Can atonal music express true sorrow?

It may surprise some of you to read this question in 2013, but there it is. A somewhat well-known composer’s statement (which I am not sure has been released to a general audience) that includes a claim that atonal music cannot express true joy or true sorrow has started to go around the internet. I may address the question of whether atonal music can express joy in a later post, but I don’t think it’s difficult to answer the question of whether it can express sorrow. Just listen to this great recording of Itzhak Perlman and the Boston Symphony Orchestra playing Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto, which is dedicated “To the Memory of an Angel,” the deceased daughter of his friends, Walter and Alma Gropius (née Schindler, and subsequently married to Gustav Mahler):

Berg Violin Concerto

OK, sure, it flirts with tonality and comes to a cadence of a kind at the very end, but do you really think the atonal sections do not express real emotion – pain, anger, sorrow, doubt, and finally a kind of acceptance or resignation?

Only one counter-example was really needed to disprove the claim that atonal music cannot express real sorrow, but if you’re not satisfied that the Berg Violin Concerto is either sufficiently expressive or sufficiently atonal (whatever that would mean, considering that the Second Vienna School composers rejected the term in favor of “pantonal,” considering the word “atonal” nilistic or/and nonsensical in implying that there can be music with no relationships between the tones), how about the Elegy for JFK, from Stravinsky’s 12-tone period?

Elegy for JFK

Does the Elegy express anguish the way a crying piece in the romantic style would? No. Actually, the music of Berg and Schoenberg is much closer in style to late romantic music than this work is. I guess it’s really up to you whether you think the Elegy expresses true sorrow, but I think it does. I find that it has a quality of very delicate and tenuous monumentality. That sounds like a contradiction, and to some degree, it is: The Elegy is not a loud wailing but a quiet, sometimes silent, questioning, doubtful, subdued, sad, and thoughtful piece, as befitting a moment when a country was reeling and trying to make sense out of something that seemed senseless and shook their faith in the solidity of the world. Yet the work also is slow, as funeral dirges traditionally are, and very carefully articulated by the vocalist and the three clarinetists. So the short little piece is appropriately contradictory and complex in its deceptively simple ABCDA form, which features a very clear repetition of the first line of text and music at the end. But I do think one of the emotions it expresses, in a subdued, possibly somewhat numb way, is real sorrow.

I think it would be very easy for a group of people to come up with a large number of other atonal works that express real sorrow, so I find it shocking that a highly accomplished and intellectual musician would make this kind of seemingly polemical statement.

How one chooses to compose can be a very personal thing. I certainly have no argument with people who compose tonally, atonally, or both tonally and atonally. But I certainly don’t see where anyone is doing a service to music or to the public by making tendentious statements about the expressive power of atonality. If it doesn’t work for you or for your audiences, don’t use it. There’s no need to defend your choice if you feel comfortable with it, but if you feel impelled to defend yourself anyway, give real, personal reasons, not global claims that are demonstrably false.

Kabuki

Gentle readers: I am aware that it has been a long time since my last post. Life has intervened. But I have not stopped listening to and thinking about music and will endeavor to catch up, now that my life is not quite as complicated.

At the end of March and beginning of April, I managed to fit in a brief but wonderful trip to Tokyo for my brother’s wedding, a beautiful traditional Shinto wedding held in the lovely Asakusa Shrine very close to the famous Sensōji Temple. The wedding was accompanied at times by great, slow, sometimes dissonant music on the shō (an ancient instrument which can be thought of as a kind of blown reed organ) and also involved a big, beautiful, very resonant taiko (the one that’s used in gagaku and shown in this article is similar in size and decoration to the one at the shrine). On this website, you can get just a bit of a basic idea of what a Shinto wedding at that shrine looks like.

My girlfriend, Maggie – a singer of European-style opera – and I made sure also to go to kabuki while we were in Tokyo. A famous epic was playing at the Shimbashi Embujo Theatre in Ginza: Kanadehon Chūshingura (“The Treasury of Loyal Retainers”), also known as the tale of the 47 Ronin. In the early showing, which started at 11 AM and let out around 3:45 PM, the earlier portions of the epic were played. We saw the late showing, which started at 4:30 and lasted until 8:50. The last 30 minutes of the show constituted the final battle that concluded the story.

