since Tin Pan Alley at the dawn of the 20th century popular music has had formulas. More to the point, all music the world over is formulaic in some way. Far from saying these formulas are bad these formulas are good. They’ve lasted us at least a hundred years. Formula is the staple for rock and pop. In fact from a great enough distance the two look pretty much the same.
Yet we often make a hard and fast distinction between rock and pop. It matters what kind of guitar you play and what kind of amplifier you use, or whether you use one. It matters how you sing, it matters what clothes you wear and what you’re talking about or sound like you’re talking about. It matters what magazines write about your songs or if you’re advertised on the radio or not. Yet if the chords and the melody don’t change to what extent are we really talking about different styles?
If Dolly Parton and Whitney Houston sing the same song different ways do the styles make that much difference? Either way the song is “I Will Always Love You.” How about when Jeff Buckley sings a Leonard Cohen song? Has the style changed? When Garth Brooks covers a song by Billy Joel or Elvis is it really country? Philosophers like Theodore Gracyk can talk about how a song played in ten different ways becomes ten different styles. That’s true as far as it goes but what about the fact that “Take Me to the River” is just what it is whether Al Green or the Talking Heads perform it? Led Zeppelin was right. The song remains the same. But we keep making labels for songs played in different styles.
If we like something that doesn’t fit the label we have we’re willing to expand the definition of our label. Sometimes music is considered rock on honorary terms even when it’s obviously not rock. Keith Richards and others have said that all Robert Johnson needed to be a rock star was have drums and bass backing up his guitar. The line between Johnson’s blues and rock and roll was considered that fine. Bob Diddley played rhythm and blues until he started getting a white audience then suddenly his music was being called rock and roll. Look no further than the book of Genesis. The first thing people do when they have the power is name things. You can call a mountain lion a cougar or a catamount but it’s still the same animal and it will still be a big North American cat. You have to look at the animal either way. Whether you call it blues or rock a Bo Diddley song is still a Bob Diddley song. We have a lot of people looking at the same animal and not only wanting to call it by different names but to fight each other over which name should stick.
But fine lines are important in establishing orthodoxy and this is precisely what happens in a lot of rock/pop distinctions. Sometimes we go further and use terms like “alternative” or “independent” or “classic” or “oldie”. We crave music that doesn’t fit any formula or stereotype and yet that craving becomes our stereotype. We need to say some artists defy any genre. Do they really defy genre or are they good at blending the traits of genres? Maybe the fact that they can “defy” genre tells us more about the interchangeability of human experience than we like to admit. Is this genre busting something the artists are actually doing themselves or something we say for our own benefit?
We do this because entertainment is one of the religions of this culture. The spectacle of our awards ceremonies should be telling enough. Even the social critics fall right into line without knowing it. “Rock” becomes orthodoxy and “pop” becomes heresy. The greatest blasphemy is when a band called a “rock band” gets called a “pop band”. Because of a religious need to separate what we call “rock” from what we call “pop” that’s exactly what we call them. Why do we make this distinction? Well, let’s consider what the two terms seem to mean for a lot of people. The first term denotes music that is free, unshackled by purely commercial interests, authentic, pure, groundbreaking, breath-taking, daring, innovative, personal, of the highest cultural importance. It is this attitude that leads people to scrawl, “Clapton is God” on walls. Pop music is ersatz, empty, shallow, consumable, establishmentarian, conformist, unoriginal, crude, venal, lacking in value, trash. It is this attitude that leads people to say, “Corporate rock still sucks.”
But what is corporate rock? Music that is produced steadily and mass-marketed to the widest possible buying public through the use of billboards, magazine ads and promotional films? Corporate rock could also be considered a palliative for the empty consumerist lives of the buying public, perhaps even presented as an alternative to the old stale regime of the public’s ancestors, the “alternative” itself perpetuating the process it claims to subvert, even being the means through which the corporation reaps its highest profit.
Well, let’s see, that means the Beatles fit the bill nicely. We’ve got A Hard Day’s Night, Yellow Submarine, and some other films. In college I met people who saw the billboards used to market Sergeant Pepper. There were magazine and newspaper interviews and TV appearances. That the Beatles were foreign made them that much easier to market in the U.S. By this definition it looks as if the Beatles were the acme of corporate rock. You certainly couldn’t say they weren’t a popular band. So did their music suck?
If the Beatles look like corporate rock by this working definition does this make them a bad band? No, of course not. Does this mean they weren’t authentic artists? No. Does this mean that their music was only consumable trash that was presented as if it were a message from God? I’ll let you decide that for yourself but the answer doesn’t have to be “yes” or “no”. It’s possible for people to sell out and retain their artistic integrity at the same time. Joseph Haydn managed to pull it off in the 1790s so why couldn’t the Beatles do it, too?
Yet once the label “pop” or “corporate rock” gets applied people recoil in horror. Nothing called corporate rock can be good. But to say this is to blind yourself to history. Not all music backed by big money has been bad. In fact a lot of it has been good. Say what you will. What if, by some astonishing turn, the corporate machinery got behind musicians who had something valuable to contribute to popular music? The Beatles are corporate rock beyond all doubt. That Beatles’ songs are used in advertising now is all the proof we need. I already know some will object but I’ll address this fallacious objection soon.
Didn’t John Lennon say he wanted to be bigger than Elvis? Selling out was the whole point of the Beatles from the very beginning. The question wasn’t whether or not to sell out but, as Moby might put it, how to sell out ethically and what to do after you’ve sold out. Never mind the details. In principle it is possible and it was possible. This presents a problem for someone who insists that rock is defined by not wanting to sell out. Maybe the Beatles became rock because they sold out and weren’t content to keep selling the same product. If so, it’s not very reassuring for maintaining a religious distinction between rock and pop. We’ve already seen that the Beatles fit many definitions of corporate rock.
The Beatles are that rare case in which the corporate part of “corporate rock” didn’t get in the way of genuine art. In fact the corporate people were instrumental to spurring the Beatles into doing some of their best work. Without Martin, Spector, Epstein and the corporate machinery to back them all up the Beatles would have been forgotten.
And just as the Beatles are a great example of corporate rock they are an equally good example of how the formulas of songwriting throughout the Western world could be cleverly used. They could see patterns most other musicians and listeners didn’t see, that a country song and a jazz standard and a folk ballad and a work by Schubert do have some things in common. They didn’t restrict themselves to rock and pop distinctions, to high or low art. It was all the same to them. It wasn’t until the Beatles broke up that they had to be deified into rock gods and people had to sweep some of their influences under a rug. George Harrison himself said that it felt odd to be in a rock band. He thought of the Beatles as a pop band and now, for some reason, they’re called a rock band. Perhaps he was unaware of the religious cult that arose around the concept of rock.
To label music “rock” and “pop” can be done but if, as some say, there are no aesthetic absolutes, then we have to admit at the outset that these terms are meaningless in themselves. To call someone a “pop” musician or a sell-out doesn’t mean they aren’t doing something daring or innovative. Even the question of daring and innovation can’t be asked without a broader historical context. Were the Beatles daring and innovative? Yes, and no. They were daring for incorporating elements of art music into a popular format. Nobody else was rushing to copy Karlheinz Stockhausen and calling the new creation “Revolution Number 9”. If you don’t believe me look at the list of people pictured on the cover of Sergeant Pepper. Stockhausen is on there, on that list of people the Beatles admired. The Beatles copied Stockhausen as readily as they copied Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan. It wasn’t that what they did was new in and of itself; all of these things had been done by other people before. The Beatles recontextualized elements of avant-garde European art music into mass-marketed music and that was new.
The real issue under the pop/rock distinction is not musical. It’s reflects an attitude about capitalism as it applies to the arts. Can what we call art be mass-produced or marketed as a mass-produced product? The mass-marketing of a musical work as if it were a product like toothpaste may not be the same thing as mass-marketing music that is meant to be consumed as if it were toothpaste. Even this argument gets more slippery. What do you then do with the early music of the Who? If you can’t stand the Who the answer is obvious but if you like the band what do you make of the issue of consumable music? What do we make of Andy Warhol then, or the Velvet Underground? It’s enough to force a person to think there might really be aesthetic absolutes. After all, everybody needs to clean their teeth once in a while, right?
You can’t honestly look at the Beatles and not think of them as a pop band. Pop doesn’t have to be a pejorative term. The Beatles wrote popular music but more than just popular music. The Fab Four blended avant-garde art music and Eastern music into their songs. The vitality of the work lay precisely in their not caring about what they were labeled. That was the job of corporate people who were selling the albums anyway. They were a pop band. If rock is the balancing act of blending the highest and lowest strata of art and popular culture then the Beatles succeeded brilliantly; you could call them a rock band then. But if this is true than “pop” can’t be seen as a heresy. If, however, you see rock as inextricably tied to black American music like rhythm and blues or jazz or anything not white then, sure, suddenly what the Beatles did couldn’t be rock. But at that point you’re no longer talking about music itself but about race. Oh well, no one can talk about music as music for long. It always becomes a question of culture, too.
Even so, the musical categories surrounding “rock” and “pop” are so malleable that the most honest thing to do is to say that Broadway, rockabilly, metal, Motown, blues, country, punk, progressive rock, bubble-gum music, doo-wop, and gospel are all really part of the same huge spectrum of Western culture: the song. The song remains the same. The song comes in many different shapes and sizes about every ritual of our lives but the song still remains the same. Go ahead and crucify that pop song on your cross of rock but before you do think about why you’re doing it. You may find that it’s not about the music after all.
