Music Notes

Opus 7: The Once and Future Arvo Pärt, Part II

May 18, 2013 by 4dancers

by Allan Greene

Part’s works and his crises

Arvo Pärt (pronounced “pair-t”), the contemporary classical composer, insists, as recorded in Arvo Pärt in Conversation (Enzo Restagno, et al., 2010), that in contrast to whatever anybody else takes away from his highly spiritual compositions, he is driven by technical goals; and that the “system” that he devised after 1976, which he calls Tintinnabuli, is meant to prove that “1+1=1”, that in the End is the Beginning. In other words, Happiness is a Cosmic Blanket.

His route to happiness took him through his own extended breakdown, between 1968 and 1976, a span during which he had largely stopped composing. He had already changed direction twice in his short career.

Born in 1935 into an independent Estonia at the fringes of Western culture, he grew up as the Soviets took effective control during the war and then complete control afterward. The Estonian musical community had been pretty much ignored by the powerful and reactionary Composers Union in Moscow. Pärt, however, was a seeker, not an entertainer, and when visiting artists performed and brought recordings and scores of what was happening in the West (Boulez, Stockhausen, Henze, Dallapicola, Berio, and above all Webern), he found the path he was seeking. His early popular success (1960) with a student composition, Nekrolog, which was one of the first twelve-tone pieces written inside the Soviet Union, drew “relentless criticism from elevated cultural circles” (Restagno, p. 14) because it allowed a corrupt Western aesthetic to penetrate the Iron Curtain. A few years later he was trying heterogeneous pieces (Collage on B-A-C-H, 1964) which he described as:

A sort of transplantation: if you have the feeling you don’t have a skin of your own,you try to take strips from skin all around you and apply them to yourself. In time these strips change, and turn into a new skin. I didn’t know where this experiment with the Collages would lead me, but in any case I had the impression I was carrying a living organism in my hands, a living substance, such as I had yet not found in twelve-tone music… But one cannot go on forever with the method transplantation. (Restagno, 17)

He was in a record store (remember those places?) and overheard a short Gregorian chant, just a few seconds of it, as he recalls (ibid., 18).

In it I discovered a world that I didn’t know, a world without harmony, without meter, without timbre, without instrumentation, without anything. At this moment it became clear to me which direction I had to follow, and a long journey began in my unconscious mind. (ibid., 18)

Pärt continued to experiment in the mid-Sixties with works juxtaposing radically different styles, like his Second Symphony (1966), which after the most frightening clashes of sound masses introduces a note-for-note symphonic quotation from Tchaikovsky twice in the final movement.

He gave up on twelve-tone, serial, musique concrète, even Webern-like miniatures, after that, having decided that mid-Twentieth Century New Music was a carrier of “the germ of conflict”. The conflicts had lost their power and meaning for him.

One could say I had come to terms with myself and with God – and in so doing, all personal demands on the world receded into the background. (ibid., 22)

I have come to recognize that it not my duty to struggle with the world, nor to condemn this or that, but first and foremost to know myself, since every conflict begins in ourselves. (ibid.)

And so I set off in search of new sounds. In this way, the path itself becomes a source of inspiration. The path no longer runs outwards from us, but inwards, to the core from which everything springs. That is what all my actions have come to mean: building and not destroying. (ibid.)

In 1968 he composed a Credo (Summa), a work for piano, orchestra and chorus with Latin texts from the Gospels. The Composers Union caught up with him, and soon he was receiving coded threats that investigations were going on at the highest level. This combination of twelve-tone language and Jesus’ suffering proved too provocative for the authorities.

After this I was interrogated several times, and the interrogators repeated the same question over and over again: “What political aim are you pursuing in this work?” (ibid.)

His wife Nora added, “And they added, ‘And do not forget that this work must never again be performed, and you must not offer it to anyone else’”. (ibid.)

Understandably, the confluence of all these doubts and pressures led to his choice to cease composing. This was his nervous breakdown moment, when nothing which had worked for him in the past worked now. [Read more…]

Opus 7: The Once and Future Arvo Pärt, Part I

May 17, 2013 by 4dancers

by Allan Greene

Let me get this out right up front: if you go for Arvo Pärt, you’ll love the late works of Franz Liszt.

I’ve played and loved the late Liszt since I was kid. It was in the late Sixties on a trip into Manhattan to the old Schirmer’s that I found a newly published Schirmer number called The Late Liszt. I was thirteen or fourteen and I had been composing atonal music for a few years; but as a piano student, Liszt, the Romantic, was my god. After going to considerable trouble to master his Liebestraum No. 3, I was taken by surprise that late in his life Liszt had composed these spare, non-bravura morceaux. That some were nearly atonal, un-moored from traditional harmony, made me even gladder.