Maggie rented a set of headphones that played an English translation of some of the text while we watched the show – a wise investment, as there were many things I would not have understood had she not explained them to me during the intermissions.  The theatre’s description of the play as a whole is as follows:

“On March 14, 1701, for reasons unknown, Asano Takuminokami, a young samurai lord, attacked Kira Kozukenosuke, a high shogunal official, during a ceremony at the shogun’s palace. The shogun was furious and Asano was forced to commit ritual suicide that very day and his domain confiscated. On December 15, 1702, forty-seven of Asano’s retainers avenged his death by attacking and killing Kira and immediately became heroes showing that even after a century of peace, the samurai value of loyalty was not yet dead.”

Of course, there are many complex sub-plots, just as there are in any other epic (think of the Odyssey or the Ramayana, for example).

The experience of witnessing an epic kabuki performance was captivating and fascinating. The actors do not sing most of the time, though that is one of the skills they need and use when appropriate. Instead, what they do is generally much more similar to what Arnold Schoenberg called Sprechstimme, to the point that Maggie and I seriously wonder whether Schoenberg had heard and been influenced by a performance or recording of kabuki. The actors’ voices were supremely expressive, ranging from screams and shrieks to growls, with words often elongated and spoken with exaggerated highs and lows. Singing was heard quite a bit during the Seventh Act (we witnessed Acts 5 and 6, then Act 7, and then Act 11, with two intermissions in between); however, the singer was not one of the actors, but one of the musicians in the orchestra. We saw only some of the musicians sometimes, but their presence was greatly felt. Musical instruments were very important for the emotional character of the play and also to keep a sense of dramatic unity as, for example, a certain set of pitches was used in a variety of different ways on the shamisen (there were two shamisen-players in the orchestra) or the flute, or a melody heard earlier in an act or scene was returned to at its conclusion. The woodblock player kept pace and also varied between single strokes and rolls for dramatic effect.

I wish I could show you scenes from the show we saw. The final scene – a raid in the winter – was particularly beautiful, like a classic Japanese print or woodblock painting come to life, and every time the audience saw a new set, we burst out into applause. I have yet to find any clips of Kanadehon Chūshingura that are long enough to give you much sense of what the drama is like (no doubt in part because I cannot read Kanji [Japanese in Chinese characters], Hiragana or Katakana [the two syllabaries commonly used for Japanese]), but this brief introduction to kabuki is useful in introducing various basic concepts and sounds to you, and this segment about the story of the 47 Ronin and its yearly recreation and celebration at the Sengaku-ji Temple, where the remains of the actual 47 ronin are buried, may help the story come alive to you.

There was great action in the drama we witnessed – especially though not only during the final scene. But by no means is kabuki always mainly about the spectacle, any more than European opera is. For example, a long scene in Act 6 of the show we saw featured a dialogue between Kanpei, his wife, and his mother-in-law, during which not much action was happening but what did happen was extremely important. If you did not understand the words used in the dialogue, however, you were lost, though you could hear that the speech was expressive. And you saw that he eventually committed seppuku – ritual suicide – but you didn’t know why.

Samuel Barber

At its best, I think Samuel Barber’s neo-romantic style was very successful. Lately, in these changeable times of spring, one of my favorite woodwind quintets other than the Schoenberg (which I consider one of that master’s greatest works) and the Hindemith Kleine Kammermusik has been in my head. Barber’s Summer Music is a challenging work to play not only because it has difficult fast passage-work and tricky rhythmic and articulation ensemble issues, but also because it has to feel like summer. The basic character, as noted by the composer in the score, is indolent, and you cannot sound indolent if you are audibly worrying about your notes. I therefore really like this recorded performance by Berlin Counterpoint, who cover the basics, like playing very much in tune with each other, and also really get across the feeling of a lazy, hot summer’s day. By taking some slow tempi, they accentuate the lyrical character of the piece, and then that sets up a greater contrast with the faster sections that include more staccato and accented playing.

Another favorite Barber work of mine – or rather, part of one – is the second movement of his Piano Concerto, marked “Canzone: Moderato.” This is another example of Barber at his lyrical and melodic best, but if anything, it is even more colorful than the Summer Music. This is a much more serious movement – an elegy, as Barber apparently subtitled it in his arrangement for flute and piano (more about that in a minute) – and definitely much more melancholic and mournful than indolent. But above all, like many of the most touching works for instruments, it is a genuine instrumental song – in the sense of singing (or indeed, the word canzone, which is Italian for “song”), not the generic sense in which any piece of jazz or popular music is called a song – with expressive big rising intervals that are ultimately unable to resist the downward motion of finality. I don’t know anything about the career of pianist Anny Hwang, and I’m not too familiar with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra, but I love the feeling they put into this performance of the movement.