But we fool ourselves into thinking that songs are different when they aren’t as different as we want them to be. We tell ourselves that style makes a bigger difference than it often does. At least since Tin Pan Alley at the dawn of the 20th century popular music has had formulas. More to the point, all music the world over is formulaic in some way. Far from saying these formulas are bad these formulas are good. They’ve lasted us at least a hundred years. Formula is the staple for rock and pop. In fact from a great enough distance the two look pretty much the same.
Yet we often make a hard and fast distinction between rock and pop. It matters what kind of guitar you play and what kind of amplifier you use, or whether you use one. It matters how you sing, it matters what clothes you wear and what you’re talking about or sound like you’re talking about. It matters what magazines write about your songs or if you’re advertised on the radio or not. Yet if the chords and the melody don’t change to what extent are we really talking about different styles?
If Dolly Parton and Whitney Houston sing the same song different ways do the styles make that much difference? Either way the song is “I Will Always Love You.” How about when Jeff Buckley sings a Leonard Cohen song? Has the style changed? When Garth Brooks covers a song by Billy Joel or Elvis is it really country? Philosophers like Theodore Gracyk can talk about how a song played in ten different ways becomes ten different styles. That’s true as far as it goes but what about the fact that “Take Me to the River” is just what it is whether Al Green or the Talking Heads perform it? Led Zeppelin was right. The song remains the same. But we keep making labels for songs played in different styles.
If we like something that doesn’t fit the label we have we’re willing to expand the definition of our label. Sometimes music is considered rock on honorary terms even when it’s obviously not rock. Keith Richards and others have said that all Robert Johnson needed to be a rock star was have drums and bass backing up his guitar. The line between Johnson’s blues and rock and roll was considered that fine. Bob Diddley played rhythm and blues until he started getting a white audience then suddenly his music was being called rock and roll. Look no further than the book of Genesis. The first thing people do when they have the power is name things. You can call a mountain lion a cougar or a catamount but it’s still the same animal and it will still be a big North American cat. You have to look at the animal either way. Whether you call it blues or rock a Bo Diddley song is still a Bob Diddley song. We have a lot of people looking at the same animal and not only wanting to call it by different names but to fight each other over which name should stick.
But fine lines are important in establishing orthodoxy and this is precisely what happens in a lot of rock/pop distinctions. Sometimes we go further and use terms like “alternative” or “independent” or “classic” or “oldie”. We crave music that doesn’t fit any formula or stereotype and yet that craving becomes our stereotype. We need to say some artists defy any genre. Do they really defy genre or are they good at blending the traits of genres? Maybe the fact that they can “defy” genre tells us more about the interchangeability of human experience than we like to admit. Is this genre busting something the artists are actually doing themselves or something we say for our own benefit?
We do this because entertainment is one of the religions of this culture. The spectacle of our awards ceremonies should be telling enough. Even the social critics fall right into line without knowing it. “Rock” becomes orthodoxy and “pop” becomes heresy. The greatest blasphemy is when a band called a “rock band” gets called a “pop band”. Because of a religious need to separate what we call “rock” from what we call “pop” that’s exactly what we call them. Why do we make this distinction? Well, let’s consider what the two terms seem to mean for a lot of people. The first term denotes music that is free, unshackled by purely commercial interests, authentic, pure, groundbreaking, breath-taking, daring, innovative, personal, of the highest cultural importance. It is this attitude that leads people to scrawl, “Clapton is God” on walls. Pop music is ersatz, empty, shallow, consumable, establishmentarian, conformist, unoriginal, crude, venal, lacking in value, trash. It is this attitude that leads people to say, “Corporate rock still sucks.”
But what is corporate rock? Music that is produced steadily and mass-marketed to the widest possible buying public through the use of billboards, magazine ads and promotional films? Corporate rock could also be considered a palliative for the empty consumerist lives of the buying public, perhaps even presented as an alternative to the old stale regime of the public’s ancestors, the “alternative” itself perpetuating the process it claims to subvert, even being the means through which the corporation reaps its highest profit.
Well, let’s see, that means the Beatles fit the bill nicely. We’ve got A Hard Day’s Night, Yellow Submarine, and some other films. In college I met people who saw the billboards used to market Sergeant Pepper. There were magazine and newspaper interviews and TV appearances. That the Beatles were foreign made them that much easier to market in the U.S. By this definition it looks as if the Beatles were the acme of corporate rock. You certainly couldn’t say they weren’t a popular band. So did their music suck?
If the Beatles look like corporate rock by this working definition does this make them a bad band? No, of course not. Does this mean they weren’t authentic artists? No. Does this mean that their music was only consumable trash that was presented as if it were a message from God? I’ll let you decide that for yourself but the answer doesn’t have to be “yes” or “no”. It’s possible for people to sell out and retain their artistic integrity at the same time. Joseph Haydn managed to pull it off in the 1790s so why couldn’t the Beatles do it, too?
Yet once the label “pop” or “corporate rock” gets applied people recoil in horror. Nothing called corporate rock can be good. But to say this is to blind yourself to history. Not all music backed by big money has been bad. In fact a lot of it has been good. Say what you will. What if, by some astonishing turn, the corporate machinery got behind musicians who had something valuable to contribute to popular music? The Beatles are corporate rock beyond all doubt. That Beatles’ songs are used in advertising now is all the proof we need. I already know some will object but I’ll address this fallacious objection soon.
Didn’t John Lennon say he wanted to be bigger than Elvis? Selling out was the whole point of the Beatles from the very beginning. The question wasn’t whether or not to sell out but, as Moby might put it, how to sell out ethically and what to do after you’ve sold out. Never mind the details. In principle it is possible and it was possible. This presents a problem for someone who insists that rock is defined by not wanting to sell out. Maybe the Beatles became rock because they sold out and weren’t content to keep selling the same product. If so, it’s not very reassuring for maintaining a religious distinction between rock and pop. We’ve already seen that the Beatles fit many definitions of corporate rock.
The Beatles are that rare case in which the corporate part of “corporate rock” didn’t get in the way of genuine art. In fact the corporate people were instrumental to spurring the Beatles into doing some of their best work. Without Martin, Spector, Epstein and the corporate machinery to back them all up the Beatles would have been forgotten.
And just as the Beatles are a great example of corporate rock they are an equally good example of how the formulas of songwriting throughout the Western world could be cleverly used. They could see patterns most other musicians and listeners didn’t see, that a country song and a jazz standard and a folk ballad and a work by Schubert do have some things in common. They didn’t restrict themselves to rock and pop distinctions, to high or low art. It was all the same to them. It wasn’t until the Beatles broke up that they had to be deified into rock gods and people had to sweep some of their influences under a rug. George Harrison himself said that it felt odd to be in a rock band. He thought of the Beatles as a pop band and now, for some reason, they’re called a rock band. Perhaps he was unaware of the religious cult that arose around the concept of rock.
To label music “rock” and “pop” can be done but if, as some say, there are no aesthetic absolutes, then we have to admit at the outset that these terms are meaningless in themselves. To call someone a “pop” musician or a sell-out doesn’t mean they aren’t doing something daring or innovative. Even the question of daring and innovation can’t be asked without a broader historical context. Were the Beatles daring and innovative? Yes, and no. They were daring for incorporating elements of art music into a popular format. Nobody else was rushing to copy Karlheinz Stockhausen and calling the new creation “Revolution Number 9”. If you don’t believe me look at the list of people pictured on the cover of Sergeant Pepper. Stockhausen is on there, on that list of people the Beatles admired. The Beatles copied Stockhausen as readily as they copied Roy Orbison and Bob Dylan. It wasn’t that what they did was new in and of itself; all of these things had been done by other people before. The Beatles recontextualized elements of avant-garde European art music into mass-marketed music and that was new.
The real issue under the pop/rock distinction is not musical. It’s reflects an attitude about capitalism as it applies to the arts. Can what we call art be mass-produced or marketed as a mass-produced product? The mass-marketing of a musical work as if it were a product like toothpaste may not be the same thing as mass-marketing music that is meant to be consumed as if it were toothpaste. Even this argument gets more slippery. What do you then do with the early music of the Who? If you can’t stand the Who the answer is obvious but if you like the band what do you make of the issue of consumable music? What do we make of Andy Warhol then, or the Velvet Underground? It’s enough to force a person to think there might really be aesthetic absolutes. After all, everybody needs to clean their teeth once in a while, right?
You can’t honestly look at the Beatles and not think of them as a pop band. Pop doesn’t have to be a pejorative term. The Beatles wrote popular music but more than just popular music. The Fab Four blended avant-garde art music and Eastern music into their songs. The vitality of the work lay precisely in their not caring about what they were labeled. That was the job of corporate people who were selling the albums anyway. They were a pop band. If rock is the balancing act of blending the highest and lowest strata of art and popular culture then the Beatles succeeded brilliantly; you could call them a rock band then. But if this is true than “pop” can’t be seen as a heresy. If, however, you see rock as inextricably tied to black American music like rhythm and blues or jazz or anything not white then, sure, suddenly what the Beatles did couldn’t be rock. But at that point you’re no longer talking about music itself but about race. Oh well, no one can talk about music as music for long. It always becomes a question of culture, too.