All these years I’ve accompanied dance I’ve used pieces from that collection in classes. I have never, with one unhappy exception (Sir Frederick Ashton’s Mayerling), seen choreography to this music. This volume held, and holds, such meaning for me, its contents might almost be my autobiography. I’ve been troubled me all these years that I haven’t seen great dances to this profound music.

And then, while researching a column on Arvo Pärt, who is wildly popular with choreographers, it hit me.

Late Liszt is late Pärt. I mean, really.

Do they have a spooky, supernatural, counter-intuitive relationship, filled with seemingly strange coincidences? Let’s see. Liszt was Hungarian, Pärt is Estonian. Their native tongues are both members of the the Finno-Ugric language group. Both had an affinity for the avant-garde from the very beginning. Both suffered mid-career life changes that sent them into a quasi-religious bout of self-examination.

Except for the “dark night of the soul” that each went through, the coincidences don’t prove much. Liszt was a very public figure who set the People Magazine standard for celebrity and scandale in his day; Pärt is a private person, thrust into the public eye by his success translating his privacy into music. He has a stable home-life and a happy family.

But it is extraordinarily interesting to me these two composers more than a century removed from one another cross paths at a very particular point in their artistic journeys, after having gone through depression and soul-searching. The fact that Pärt has become so popular among choreographers and Liszt is not tells me something is wrong.

I’m going to right that wrong.

Initially, I’d like to suggest that Pärt may have led us to the edge of an age of Radical Diatonicism, much as Liszt blazed a path to radical chromaticism 150 years ago.

Diatonic versus Chromatic

It is a bit easier to follow my thesis if we understand the historic relationship between the diatonic (white-key) scale and the chromatic (all the keys on the piano) scale.

The diatonic scale held absolute power in Western music at least as far back as the 12^th Century, when the earliest surviving notated music, that of the monk Perotin, was composed. Music was organized around seven tones, what we today call A, B, C, D, E, F and G. Music was characterized based on which of those seven tones dominated the melody. Depending on which tone it was, the music had a certain sound, called a mode (modus). What we today call a major scale was called the Lydian Mode. What we today call the minor scale (or natural minor scale) was called the Hypodorian (or Aeolian) Mode. There were eight modes, the most dissonant being the Phrygian and Hypophrygian or Lochrian.

[Read more…]

Opus 4, No. 1: The White Swan And A Jungian-style Of Musical Analysis

September 18, 2012 by Ashley David

by Allan Greene

Cue the strings. Prepare yourself for something big. I’ve got a lot of explaining to do.

Opus 4 is going to be big project. It’s going to synthesize several streams of thought that I’ve been carrying around with me for a while, one going back 36 years to when I was a senior at Carleton College. I’ve been intending to do something with these ideas for a few years, since George de la Peña, who was Artistic Director of the Joffrey Ballet School at the time, suggested I give a talk to the faculty and students on music and dance.

In order to get paid for such a talk, George had me submit a proposal to the school’s executive director. Unfortunately, George and the executive director parted ways before my proposal was ever processed. I had proposed doing five lecture/demonstrations on various topics, including the use both Stravinsky and Balanchine made of French Baroque poetry in Apollo, and the how the Ivanov/Legat choreography of the White Swan Pas de Deux in Swan Lake and Tchaikovsky’s music for it are interlaced to create a masterpiece. Long story short, no money, no revelations.

When the editor of this blog, Catherine, asked me to write about music and dance, and gave me carte blanche to write what was on my mind, the first thing that popped into my head was that long-delayed White Swan project. I had intended originally to recruit two dancers to demonstrate various parts of the dance while I played at the piano and did my Leonard Bernstein routine. In cyberspace, however, my audio-visual aids will be a little different. But it will get to the same place.

The more I thought about how to do this, the more I realized that my project rested on assumptions that, to be charitable, not everybody agrees with nor understands. [Read more…]

Opus 2: Why Can’t We All Get Along? (Dancer’s and Musician’s Edition)

July 13, 2012 by Allan Greene

by Allan Greene

I was thinking of starting this series by getting a few things off my chest that have been weighing me down for a while. Not a list of grievances (I can wait ’til Festivus for that), but instead a few lectures that I was going to give at an unnamed professional training program which, as happens, got lost in an administrative power play. I have decided that these would be no match for summer’s long days and their journey into, uh, serious refreshments, so I came up with something else.

