Last Sunday I had one of the great musical afternoons—one of the great afternoons, period—of my life, listening, at Chicago’s Symphony Center (across from the Art Institute), to pianist Andras Schiff play Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II, in its entirety (and entirely from memory), a performance that lasted nearly three hours and could’ve kept going, as far as I was concerned, for three days.
Johann Sebastian Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier (1722 [Book I], 1742 [Book II])
Book II, Prelude and Fugue No. 16 in G minor, BMV 885
Sheng Cai (piano), live, Boston, 2010
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Books I and II, Sviatoslav Richter (piano), recording, 1970s
(For better sound quality on this and other YouTube clips, go to the “Settings” icon [lower right] and select the highest available [here 1080p].)
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
If there is anyone who owes everything to Bach, it is God. Without Bach, God would be a third-rate character.
Elliott Carter, composer, December 11, 1908-November 5, 2012
He was an artist of plenitude. His music is so full of sonic detail it often seems about to burst. What if we gave our daily lives, moment by moment, the sort of full-force attention his music demands—and rewards?
Cello Concerto (2001), dress rehearsal, 2008, New York
Julliard Orchestra (James Levine, cond.) with Dane Johansen, cello
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
As a young man, I harbored the populist idea of writing for the public. I learned that the public didn’t care. So I decided to write for myself. Since then, people have gotten interested.
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I just can’t bring myself to do something that someone else has done before. Each piece is a kind of crisis in my life.
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I like to sound spontaneous and fresh, but my first sketches often sound mechanical. I have to write them over until they sound spontaneous.
I have loved Elliott Carter’s music for many years. Last month, I recorded his cello concerto, and I was speaking to him only last Saturday. For me, he was the most important American composer of his time. His music was not complicated, but it was complex. I think its outstanding quality was that it always seemed to be in good humour. If Haydn had lived in the 21st century, he would have probably have composed like this.
When you get to be 103, modernism is a very wide concept. In some aspects he was ahead of his times, but then some of his music doesn’t sound like music of the future – but it is unmistakable and I simply love it. The problem with listening to music today is that there’s so much of it everywhere. We’ve got used to hearing music without actually listening to it. Carter’s is to be listened to.
I met him on an incredibly hot day in New York last summer. He was affable and kind, and was using a giant magnifying glass to look at a score. When I asked if I could play a passage of his cello concerto, he said: “Of course, but I don’t hear so well.” He lasted about seven seconds before he stopped me with incredibly detailed observations about my playing. He told me things about the work I’d never heard before, saying he’d wanted to make use of the cello’s incredible expressive possibilities. “I wanted it to sing,” he said.
In the fourth movement, he wanted my playing to be more expressive, which is something I’m rarely told. Usually people tell me to calm down! He composed every day, too. Even on that day, when it was over 40 degrees [Celsius], he’d got up that morning to write.
Conlon’s music has such an outrageous, original character that it is literally shocking. It confronts you. Like Emerson said of Thoreau, ‘We have a new proposition.’
This music is the greatest discovery since Webern and Ives . . . something great and important for all music history! His music is so utterly original, enjoyable, perfectly constructed but at the same time emotional . . . for me it’s the best of any composer living today.
Conlon Nancarrow, an expatriate American composer whose frustrations with the limitations of live performance technique led him to compose almost exclusively for mechanical player pianos, and who was widely regarded as one of the few truly visionary composers of the century, died on Sunday at his home in Mexico City. He was 84.
Mr. Nancarrow, who was a jazz trumpeter before he turned his attention to formal composition, was fascinated throughout his life by the complex relationships that resulted when competing rhythms were set against each other. His best-known works, the more than 40 Studies for Player Piano, dazzle the ear with torrential figuration, thick counterpoint, colliding meters and melodies that draw on everything from blues and Spanish music to the spiky abstractions of free atonality.
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Mr. Nancarrow was born in Texarkana, Ark., on Oct. 27, 1912, and undertook his musical studies at the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music from 1929 to 1932. He later studied privately in Boston with Nicolas Slonimsky, Walter Piston and Roger Sessions. In 1936, he went to Spain to fight against Franco with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and upon his return to the United States, in 1939, he became involved in the growing new music scene in New York, both as a composer and as a critic for the magazine Modern Music.
His stay in New York was brief, however. In 1940, when the United States Government refused to renew his passport because of his outspoken Socialist views, he moved to Mexico City. He became a Mexican citizen in 1956. Until 1981, when he attended a performance of his music in San Francisco, he had returned to the United States only once, in 1947, to obtain a machine for cutting his own piano rolls, the long paper strips that drive player pianos.
Mr. Nancarrow’s interest in mechanical pianos can be traced to the mid-1930’s, when he found pianists unable to play works like the Toccata for Violin and Piano and the Prelude and Blues (both composed in 1935) at the speeds or with the clarity that he demanded. Soon after his arrival in Mexico City, he bought two Ampico player pianos, which he modified by covering their hammers with leather and steel straps in order to make their attacks sharper.
He also began composing directly onto piano rolls, and for about four decades he composed exclusively this way. But with the renewed interest in his music that began in the 1970’s and picked up speed in the 1980’s, he became acquainted with virtuosic young players like Ms. [Ursula] Oppens and Mr. [Yvar] Mikhashoff, and pioneering new music ensembles like the Arditti Quartet, in England. Reconsidering his attitude toward live music-making, he began accepting commissions for piano, chamber and orchestral works, and produced a series of vivid scores that includes the rhythmically vital and texturally vivid ”Piece No. 2 for Small Orchestra,” the ”Three Canons for Ursula” and the String Quartet No. 3.
Here’s another take on a piece we listened to the other day.
Alfred Schnittke (1934-98), Concerto Grosso No. 1 (excerpt); A Far Cry with guests Nelson Lee (violin), Meg Freivogel (violin), and Andrus Masden (harpsichord, prepared piano); live, Boston, 2009
Elliott Carter (December 11, 1908-), Esprit Rude/Esprit Doux (1985); Claire Chase (flute),* Joshua Rubin (clarinet), International Contemporary Ensemble; live, Brazil (Sao Paulo), 2012
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lagniappe
musical thoughts
The “opportunity cost” of listening to something you already know, to borrow from the dreary world of economics, is that you’re forgoing an opportunity to discover something new.
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found words
Last night, after a concert at the University of Chicago’s Mandel Hall (Takacs Quartet), I stopped at Harold’s Chicken Shack on 53rd Street, as much for old times’ sake as anything else (Harold got me through law school), and found this at the bottom of the receipt:
Kaija Saariaho, Fall (1991, from the ballet Maa); Nuiko Wadden (harp), Ryan Streber (electronics); Mount Holyoke College (South Hadley, Mass.), 2010
One of the joys of having grown children is going out with them to hear live music, as I did the other night, meeting my older son Alex after work at a Chicago art gallery (Corbett vs. Dempsey) for a solo performance by this harpist.