Even so, the musical categories surrounding “rock” and “pop” are so malleable that the most honest thing to do is to say that Broadway, rockabilly, metal, Motown, blues, country, punk, progressive rock, bubble-gum music, doo-wop, and gospel are all really part of the same huge spectrum of Western culture: the song. The song remains the same. The song comes in many different shapes and sizes about every ritual of our lives but the song still remains the same. Go ahead and crucify that pop song on your cross of rock but before you do think about why you’re doing it. You may find that it’s not about the music after all.
Penis Music?
When Billy Joel said that being called soft rock is like saying he’s got a soft cock, and that he’s not a soft cock kind of guy, we all know he’s not literally saying he always has an erection. He’s talking about his music. And it’s true that even though he is defined by his ballads he has written plenty of faster songs. History is unfair to even the greatest composers, consigning them to be known for a handful of pieces that can’t possibly reflect their whole output. The Rolling Stones are known for “Satisfaction”, for instance, a throw-away song they wrote just to pad out an album. Yet it was the song that defined them more than any song they played up to that time. We all know James Brown feels good.
We have to grant Billy Joel the benefit of a doubt. Maybe he is a regular rocker after all, perhaps not a rocker of the same rank as Jimi Hendrix but, hey, he plays piano so he has a natural disadvantage. And the truth is that the bias against the piano in rock and roll is probably a post-Hendrix thing. Nevertheless, many of Billy Joel’s most memorable songs are often ballads and that’s what he’s stuck with.But there’s more to this soft rock/soft cock rhetoric of his then just the hard and soft. That dichotomy suggests several things. The first and most obvious observation is that Billy Joel uses the penis as a metaphor for his music and that he wants to be known for having hard music and not just soft music. It’s almost as if he’s ashamed of the soft music.
I assume his statement was mainly polemical, something to get people’s attention, something meant to be witty. He’s probably not really ashamed of all those ballads. He just wants people to remember the louder stuff, too. I grant that and that the soft cock rhetoric made its point. Maybe I laughed for the wrong reason but it was genuinely funny.
Nevertheless, the soft rock/soft cock rhetoric conspicuously omits anything but the hard and soft penis, as if the penis existed in only two states and the use, implicit in Joel’s rhetoric, could not be discussed. I realize it was meant mainly as a witticism but it is useful to take jokes seriously when there’s any room for controversy, especially when there’s a hard core that criticizes the soft core, so to speak. And of course it’s always useful to take a joke seriously if by doing so you make a joke of your own.
So consider interviews with the Scorpions or Iron Maiden. When asked why they always write lyrics about certain things the answer is always something like this: “Well, we can’t very well write music about dandelions and butterflies to this kind of music. This is hard music.” And because rock is often about sex, drugs, and itself (and politics and religion and other things people supposedly don’t discuss in polite company) it stands to reason that hard music has to be about something. The music, history shows us, dictates that the texts of hard rock be about certain things.
Classical music has had people doing this for centuries, in reverse. It’s called text-painting. You figure out what the text means and make music that fits it. A lot of rock simply reverses that order; Billy Joel, for instance, writes the music first and then tries to come up with words, as many rock and pop bands probably do. So if Billy Joel wants to fix the problem of being “soft” he might want to write about different things than usual and then write his music. I know from experience that it’s always an ordeal to write lyrics for a song after the music already exists. Most of the time you fall back on two or three pet subjects (like Jackson Browne or Don Henley), or you resort to something more random like Bob Dylan or David Bowie. Billy Joel’s soft rock misfortune, then, may not simply spring from the music.
As a matter of course the risk of writing words after music is that the words become limited by both your pet topics and the musical mood. Does anyone believe Robert Plant wrote the words first for Led Zeppelin’s songs? Would it ever have mattered if he wrote the words first? Probably not. You can’t sing about teddy bears and lollipops when you’ve got the rhythm section of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” or “Angel of Death” by Slayer. I take that back. You can but it won’t sound convincing, unless you want to be funny. Try it sometime and you’ll see what I mean.
If you tend to write about just your pet subjects, no matter the musical style, the textual range of rock lyrics is limited even more when the music you write asks only for rage and angst.To continue with my reductio ad absurdum, Billy Joel’s terminology offers a perfectly good explanation for why metal bands can only write about x, y, and z: hard rock needs hard words because music is finally all about the hard penis and the soft penis, hard and soft rock and everything in between (heretofore unmentioned and never generally discussed). Listeners who don’t like hard or soft rock at this point will make the easy put down. It’s not just Billy Joel that has this problem.
If the soft rockers are constantly writing impotent music then surely hard rock is in a state of eternal musical priapism, just as Motown, rhythm and blues, and other styles are constantly striving to maintain eternal musical orgasm. One can’t get it up, one can’t keep it down (so no blood gets to the brain and brain damage ensues), and the other can’t shut off the cremaster. Billy Joel’s soft rock/soft cock conundrum presents us with a metaphor for the whole world of Western music as one grand phallic parade.
It’s no wonder feminist music criticism exists! Who wouldn’t get tired of the rhetoric of penis music? Paradoxically, not feminist music critics who like to complain about penis music.But the truth is that all this rhetoric is unfair and we should all know it. It’s not fair to say that any style of music has to be described in phallic terms anyway, or vaginal terms. But the fact is that we frequently define ourselves by something and for a lot of people (too many perhaps?) this is sexuality, male or female.
And when people define themselves by sexuality then the worst accusation is to be either impotent or repressed, never mind that life is more than orgasm, copulation, or cuddling or what have you.Still, it happens that in a musical world dominated by men a cursory reading of Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective demonstrates that a common put-down of a classical composer was to declare him impotent. Strike that, the sorry lad was said to have creative impotence. Everyone knows that one form of impotence suggests another, after all.
As Slonimsky chronicles in his book the following composers were declared to have had creative impotence: Brahms, Aaron Copland, Debussy, Darius Milhaud, Dmitri Shostakovich, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Edgar Varese, and Wagner. We might as well throw in Gustav Mahler, too, for of him it was written “The drooling and emasculated simplicity of Gustav Mahler!” (p. 120 Musical Invective). “Emasculated” is the same general thing as impotence, after all, and let’s not forget the additional playground classic “retard” that “drooling” suggests. This sample reflects an impressive diversity of composers getting the brand “impotent”.
Ironically, the sexual slur in criticism of classical music usually applies to composers who are too modern for their own time (most of the above). In other cases it applied to composers who were too subdued to appeal to the taste of the critic (Brahms in contrast to Wagner). Curiously, the sexual put-down in classical music has mostly the opposite meaning that it has in popular music. Certainly Brahms’ music can often be sweet and cloying but by and large the “impotent” composers are anything but sweet and cloying. Edgar Varese, for instance, was a crucial inspiration to Frank Zappa, who could never have been described as a purveyor of soft rock. And yet Varese was said to be “impotent” in some form or another.
In rock and roll the intimation of impotence is less direct and it obviously has the opposite spin with the same meaning. The musician has no good ideas and is not where ever the cutting edge of rock is supposed to be. It doesn’t even need to be connected to male sexuality. Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele was considered a mediocrity by a Rolling Stone critic in part because the critic felt Amos couldn’t or didn’t convey rage in her music. The immediate appellation was to Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. The more contemporary reference could have been Kurt Cobain or someone else.
Most interesting of all was reading a woman critiquing a rock album by another woman by negatively comparing her to a man. Still more interesting is the criticism that Amos can’t bring herself to effectively convey rage in her songs. Clearly the men, we were being told, had the right example to follow. One woman was in want of unsullied rock credentials by not being like men who recorded forty years earlier. Arguably a song relies on text and not simply music. Nevertheless, the criticism is not entirely invalid.
The reason the criticism is not invalid is because, to borrow the penis metaphor Billy Joel has conveniently provided, if a person’s musical output is a penis or vagina it is necessary, for the sake of healthy musical expression, that the said member exist in all possible states. It’s a matter of musical health. The problem with soft rock or hard rock is that the member is only presented in one state or two rather than in the natural flow of life.
Inevitably the music which appeals to the largest group of people over the longest period of time is going to either study one element of human experience thoroughly or present a panoramic view. The case of the former is usually tied to a style of music like ragtime, tango, or the military march. But if music is to depict the whole of human experience it is dangerous to stick to one style. Historically the single style usually ends up exploring a wider emotional range (tango) or being restricted to an extra-musical activity (marching or dancing, for instance). In the end the hard rock and soft rock performers have the same creative problem, not touching on more than just one or two states of the human condition.
If music can be said to be a portrait of the human condition, and we still stick to the penis metaphor then we can say that some musicians depict the penis in every possible stage of its existence. The musicians who do this stand a much better chance of having staying power. In the history of pop music the Beatles are a good example of this. And it’s telling that when you listen to format radio you’ll hear Beatles songs on dozens of stations but you’ll notice you only hear a handful of songs from different periods. You don’t hear “Tax Man” that often on the oldies stations and you don’t hear “Help” too often on classic rock stations. You don’t hear “Revolution Number 9” on many stations at all.