Conductors. Tempi. The irrational fraction expressed by dividing the musician’s meter and the dancer’s meter.

Let me start with a story the late conductor/rehearsal pianist Harry Fuchs told me. Harry was working at the New York City Opera in the mid-seventies when they were producing Sarah Caldwell’s celebrated production of The Barber of Seville. As a conductor, Harry was curious as to how Ms. Caldwell would be beating time in the finale of the overture, at the point at which the tempo accelerates suddenly and concludes the piece in a breathless finish.

Now, this is the principle: the faster the musical pulse, the fewer beats the conductor can make per measure. In very slow music a conductor may indicate eight separate beats in a measure that is written in 4/4, four quarter notes to the bar. For a more moderate tempo (think “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”), a four beat pattern is best. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” or most Sousa marches would be conducted two beats to the bar, as are most of the famous Rodgers & Hammerstein songs, like “Getting to Know You”, “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” and “Surrey with the Fringe on Top”. [Read more…]

Music Notes: Opus 1

June 22, 2012 by 4dancers

by Allan Greene

The first thing is, something always has to be moved. The piano, the seat, where to put the tea to keep from knocking it over, do I need to see this teacher’s feet or can I rely on her cadence… A quick look around the studio to see if there are any interesting visitors, if any regulars are missing. Once I know who my audience is, I can think about how to break the aural dryness. Often the choice is like a steakhouse menu, steak or non-steak, or, in this case, Chopin or non-Chopin. This presupposes, of course, that the teacher doesn’t decide to lead off with foot warm-ups or something. I almost always react to avant-pliés non-Classically. If a teacher wants to start a class Pawn-to-Queen’s-Knight-4, I feel it’s my duty to let the students know they’re no longer in Kansas. But it’s just going to be pliés, and pliés music must be a satin blanket that can never crease. Can the students handle drama, or will it have to be Bel Canto? Let’s try drama. Can they handle humor, or surprise? If they’re disciplined enough, I can really have fun with them. Let’s save that for the second side, after I’ve relaxed them. Okay, it’ll be a Chopin nocturne, no, a Liszt Consolation, no the Goldberg Variations aria, no, we’re about to begin, CHOOSE! “Préparation…” Hands on keys, oh, I’m playing D-flat arpeggios, Opus 9 No.1, D-flat Consolation, Berceuse, need a melody: an E-flat! It’s a V9 chord in G-flat major, and yes! the Schubert G-flat Impromptu, and we’re off! Second side, can we integrate the Well-Tempered Clavier into this? It should work.

I can’t speak for any other dance accompanist, so don’t draw any conclusions. But the above is precisely the way I think from the moment I walk into the dance studio through to the end of the class. It’s a 90-minute interior monologue interrupted by commands to start and stop, repeat, change the tempo, change the music, play more, play less. I have to make the whole thing sound improvised, yet intentional. It’s my job to reinforce whatever the teacher is teaching that day, never step on his message. Ninety-nine percent of the time I don’t want to draw attention to myself, even if the effect I choose is a Lisztian ocean of sound. Sometimes my choice doesn’t come off, sometimes I switch in mid-combination, or even in mid-phrase. But almost always, the result, after ninety minutes, is an artistic workout, the satisfaction of structural completeness, and the heightened sensitivity that serves as the emotional foundation for dance artistry. Or so I like to think.

Consider this column as my préparation for my future commentary on the relationship between dance and music. Some of my pieces will unlock the magic of great ballet choreography, looking at the symbiosis between the steps and the music. (Shall we tackle Swan Lake?) Some will cover my experiences working with the famous and the not-so-famous. (Interested in what it was like working with Agnes de Mille after her stroke?) We will undoubtedly get into the gnarly but indispensable subject of synesthesia, the study of how some peoples’ brains vividly cross-process sensory information. (I have arrived at the conviction that the truly great artists were all wired this way to varying degrees.) We might mix in a music lesson here and there. (Ever wonder what the significance is of the difference between 4/4 and 2/4?)

I can’t wait to share with you a few of those thoughts that rattle around in my mind, like dancers awaiting the curtain’s opening, for that Pavlovian word, “And…”

BIO: Allan Greene has been a dancers’ musician for nearly forty years. He is a composer, pianist, teacher, conductor, music director, father to Oliver, 9, and Ravi, 6, and husband to Juliana Boehm. He has also been an architect, an editor, a writer and a boiler mechanic. He lives and works in New York City. His ballet class music can be found on www.BalletClassTunes.com.

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