We flutists are lucky that Barber wrote a beautiful arrangement of this movement for flute and piano. A truly appropriate performance of the Canzone for flute and piano needs to suggest some of the very vivid orchestral colors absent from the comparatively sparse scoring of the arrangement, while maintaining the expression of the large intervals and the dissonant, crying chromatic harmonies. A particular technical challenge for flutists is to make sure the numerous C-sharps in this C# minor movement are low enough, and many fail to achieve this. But an interpretation by Jennifer Stinson on flute and Malcom Martineau on piano succeeds where many others fall short.

One thing that’s interesting to me is that the Canzone, though written in 1961, is not too distantly related to the coloristic French style of several decades earlier. It’s neo-romantic music that sounds best when played with phantasy, as Barber might have spelled it.

On My Father

I write you today on – or depending on where you are, slightly after – the first anniversary of the death of my father, the artist, Gabriel Laderman, who currently has two paintings (far right in this shot) up in a group show at the Schroeder, Romero & Shredder Gallery on 531 W. 21 St. in New York, NY.

My parents were both great music lovers and both were crucial to my musical development. When I was a child, classical music was almost always on in my parents’ Upper West Side apartment and in the car, when my father still had one. The only time that wasn’t true was when my brother was listening to rock on the stereo or we were watching TV. Or sometimes when we were having dinner. Or when we had classical music on the record player. Moreover, my father always had classical music on the radio in his studio. WNCN and WQXR were his favorite stations. When we took trips in the car, my father would play a game with me, whereby we would guess who wrote a piece we turned on in the middle. This was a good educational exercise for me, but my father stopped playing when I got better at it than he was. It did take me a while to get that good, though.

My father had several years of musical education when he was a child. His mother, who I called “Baba,” Ukrainian for “Grandma,” had wanted him to be a musician. He practiced the cello for years, and then the oboe, but never got good. He even was thrown out of the chorus my mother conducted at Ithaca College while he was going for his Master of Fine Arts in painting at Cornell, because he couldn’t sing on pitch. But though the paintbrush was the right tool for a man of his talents, he certainly could hear and understand music to a very high degree.

By the time I was four, I already had a favorite recording, of the complete Four Seasons, featuring Salvatore Accardo as the violin soloist, I believe with I Solisti Veneti. I can’t find that recording online, and I no longer have a working turntable to play the LP and have given the record away to a violinist friend, but this 1987 recording of the slow movement of “Winter” with I Solisti Delle Settimane Musicali di Napoli stands up very well.

My parents were also early fans of modernist music. They went to numerous premières at the American Composers Alliance in the 1950s and were big fans of Béla Bartók, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Edgard Varèse, and Stefan Wolpe, with whom my mother studied counterpoint. As a young child, I disliked even fairly mildly dissonant music, but my father encouraged me to give it a chance. Piano was my first instrument, and I enjoyed playing through Bartók’s “For Children,” but it took longer for me to enjoy a work like this (for best effect, turn up your speakers), which my father loved so much.

My father also liked 1920s jazz very much, especially Louis Armstrong, and took a break from listening to classical music around the 4th of July, when WKCR devotes several days exclusively to recordings by the great trumpeter, whom my father considered one of the greatest of all musicians. He particularly loved the Hot Five and Hot Seven. Listen to Potato Head Blues and understand why.

My father was open to non-Western classical musics, too. My parents bought just about every world music record they could get their hands on through the 1970s or so. And my father’s encounter with non-Western music went far beyond just listening to records. I will never forget the day he took me with him to see kabuki in Tokyo. I was 10 and had not yet sat through a European opera, but I found kabuki fascinating and beautiful. My father also loved wayang orang in Solo, Indonesia, where actors play scenes from the Mahabharata in gesture and dance, with the accompaniment of a gamelan, and Beijing opera, which we experienced together in various places including Beijing.

Another way that my father was important was that he believed in me as a musician and a person. He was delighted at the musical directions I took (except for my performance of bop and post-bop jazz), the way I interpret, and the technical level I have achieved, and considered me the greatest “unknown” flutist in the world. He pushed me to perform more, record more, and promote myself more, not just because I was his son, but because he knew I had important statements to make about music. I hope to honor him and his memory by continuing to do things I consider artistically right, good, and true, just as he did in his art.