Even when a band is truly eclectic in style and substance the presentation of their work is not.The other route to being remembered is to give listeners a portrait of the penis in a particular state. Thus soft rock, hard rock, or anything else in between. As Zappa and others have said this is often a function of marketing. The bitter irony is that while Billy Joel may have had a major role in his soft rock image there is the problem of critical and market reception. You can control how you make your music to some degree but you can’t control how the public perceives you with the same assurance (unless, perhaps, you’re Madonna but she is another subject).
Suddenly it turns out that the market has a label for your music and straying from it creates problems. What happens when you have a whole range of anatomical studies and the customer only wants to buy one? This gets back to Billy Joel’s problem. There’s a point where the limitation of style is considered better than any attempt to display the whole range of your thoughts and feelings in music. Even the most eclectic songwriters in pop music have their work pigeon-holed. Joel has a place to be angry.
It should go without saying that eclecticism is not unconditionally acceptable but it needs to be said precisely because it makes a world of difference in determining whether Billy Joel “gets” to make classical music successfully or whether the Beatles “get” to make the White album. The sad truth is that most people like penis music and they only like that penis music to exist in one state.
We have to grant Billy Joel the benefit of a doubt. Maybe he is a regular rocker after all, perhaps not a rocker of the same rank as Jimi Hendrix but, hey, he plays piano so he has a natural disadvantage. And the truth is that the bias against the piano in rock and roll is probably a post-Hendrix thing. Nevertheless, many of Billy Joel’s most memorable songs are often ballads and that’s what he’s stuck with.But there’s more to this soft rock/soft cock rhetoric of his then just the hard and soft. That dichotomy suggests several things. The first and most obvious observation is that Billy Joel uses the penis as a metaphor for his music and that he wants to be known for having hard music and not just soft music. It’s almost as if he’s ashamed of the soft music.
I assume his statement was mainly polemical, something to get people’s attention, something meant to be witty. He’s probably not really ashamed of all those ballads. He just wants people to remember the louder stuff, too. I grant that and that the soft cock rhetoric made its point. Maybe I laughed for the wrong reason but it was genuinely funny.
Nevertheless, the soft rock/soft cock rhetoric conspicuously omits anything but the hard and soft penis, as if the penis existed in only two states and the use, implicit in Joel’s rhetoric, could not be discussed. I realize it was meant mainly as a witticism but it is useful to take jokes seriously when there’s any room for controversy, especially when there’s a hard core that criticizes the soft core, so to speak. And of course it’s always useful to take a joke seriously if by doing so you make a joke of your own.
So consider interviews with the Scorpions or Iron Maiden. When asked why they always write lyrics about certain things the answer is always something like this: “Well, we can’t very well write music about dandelions and butterflies to this kind of music. This is hard music.” And because rock is often about sex, drugs, and itself (and politics and religion and other things people supposedly don’t discuss in polite company) it stands to reason that hard music has to be about something. The music, history shows us, dictates that the texts of hard rock be about certain things.
Classical music has had people doing this for centuries, in reverse. It’s called text-painting. You figure out what the text means and make music that fits it. A lot of rock simply reverses that order; Billy Joel, for instance, writes the music first and then tries to come up with words, as many rock and pop bands probably do. So if Billy Joel wants to fix the problem of being “soft” he might want to write about different things than usual and then write his music. I know from experience that it’s always an ordeal to write lyrics for a song after the music already exists. Most of the time you fall back on two or three pet subjects (like Jackson Browne or Don Henley), or you resort to something more random like Bob Dylan or David Bowie. Billy Joel’s soft rock misfortune, then, may not simply spring from the music.
As a matter of course the risk of writing words after music is that the words become limited by both your pet topics and the musical mood. Does anyone believe Robert Plant wrote the words first for Led Zeppelin’s songs? Would it ever have mattered if he wrote the words first? Probably not. You can’t sing about teddy bears and lollipops when you’ve got the rhythm section of Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” or “Angel of Death” by Slayer. I take that back. You can but it won’t sound convincing, unless you want to be funny. Try it sometime and you’ll see what I mean.
If you tend to write about just your pet subjects, no matter the musical style, the textual range of rock lyrics is limited even more when the music you write asks only for rage and angst.To continue with my reductio ad absurdum, Billy Joel’s terminology offers a perfectly good explanation for why metal bands can only write about x, y, and z: hard rock needs hard words because music is finally all about the hard penis and the soft penis, hard and soft rock and everything in between (heretofore unmentioned and never generally discussed). Listeners who don’t like hard or soft rock at this point will make the easy put down. It’s not just Billy Joel that has this problem.
If the soft rockers are constantly writing impotent music then surely hard rock is in a state of eternal musical priapism, just as Motown, rhythm and blues, and other styles are constantly striving to maintain eternal musical orgasm. One can’t get it up, one can’t keep it down (so no blood gets to the brain and brain damage ensues), and the other can’t shut off the cremaster. Billy Joel’s soft rock/soft cock conundrum presents us with a metaphor for the whole world of Western music as one grand phallic parade.
It’s no wonder feminist music criticism exists! Who wouldn’t get tired of the rhetoric of penis music? Paradoxically, not feminist music critics who like to complain about penis music.But the truth is that all this rhetoric is unfair and we should all know it. It’s not fair to say that any style of music has to be described in phallic terms anyway, or vaginal terms. But the fact is that we frequently define ourselves by something and for a lot of people (too many perhaps?) this is sexuality, male or female.
And when people define themselves by sexuality then the worst accusation is to be either impotent or repressed, never mind that life is more than orgasm, copulation, or cuddling or what have you.Still, it happens that in a musical world dominated by men a cursory reading of Nicolas Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective demonstrates that a common put-down of a classical composer was to declare him impotent. Strike that, the sorry lad was said to have creative impotence. Everyone knows that one form of impotence suggests another, after all.
As Slonimsky chronicles in his book the following composers were declared to have had creative impotence: Brahms, Aaron Copland, Debussy, Darius Milhaud, Dmitri Shostakovich, Richard Strauss, Tchaikovsky, Edgar Varese, and Wagner. We might as well throw in Gustav Mahler, too, for of him it was written “The drooling and emasculated simplicity of Gustav Mahler!” (p. 120 Musical Invective). “Emasculated” is the same general thing as impotence, after all, and let’s not forget the additional playground classic “retard” that “drooling” suggests. This sample reflects an impressive diversity of composers getting the brand “impotent”.
Ironically, the sexual slur in criticism of classical music usually applies to composers who are too modern for their own time (most of the above). In other cases it applied to composers who were too subdued to appeal to the taste of the critic (Brahms in contrast to Wagner). Curiously, the sexual put-down in classical music has mostly the opposite meaning that it has in popular music. Certainly Brahms’ music can often be sweet and cloying but by and large the “impotent” composers are anything but sweet and cloying. Edgar Varese, for instance, was a crucial inspiration to Frank Zappa, who could never have been described as a purveyor of soft rock. And yet Varese was said to be “impotent” in some form or another.
In rock and roll the intimation of impotence is less direct and it obviously has the opposite spin with the same meaning. The musician has no good ideas and is not where ever the cutting edge of rock is supposed to be. It doesn’t even need to be connected to male sexuality. Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele was considered a mediocrity by a Rolling Stone critic in part because the critic felt Amos couldn’t or didn’t convey rage in her music. The immediate appellation was to Jerry Lee Lewis and Little Richard. The more contemporary reference could have been Kurt Cobain or someone else.
Most interesting of all was reading a woman critiquing a rock album by another woman by negatively comparing her to a man. Still more interesting is the criticism that Amos can’t bring herself to effectively convey rage in her songs. Clearly the men, we were being told, had the right example to follow. One woman was in want of unsullied rock credentials by not being like men who recorded forty years earlier. Arguably a song relies on text and not simply music. Nevertheless, the criticism is not entirely invalid.
The reason the criticism is not invalid is because, to borrow the penis metaphor Billy Joel has conveniently provided, if a person’s musical output is a penis or vagina it is necessary, for the sake of healthy musical expression, that the said member exist in all possible states. It’s a matter of musical health. The problem with soft rock or hard rock is that the member is only presented in one state or two rather than in the natural flow of life.
Inevitably the music which appeals to the largest group of people over the longest period of time is going to either study one element of human experience thoroughly or present a panoramic view. The case of the former is usually tied to a style of music like ragtime, tango, or the military march. But if music is to depict the whole of human experience it is dangerous to stick to one style. Historically the single style usually ends up exploring a wider emotional range (tango) or being restricted to an extra-musical activity (marching or dancing, for instance). In the end the hard rock and soft rock performers have the same creative problem, not touching on more than just one or two states of the human condition.
If music can be said to be a portrait of the human condition, and we still stick to the penis metaphor then we can say that some musicians depict the penis in every possible stage of its existence. The musicians who do this stand a much better chance of having staying power. In the history of pop music the Beatles are a good example of this. And it’s telling that when you listen to format radio you’ll hear Beatles songs on dozens of stations but you’ll notice you only hear a handful of songs from different periods. You don’t hear “Tax Man” that often on the oldies stations and you don’t hear “Help” too often on classic rock stations. You don’t hear “Revolution Number 9” on many stations at all.
Even when a band is truly eclectic in style and substance the presentation of their work is not.The other route to being remembered is to give listeners a portrait of the penis in a particular state. Thus soft rock, hard rock, or anything else in between. As Zappa and others have said this is often a function of marketing. The bitter irony is that while Billy Joel may have had a major role in his soft rock image there is the problem of critical and market reception. You can control how you make your music to some degree but you can’t control how the public perceives you with the same assurance (unless, perhaps, you’re Madonna but she is another subject).
Suddenly it turns out that the market has a label for your music and straying from it creates problems. What happens when you have a whole range of anatomical studies and the customer only wants to buy one? This gets back to Billy Joel’s problem. There’s a point where the limitation of style is considered better than any attempt to display the whole range of your thoughts and feelings in music. Even the most eclectic songwriters in pop music have their work pigeon-holed. Joel has a place to be angry.
It should go without saying that eclecticism is not unconditionally acceptable but it needs to be said precisely because it makes a world of difference in determining whether Billy Joel “gets” to make classical music successfully or whether the Beatles “get” to make the White album. The sad truth is that most people like penis music and they only like that penis music to exist in one state.
Soft Rock, Soft Cock
PREFACE: This essay was written some time around 2001 and Billy Joel's musical career, such as it now is, has not led me to change my views in the slightest. I haven't had the time or inclination to really dig into the classical career of Elvis Costello but am willing to say (perhaps at the risk of looking silly) of saying Costello might have less to worry about trying to establish himself as a classical composer partly because hehasn't tried so hard to counteract his reputation as a rock star.
Anyway, the text below is probably going to feel a bit dated and I realize that in the text I list some people as soft rock you might not agree should be listed as soft rock. I've got another essay entirely for those of you who wonder why women are listed in soft rock discussion and why this essay is called "Soft Rock, Soft Cock". Keep in mind this is a jocular piece making fun of Billy Joel and know that I haven't written this to be offensive. So, without further ado
SOFT ROCK, SOFT COCK
I can hardly remember the various places I read it but I know for a fact it was in an issue of Musician. I subscribed to that fine magazine for a couple years and in those pages somewhere in the mid to late 1990s I read an interview with Billy Joel, who was talking about his transition out of rock into classical music. The Piano Man was going classical. Among other things he said he wanted to break free from the tyranny of the lyric and that other rock musicians, like Elton John, Paul Simon, and Phil Collins were also branching out, into Broadway. That Broadway thing is another issue, I suppose. Then again, maybe it’s not.
By far the most striking thing he said in that interview was that he hated being labeled soft rock by people in the industry. If I remember correctly he said something along these lines: “I hate being called soft rock. It’s like saying I have a soft cock and I’m not a soft cock kind of guy”.
My first thought was, “Well, it is soft most of the time, Billy.” And it should be. After all, if it was always hard we’d have to talk about a medical condition known as priapism that requires medical attention. Any man and many a woman knows that the penis exists in several states and that however Joel said it we shouldn’t take his words literally. On the other hand, rock is so steeped in sexuality (because we are) it often comes out that we discuss music in terms of sexual functions and sexual relationships. So this soft rock/soft cock talk is obviously a metaphor.
I won’t contest that Billy Joel has been labeled soft rock or that he does, in fact, have a basis for anger at the stereotype. This is the guy who wrote “Pressure”, “You May Be Right”, and “Big Shot”. Whether you think these and his other faster songs constitute “real” rocking songs is part of this issue but we don’t need elaboration. It will suffice he is accurately branded a soft rocker. He is, after all, The Piano Man. “I Love You Just the Way You Are”, “For the Longest Time”, “The Rose”, “Always a Woman to Me”, “Innocent Man” (I think that’s him, isn’t ?), and a host of other ballads have defined his work. The label soft rock is a function of marketing, of course, and marketing is arguably the most pervasive and pernicious element in a life of music-making, but it is also unavoidable. The legacy of Billy Joel as a soft rocker is too secure for him to change.
His music moved further and further away from the traditional expectations of rock through the 1980s, especially with The Bridge. No one is going to pretend that “Modern Woman” is a hard rock song no matter how much energy Joel puts into singing it. “A Matter of Trust” aspires to be a rocking piece and simply manages to be a pop song. A hit does not make it rock. Clearly there’s no way a song like “She’s Such a Temptation” or “Baby Grand” are hard rock souvenirs.
But setting aside the emotional and intellectual territory covered in Billy Joel songs there may be a simpler yet more profound explanation for this soft rock, soft cock association Billy Joel has made. It requires a broader survey of everything called soft rock. I’ve canvassed my friends for names to include in the soft rock pantheon. This activity will reveal much in and of itself. Here’s a list of names:
Rod Stewart
Billy Joel
Elton John
Chicago
Phil Collins
Sting
Peter Cetera
Bruce Hornsby
Sade
The Eagles
Fleetwood Mac
Gordon Lightfoot
Jackson Browne
James Taylor
The Carpenters
Michael Bolton
Air Supply
Celine Dion
Take a look at this list and think about something besides the songs. What instruments do these people play (if any)? Of eighteen names a good number have their famous songs backed up by piano, often solo, or at least in settings where the piano plays a significant role in defining the musical landscape. I’m not saying the keyboard alone is the reason these people are considered soft rock. James Taylor, at the very least, plays guitar and I don’t recall the piano having any meaningful role in the Eagles’ output. But clearly the piano plays a big role in at least many of the hits a lot of these people made.
Some of you may be object. You might be thinking, “Sure, the piano may be more common in soft rock but that doesn’t mean all piano players have to make soft rock.” I agree. I love the piano works of Prokofiev, Hindemith, Bartok, Thelonius Monk, and Stravinsky and they didn’t play soft rock. Of course that’s not fair because their music isn’t even rock `n roll but it’s incontestably “harder” music than anything Peter Cetera or Billy Joel ever wrote. By the same token. no one has ever told me that Tom Waits, Stevie Wonder, Ben Folds, or Jerry Lee Lewis played “soft rock” when they tickled or pounded the ivories, even if Stevie has softened up a lot since Hotter than July.
Nevertheless, this remarkable pattern emerges and when Stevie’s soft he’s still a good case study. Why do so many soft rock/soft cock rockers seem to play keyboards? We can forget altogether the question of whether or not women playing piano can be considered hard rock or even rock. They may be lucky to be labeled soft rock or alternative rock (see Tori Amos in this instance). Let’s just settle on this question about the piano because I’m convinced a thorough survey of soft rock will reveal the dominance of the piano as one of the crucial elements in the soda rock recipe. If you don’t believe me we can approach this question from the opposite end.
When we think of hard rock or even just plain rock we never think of music dominated by the keyboard. When we think of classic rock bands we think of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Who, and none of these bands ever made the piano central to their songwriting and performance or even made much of it when it did appear. Go back even further to Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Elvis, and we see that the guitar still dominates the musical landscape. In contrast, in the music of acknowledged masters of soft rock like Billy Joel, Elton John or Rod Stewart the piano is crucial. If we call it “adult contemporary” the facts won’t be changed. Take Phil Collins as an example. The further he gets from the drum kit in his writing process the softer and softer his music seems to get. If he wants to avoid the lifelong “soft rock” label he better start making more albums with Robert Fripp.
"Fine,” some of you may say, “what about those people you say aren’t soft rock?” That’s a fair question. My first appeal, whether you believe me or not, is to all around musicianship. Stevie Wonder played all the instruments on quite a few songs he recorded for his three 1972 albums Music of My Mind, Talking Book, and Innervisions. So that meant at least keyboards, harmonica, and drums. I’m less familiar with Ben Folds work but I’m told by some that he, too, has all-around instrumental facility. I grant that Paul McCartney is proof that all-around musical skill won’t keep you out of the annals of soft-rock but it’s the first best defense if that’s what you want to avoid.
But beyond the ability to play more than one instrument (and this importance of this can’t be overstated) is clearly not the only reason. The second critical difference between someone like Tom Waits or Ben Folds and Billy Joel or Elton John is musical affiliation. This is harder to explain. Billy Joel listens to classical music and not just rock `n roll. Some of you may say this is the problem but you’d be wrong. Joel admires Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Bernstein, Copland, and other 19th century Romantic composers. I happen to think this is part of Joel’s soft rock problem. The soft cock problem, if you will, has to be explained elsewhere. But influences alone do not put you in soft or hard rock categories.
When I say we have to look at musical affiliation I don’t mean the issue of influences but musical context. Stevie Wonder got his start in Motown and Ben Folds has clearly been influenced by Bill Evans (notwithstanding he also seems to know this, unlike many other pianists in popular music). Bands that draw from musical traditions and associations beyond rock itself have a distinctly different aesthetic sensibility from those who make their music within the rock tradition. Jerry Lee Lewis came from a culture steeped in Gospel. No one can listen to Tom Wait’s The Black Rider and think he has always and only played rock.
Billy Joel has obviously played some classical music, though, hasn’t he? That’s true but each art lives in unique terms. If I play a handful of classical pieces and then go on to spend twenty years writing rock and pop songs am I really living with that music as a performer? If I, for instance, join a rock band that covers Rush songs and has admiration for early Genesis, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Metallica, and Led Zeppelin how can I not expect to be influenced by those bands even when I haven’t listened to them? It’s possible, as Claude Debussy discovered, to be influenced by people you detest just as you can by those you admire. He spent no small part of his composing life moving away from the legacy of Wagner. You can listen to all the music you want but in the end you are always defined by what you play.
So what does Billy Joel play? Even he has figured this out. If he hadn’t he wouldn’t be angry at being labeled soft rock. The last and most unforgiving thing in all this is the testimony of history. Billy Joel is writing classical music now but after twenty to thirty years in rock it seems too little too late. If he had spent time composing rock and classical music simultaneously he might never have gotten the label soft rock. But the truth is that no musician can be known by his or her total output. Invariably amongst a musicians total work several defining moments or pieces will arise. Stevie Wonder never intended to be known for “Superstition” and “Living for the City” but those are his most famous and important songs. Here I come back to my long-ago comment about cover bands. You know your songs have touched people when they get covered and the covers don’t simply speak for themselves.
By the same token Beethoven is known for those works that are regularly performed. No one person can possibly perform everything Bach ever wrote so you choose the pieces you want to play. Classical composers are known, by and large, for a handful of works that define their artistic lives. The same is true in popular music and we’ve seen where history has put Billy Joel so far.
There’s still time for Billy Joel to change public perception. He can compose more classical music but I think we all know the chances aren’t good this will make any difference. If he had finished the once threatened oratorio on 9/11/2001 he might have been remembered but not necessarily in a positive way. It’s rare we hear musicians who can play a variety of styles convincingly. Pianists who are good at playing Ravel aren’t guaranteed mastery of Debussy or even convincing interpretations. Not everyone who plays Beethoven well can play Brahms. If it’s true in the world of art music it is equally true in classical music. Whether or not he has a hard cock Billy Joel at this point will be remembered mainly for making music most of us call soft rock. Right now Billy Joel may want to count his blessings. The only thing worse than being remembered as a soft rocker would be not being remembered at all.
Anyway, the text below is probably going to feel a bit dated and I realize that in the text I list some people as soft rock you might not agree should be listed as soft rock. I've got another essay entirely for those of you who wonder why women are listed in soft rock discussion and why this essay is called "Soft Rock, Soft Cock". Keep in mind this is a jocular piece making fun of Billy Joel and know that I haven't written this to be offensive. So, without further ado
SOFT ROCK, SOFT COCK
I can hardly remember the various places I read it but I know for a fact it was in an issue of Musician. I subscribed to that fine magazine for a couple years and in those pages somewhere in the mid to late 1990s I read an interview with Billy Joel, who was talking about his transition out of rock into classical music. The Piano Man was going classical. Among other things he said he wanted to break free from the tyranny of the lyric and that other rock musicians, like Elton John, Paul Simon, and Phil Collins were also branching out, into Broadway. That Broadway thing is another issue, I suppose. Then again, maybe it’s not.
By far the most striking thing he said in that interview was that he hated being labeled soft rock by people in the industry. If I remember correctly he said something along these lines: “I hate being called soft rock. It’s like saying I have a soft cock and I’m not a soft cock kind of guy”.
My first thought was, “Well, it is soft most of the time, Billy.” And it should be. After all, if it was always hard we’d have to talk about a medical condition known as priapism that requires medical attention. Any man and many a woman knows that the penis exists in several states and that however Joel said it we shouldn’t take his words literally. On the other hand, rock is so steeped in sexuality (because we are) it often comes out that we discuss music in terms of sexual functions and sexual relationships. So this soft rock/soft cock talk is obviously a metaphor.
I won’t contest that Billy Joel has been labeled soft rock or that he does, in fact, have a basis for anger at the stereotype. This is the guy who wrote “Pressure”, “You May Be Right”, and “Big Shot”. Whether you think these and his other faster songs constitute “real” rocking songs is part of this issue but we don’t need elaboration. It will suffice he is accurately branded a soft rocker. He is, after all, The Piano Man. “I Love You Just the Way You Are”, “For the Longest Time”, “The Rose”, “Always a Woman to Me”, “Innocent Man” (I think that’s him, isn’t ?), and a host of other ballads have defined his work. The label soft rock is a function of marketing, of course, and marketing is arguably the most pervasive and pernicious element in a life of music-making, but it is also unavoidable. The legacy of Billy Joel as a soft rocker is too secure for him to change.
His music moved further and further away from the traditional expectations of rock through the 1980s, especially with The Bridge. No one is going to pretend that “Modern Woman” is a hard rock song no matter how much energy Joel puts into singing it. “A Matter of Trust” aspires to be a rocking piece and simply manages to be a pop song. A hit does not make it rock. Clearly there’s no way a song like “She’s Such a Temptation” or “Baby Grand” are hard rock souvenirs.
But setting aside the emotional and intellectual territory covered in Billy Joel songs there may be a simpler yet more profound explanation for this soft rock, soft cock association Billy Joel has made. It requires a broader survey of everything called soft rock. I’ve canvassed my friends for names to include in the soft rock pantheon. This activity will reveal much in and of itself. Here’s a list of names:
Rod Stewart
Billy Joel
Elton John
Chicago
Phil Collins
Sting
Peter Cetera
Bruce Hornsby
Sade
The Eagles
Fleetwood Mac
Gordon Lightfoot
Jackson Browne
James Taylor
The Carpenters
Michael Bolton
Air Supply
Celine Dion
Take a look at this list and think about something besides the songs. What instruments do these people play (if any)? Of eighteen names a good number have their famous songs backed up by piano, often solo, or at least in settings where the piano plays a significant role in defining the musical landscape. I’m not saying the keyboard alone is the reason these people are considered soft rock. James Taylor, at the very least, plays guitar and I don’t recall the piano having any meaningful role in the Eagles’ output. But clearly the piano plays a big role in at least many of the hits a lot of these people made.
Some of you may be object. You might be thinking, “Sure, the piano may be more common in soft rock but that doesn’t mean all piano players have to make soft rock.” I agree. I love the piano works of Prokofiev, Hindemith, Bartok, Thelonius Monk, and Stravinsky and they didn’t play soft rock. Of course that’s not fair because their music isn’t even rock `n roll but it’s incontestably “harder” music than anything Peter Cetera or Billy Joel ever wrote. By the same token. no one has ever told me that Tom Waits, Stevie Wonder, Ben Folds, or Jerry Lee Lewis played “soft rock” when they tickled or pounded the ivories, even if Stevie has softened up a lot since Hotter than July.
Nevertheless, this remarkable pattern emerges and when Stevie’s soft he’s still a good case study. Why do so many soft rock/soft cock rockers seem to play keyboards? We can forget altogether the question of whether or not women playing piano can be considered hard rock or even rock. They may be lucky to be labeled soft rock or alternative rock (see Tori Amos in this instance). Let’s just settle on this question about the piano because I’m convinced a thorough survey of soft rock will reveal the dominance of the piano as one of the crucial elements in the soda rock recipe. If you don’t believe me we can approach this question from the opposite end.
When we think of hard rock or even just plain rock we never think of music dominated by the keyboard. When we think of classic rock bands we think of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, the Who, and none of these bands ever made the piano central to their songwriting and performance or even made much of it when it did appear. Go back even further to Buddy Holly, Chuck Berry, Elvis, and we see that the guitar still dominates the musical landscape. In contrast, in the music of acknowledged masters of soft rock like Billy Joel, Elton John or Rod Stewart the piano is crucial. If we call it “adult contemporary” the facts won’t be changed. Take Phil Collins as an example. The further he gets from the drum kit in his writing process the softer and softer his music seems to get. If he wants to avoid the lifelong “soft rock” label he better start making more albums with Robert Fripp.
"Fine,” some of you may say, “what about those people you say aren’t soft rock?” That’s a fair question. My first appeal, whether you believe me or not, is to all around musicianship. Stevie Wonder played all the instruments on quite a few songs he recorded for his three 1972 albums Music of My Mind, Talking Book, and Innervisions. So that meant at least keyboards, harmonica, and drums. I’m less familiar with Ben Folds work but I’m told by some that he, too, has all-around instrumental facility. I grant that Paul McCartney is proof that all-around musical skill won’t keep you out of the annals of soft-rock but it’s the first best defense if that’s what you want to avoid.
But beyond the ability to play more than one instrument (and this importance of this can’t be overstated) is clearly not the only reason. The second critical difference between someone like Tom Waits or Ben Folds and Billy Joel or Elton John is musical affiliation. This is harder to explain. Billy Joel listens to classical music and not just rock `n roll. Some of you may say this is the problem but you’d be wrong. Joel admires Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Bernstein, Copland, and other 19th century Romantic composers. I happen to think this is part of Joel’s soft rock problem. The soft cock problem, if you will, has to be explained elsewhere. But influences alone do not put you in soft or hard rock categories.
When I say we have to look at musical affiliation I don’t mean the issue of influences but musical context. Stevie Wonder got his start in Motown and Ben Folds has clearly been influenced by Bill Evans (notwithstanding he also seems to know this, unlike many other pianists in popular music). Bands that draw from musical traditions and associations beyond rock itself have a distinctly different aesthetic sensibility from those who make their music within the rock tradition. Jerry Lee Lewis came from a culture steeped in Gospel. No one can listen to Tom Wait’s The Black Rider and think he has always and only played rock.
Billy Joel has obviously played some classical music, though, hasn’t he? That’s true but each art lives in unique terms. If I play a handful of classical pieces and then go on to spend twenty years writing rock and pop songs am I really living with that music as a performer? If I, for instance, join a rock band that covers Rush songs and has admiration for early Genesis, the Mahavishnu Orchestra, Metallica, and Led Zeppelin how can I not expect to be influenced by those bands even when I haven’t listened to them? It’s possible, as Claude Debussy discovered, to be influenced by people you detest just as you can by those you admire. He spent no small part of his composing life moving away from the legacy of Wagner. You can listen to all the music you want but in the end you are always defined by what you play.
So what does Billy Joel play? Even he has figured this out. If he hadn’t he wouldn’t be angry at being labeled soft rock. The last and most unforgiving thing in all this is the testimony of history. Billy Joel is writing classical music now but after twenty to thirty years in rock it seems too little too late. If he had spent time composing rock and classical music simultaneously he might never have gotten the label soft rock. But the truth is that no musician can be known by his or her total output. Invariably amongst a musicians total work several defining moments or pieces will arise. Stevie Wonder never intended to be known for “Superstition” and “Living for the City” but those are his most famous and important songs. Here I come back to my long-ago comment about cover bands. You know your songs have touched people when they get covered and the covers don’t simply speak for themselves.
By the same token Beethoven is known for those works that are regularly performed. No one person can possibly perform everything Bach ever wrote so you choose the pieces you want to play. Classical composers are known, by and large, for a handful of works that define their artistic lives. The same is true in popular music and we’ve seen where history has put Billy Joel so far.
There’s still time for Billy Joel to change public perception. He can compose more classical music but I think we all know the chances aren’t good this will make any difference. If he had finished the once threatened oratorio on 9/11/2001 he might have been remembered but not necessarily in a positive way. It’s rare we hear musicians who can play a variety of styles convincingly. Pianists who are good at playing Ravel aren’t guaranteed mastery of Debussy or even convincing interpretations. Not everyone who plays Beethoven well can play Brahms. If it’s true in the world of art music it is equally true in classical music. Whether or not he has a hard cock Billy Joel at this point will be remembered mainly for making music most of us call soft rock. Right now Billy Joel may want to count his blessings. The only thing worse than being remembered as a soft rocker would be not being remembered at all.
Calm Blue Oceans & Thunderstorms, instrumental pop and bad classical music
A friend of mine lent me an album of rock instrumentals in 2001, Zooma, by John Paul Jones, our famous bassist from Led Zeppelin. I knew Jones was responsible for the added arrangements in many a Led Zeppelin song; that he was responsible for the brass arrangement of “Mellow Yellow”; and that he could find his way well enough around a keyboard. Jones is by all accounts a capable musician but I wasn’t expecting much from the album and my expectations weren’t disappointed. Zooma is largely a yawn.
It’s not that the album isn’t full of loud music and heavy grooves. No Zeppelin veteran could go for a fifty minute disk and be all quiet. It has songs with fittingly post-Zeppelin titles like “Snake Eyes”, and of course “Zooma”. There are a couple of nice solos and an interesting string arrangement that rounds off one of the tracks. But in the end Zooma is just plain dull, a series of riff-bashing exercises unsullied by the interference of the human voice. Jones has obviously mastered his instruments and yet his tracks feel like jam sessions that wanted to become songs. Jones didn’t give them that luxury. It’s impressive, I guess, that Jones can play four or five different kinds of bass and make instrumentals using only his own set of basses but what’s the point, really, of playing a solo on pedal steel bass? The simple fact that he can? That seemed to be the whole point of Zooma and I’ve been wondering if that’s reason enough ever since.
Lest anyone think this will be about popular music alone, let me share another story. This was also the year I heard the work of guitarist/composer Andrew York. I met a guitarist who said he was planning a recital. He said the recital was going to be a program devoted entirely to the music of Andrew York. “Who’s that?” I asked. “You don’t know who Andrew York is?” he asked in amazement. The guitarist urged me to listen to Andrew York. I figured this recital of his would be the best way to find out.
As a matter of curiosity and friendly acquaintance I went to this York recital. I was disappointed. York’s music consists almost entirely of pretty filigree patterns that are moved up and down the fingerboard. When there are tunes in a York piece the tunes outstay their welcome by dint of repetition. I don’t deny that Andrew York must be (or was) an excellent guitarist but I’ve since learned it’s not without cause he’s one of the flagship guitarists on Windham Hill since the passing of Michael Hedges.
You may object to my examples but the judgment of critics reflects this powerful bias as strongly as the buying public. If I rattle off names like John Tesh, Yanni, Kenny G, or even Phil Collins and Sting many of you think something like MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch put-down “elevator-prone sissy rock.” There are classical equivalents, to be sure, but most classical music is usually too long to get played in an elevator or department store. In fact much of this music is barely distinguishable from the background sounds that might accompany it: a calm blue ocean, or a distant thunderstorm.
Not a few people I know who have had anything to say on the subject of instrumental rock or classical music say the following: “If it doesn’t have a voice I’m not interested.” Fair enough. Even I said Zooma was a bunch of instrumentals that needed to be songs. A lot of people only like music that sings.
That’s one of the reason bands like Yes and Genesis aren’t considered good rock and roll. All the lengthy instrumental breaks are seen as pretensions to classical music or distractions from what could have been a straightforward song. We don’t have to stick with “lite rock” to find this pattern. Consider the Robert Fripp/Andy Summer’s collaborative album. I know they made one but I don’t even remember the title. That, too, was all instrumental and barely memorable. A lot of the progressive rock of Yes and Rush is so fraught with instrumental breaks it is virtually de facto instrumental rock. What is it about this stuff that drives people up the wall? And what is it about the music recorded on the Windham Hill label, for instance, that gets so many people cringing and inspired a nasty skit from Mystery Science Theater 3000?
I don’t think the song-theory alone can explain this. Ellington and dozens of other jazz musicians made livings off of instrumental music. Miles Davis didn’t have to sing anything to get people to buy his albums. People buy more recordings of Beethoven than almost any other classical composer. From Phil Collins and Stevie Wonder through to Rush, Led Zeppelin, and Metallica we see rock and pop bands writing instrumentals that are genuinely interesting pieces.
To explain the weakness of that “elevator prone sissy rock”, progressive rock like Rush, or classical music that puts us to sleep we need another explanation than the innate weakness of instrumental music or of any musical style. The real answer probably lies in an imbalance between instrumental technique and musical form. I’m not the first or best exponent of this idea but here it is: In too many cases instrumental music written by soloists for their own pleasure puts idiomatic command of the instrument above even the barest concept of musical form. This applies to groups and individuals alike. A person writes something because it lets them showcase a technique or they get caught up in the joy of pushing the technique into the domain of making a full study of it.
In classical music these works are called studies and are generally not meant to be concert pieces. In popular music there is no such thing as a technical exercise to promote all-around musicianship so a lot of these finger-walking pieces are recorded as if they were just like any other piece of recorded music, song or not. Thus technical command of the instrument supercedes musical form or entertainment value. Never mind any question of art or substance. This is the calm blue ocean kind of music.
Some folk call these people “fret-board masturbators.” The fretboard masturbator can play hundreds of scales faster than you can say jack-rabbit but you don’t know why they’re doing it or what real music all these scales are supposed to make. It happens that this was the phrase I thought I heard someone say when he heard Joe Pass for the first time. Whether the term should apply to Joe Pass I’m not here to argue. The invective does its job.
The invective can apply to Kenny G, Kitaro, Yanni, or any other “soft rock” you want; there’s no denying every last one of them is a calm, blue ocean. It could also apply to all kinds of metal and progressive rock, too. It applies with brutal accuracy to most nineteenth century classical guitar literature. It doesn’t have to be instrumental to fall into this category. Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” is about twice as long as it needs to be and it has words. Gabriel took more space to get his message across than the text really demanded. Even otherwise solid songwriters and composers can overplay their hand once in a while.
But there’s another side to this imbalance. Rush, Yes, and early Genesis are the major culprits for the opposite of the calm blue ocean, the thunderstorm. With chops of death firmly established the band or composer goes on to make grand musical landscapes with sweeping and drastic changes, occasionally with a text, however superfluous the text frequently is. My favorite example is “Xanadu”. Here’s a piece with at least five different ideas that are cobbled together in a form somewhere between a rondo and a palindrome but not quite either. Cribbing and trimming Coleridge we get a giant prog-rock phantasm that seemed to get its text as an afterthought. Where the other brand of instrumental rock errs on the side of mind-numbing repetition this brand errs in the direction of jumping to the next idea or mood simply for the sake of pulling off a dramatic change. If “Xanadu” were stripped down to the introduction and the sections where Geddy Lee sings the song would be fairly tight, if not wholly enjoyable. As it stands we’re taken through so many storms and eyes-of-the-storm you’d think the storm was a compound eye. Even the awkward metaphor explains the musical shortcoming I’m talking about.
It’s not that musicians in this category never get it right. “YYZ”, for instance, is largely free of the amorphous crashing of the Thunderstorm. Genesis and Peter Gabriel, for the most part, figured out how to strip down their music so that it had a form that made at least some sense; of course they didn’t do it when they were all working together. Other bands like Rush, and particularly Yes, have taken longer to boil their songs down to whatever their essence might be.
Naturally the joy of playing music should always be there when you write music. You don’t write music you don’t want to play. You don’t want to simply pander to some audience, either. But there are limits. The joy of playing should never be pursued without thinking about the joy of listening. You’re not the only one who should be having fun with the music you play. If there’s a problem with Andrew York and John Paul Jone’s Zooma alike, as with progressive rock, it’s that the musicians have not found that happy marriage of musical technique and musical form. The musicians who do and then go beyond that to express something in a unique way (not to say original) go on to make musical history, whatever the musical style may be. Those don’t may become footnotes in music history but they rarely get an honorable mention. The rest have the harsher but finally kinder fate, they get forgotten.
It’s not that the album isn’t full of loud music and heavy grooves. No Zeppelin veteran could go for a fifty minute disk and be all quiet. It has songs with fittingly post-Zeppelin titles like “Snake Eyes”, and of course “Zooma”. There are a couple of nice solos and an interesting string arrangement that rounds off one of the tracks. But in the end Zooma is just plain dull, a series of riff-bashing exercises unsullied by the interference of the human voice. Jones has obviously mastered his instruments and yet his tracks feel like jam sessions that wanted to become songs. Jones didn’t give them that luxury. It’s impressive, I guess, that Jones can play four or five different kinds of bass and make instrumentals using only his own set of basses but what’s the point, really, of playing a solo on pedal steel bass? The simple fact that he can? That seemed to be the whole point of Zooma and I’ve been wondering if that’s reason enough ever since.
Lest anyone think this will be about popular music alone, let me share another story. This was also the year I heard the work of guitarist/composer Andrew York. I met a guitarist who said he was planning a recital. He said the recital was going to be a program devoted entirely to the music of Andrew York. “Who’s that?” I asked. “You don’t know who Andrew York is?” he asked in amazement. The guitarist urged me to listen to Andrew York. I figured this recital of his would be the best way to find out.
As a matter of curiosity and friendly acquaintance I went to this York recital. I was disappointed. York’s music consists almost entirely of pretty filigree patterns that are moved up and down the fingerboard. When there are tunes in a York piece the tunes outstay their welcome by dint of repetition. I don’t deny that Andrew York must be (or was) an excellent guitarist but I’ve since learned it’s not without cause he’s one of the flagship guitarists on Windham Hill since the passing of Michael Hedges.
You may object to my examples but the judgment of critics reflects this powerful bias as strongly as the buying public. If I rattle off names like John Tesh, Yanni, Kenny G, or even Phil Collins and Sting many of you think something like MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch put-down “elevator-prone sissy rock.” There are classical equivalents, to be sure, but most classical music is usually too long to get played in an elevator or department store. In fact much of this music is barely distinguishable from the background sounds that might accompany it: a calm blue ocean, or a distant thunderstorm.
Not a few people I know who have had anything to say on the subject of instrumental rock or classical music say the following: “If it doesn’t have a voice I’m not interested.” Fair enough. Even I said Zooma was a bunch of instrumentals that needed to be songs. A lot of people only like music that sings.
That’s one of the reason bands like Yes and Genesis aren’t considered good rock and roll. All the lengthy instrumental breaks are seen as pretensions to classical music or distractions from what could have been a straightforward song. We don’t have to stick with “lite rock” to find this pattern. Consider the Robert Fripp/Andy Summer’s collaborative album. I know they made one but I don’t even remember the title. That, too, was all instrumental and barely memorable. A lot of the progressive rock of Yes and Rush is so fraught with instrumental breaks it is virtually de facto instrumental rock. What is it about this stuff that drives people up the wall? And what is it about the music recorded on the Windham Hill label, for instance, that gets so many people cringing and inspired a nasty skit from Mystery Science Theater 3000?
I don’t think the song-theory alone can explain this. Ellington and dozens of other jazz musicians made livings off of instrumental music. Miles Davis didn’t have to sing anything to get people to buy his albums. People buy more recordings of Beethoven than almost any other classical composer. From Phil Collins and Stevie Wonder through to Rush, Led Zeppelin, and Metallica we see rock and pop bands writing instrumentals that are genuinely interesting pieces.
To explain the weakness of that “elevator prone sissy rock”, progressive rock like Rush, or classical music that puts us to sleep we need another explanation than the innate weakness of instrumental music or of any musical style. The real answer probably lies in an imbalance between instrumental technique and musical form. I’m not the first or best exponent of this idea but here it is: In too many cases instrumental music written by soloists for their own pleasure puts idiomatic command of the instrument above even the barest concept of musical form. This applies to groups and individuals alike. A person writes something because it lets them showcase a technique or they get caught up in the joy of pushing the technique into the domain of making a full study of it.
In classical music these works are called studies and are generally not meant to be concert pieces. In popular music there is no such thing as a technical exercise to promote all-around musicianship so a lot of these finger-walking pieces are recorded as if they were just like any other piece of recorded music, song or not. Thus technical command of the instrument supercedes musical form or entertainment value. Never mind any question of art or substance. This is the calm blue ocean kind of music.
Some folk call these people “fret-board masturbators.” The fretboard masturbator can play hundreds of scales faster than you can say jack-rabbit but you don’t know why they’re doing it or what real music all these scales are supposed to make. It happens that this was the phrase I thought I heard someone say when he heard Joe Pass for the first time. Whether the term should apply to Joe Pass I’m not here to argue. The invective does its job.
The invective can apply to Kenny G, Kitaro, Yanni, or any other “soft rock” you want; there’s no denying every last one of them is a calm, blue ocean. It could also apply to all kinds of metal and progressive rock, too. It applies with brutal accuracy to most nineteenth century classical guitar literature. It doesn’t have to be instrumental to fall into this category. Peter Gabriel’s “Biko” is about twice as long as it needs to be and it has words. Gabriel took more space to get his message across than the text really demanded. Even otherwise solid songwriters and composers can overplay their hand once in a while.
But there’s another side to this imbalance. Rush, Yes, and early Genesis are the major culprits for the opposite of the calm blue ocean, the thunderstorm. With chops of death firmly established the band or composer goes on to make grand musical landscapes with sweeping and drastic changes, occasionally with a text, however superfluous the text frequently is. My favorite example is “Xanadu”. Here’s a piece with at least five different ideas that are cobbled together in a form somewhere between a rondo and a palindrome but not quite either. Cribbing and trimming Coleridge we get a giant prog-rock phantasm that seemed to get its text as an afterthought. Where the other brand of instrumental rock errs on the side of mind-numbing repetition this brand errs in the direction of jumping to the next idea or mood simply for the sake of pulling off a dramatic change. If “Xanadu” were stripped down to the introduction and the sections where Geddy Lee sings the song would be fairly tight, if not wholly enjoyable. As it stands we’re taken through so many storms and eyes-of-the-storm you’d think the storm was a compound eye. Even the awkward metaphor explains the musical shortcoming I’m talking about.
It’s not that musicians in this category never get it right. “YYZ”, for instance, is largely free of the amorphous crashing of the Thunderstorm. Genesis and Peter Gabriel, for the most part, figured out how to strip down their music so that it had a form that made at least some sense; of course they didn’t do it when they were all working together. Other bands like Rush, and particularly Yes, have taken longer to boil their songs down to whatever their essence might be.
Naturally the joy of playing music should always be there when you write music. You don’t write music you don’t want to play. You don’t want to simply pander to some audience, either. But there are limits. The joy of playing should never be pursued without thinking about the joy of listening. You’re not the only one who should be having fun with the music you play. If there’s a problem with Andrew York and John Paul Jone’s Zooma alike, as with progressive rock, it’s that the musicians have not found that happy marriage of musical technique and musical form. The musicians who do and then go beyond that to express something in a unique way (not to say original) go on to make musical history, whatever the musical style may be. Those don’t may become footnotes in music history but they rarely get an honorable mention. The rest have the harsher but finally kinder fate, they get forgotten.
Monday, May 22, 2006
Samuel Jones' Tuba Concerto
You probably would only have heard this piece if you wre in the Seattle area but this is a fun piece. I was sold pretty much from seeing the title mentioned in a local newspaper. (if you're Chris DeLaurenti it was your listing).
I've found the essays but haven't carved out time to put them on the blog yet. When I do you can expect a few essays with titles like.
Soft rock, soft cock
penis music
Clam blue oceans and thunderstorms
I had some essay floating around about counterpoint in the music of Stevie Wonder but I've also got essays I've rediscovered about the history of Western music, really fast and loose summaries of how musical trends developed in Western music. Keep in mind this is a rambling and VERY broad summary in the works.
The teaser for "Soft Rock, Soft Cock" is that if you've read a few interviews with Billy Joel from about ten or fifteen years ago you'll have some sense of what the focus is going to be. a
I've found the essays but haven't carved out time to put them on the blog yet. When I do you can expect a few essays with titles like.
Soft rock, soft cock
penis music
Clam blue oceans and thunderstorms
I had some essay floating around about counterpoint in the music of Stevie Wonder but I've also got essays I've rediscovered about the history of Western music, really fast and loose summaries of how musical trends developed in Western music. Keep in mind this is a rambling and VERY broad summary in the works.
The teaser for "Soft Rock, Soft Cock" is that if you've read a few interviews with Billy Joel from about ten or fifteen years ago you'll have some sense of what the focus is going to be. a
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