Interesting reading this morning (July 19) on line and in the papers.  Terry Teachout’s Sightings column in the Wall Street Journal is a response to this article in the Guardian, bemoaning the death of likable music at the hands of 20th century composers. The Guardian article is a broad-brush dismissal of 20th century music, and as with many such dismissals, it weakens its argument by overstating its case.

Writes Joe Queenan: “I was incredibly proud of myself for giving this music a try, even though the Stockhausen sounded like a cat running up and down the piano, and the Penderecki was that reliable old post-Schoenberg standby: belligerent bees buzzing in the basement…It is not the composers’ fault that they wrote uncompromising music that was a direct response to the violence and stupidity of the 20th century; but it is not my fault that I would rather listen to Bach.”

I would rather listen to Bach, too, but hanging the harshness of much of modern music on 20th century violence and stupidity is specious; our violent and stupid human natures have rendered every century equally distasteful, the 20th being distinguished only by our ability to cause havoc on grand scales. Indeed some 20th century music is loathsome. But to take Mr. Queenan’s viewpoint to the logical extreme, everything written after 1899 is hideous, and Mr. Teachout notes that this means Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklarte Nacht, written in 1899, is among the last likable music ever penned.

That opens an interesting door for further comment. Schoenberg is, for many, the poster boy of ugly music, and I admit I dislike much of it. But Verklarte Nacht! Goose bumps all the way; it’s a haunting, magnificent string sextet. Rolling one’s eyes at the later music of Schoenberg is as limiting as admiring Piet Mondrian’s Mill in Sunlight while refusing to explore the minimalist nature of his later paintings. That I find great beauty in those later paintings suggests there is beauty in 20th century music I don’t yet appreciate. More importantly, to dismiss these works is to ignore the reason behind the evolution of artists like Schoenberg and Mondrian from “accessible” to “challenging” (for lack of better adjectives) explorations of basic forms in sound and color.

This is not to extol all modern composers just because their music is tonally challenging — a knee jerk reaction of “erudite” concertgoers Queenan correctly despises. There is much chaff lately. But in the vast body of Baroque music, there is consummate art…and much trite dabbling with the circle of fifths. Or, to return to the 20th century, in the genre of ragtime there are masterpieces, but also countless rags that are no good at all (consider the difference between the rags of Scott Joplin and those of Charles L. Johnson, a popular but vastly inferior ragtime composer).   And undoubtedly, for some ears, the music of Penderecki and others may be forever ugly and gloomy.  Perhaps that’s because it is; but such a mood is hardly unique to contemporary composers, any more than one has to look to the 20th century to find a profession of faith as luminous and transcendent as the Durufle Requiem.

Appreciation of music remains, of course, subjective.  Teachout sniffs at minimalism, but I listen to Steve Reich’s Music for a Large Ensemble and Octet not to be a wannabee connoisseur, but because they are drop-dead gorgeous pieces.  Appreciation of avant garde music depends on careful programming by performance organizations and wise decisions by music educators.  Queenan describes a group of teenagers forced to sit through Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia as ready to “garrotte” their teacher.  I would have been too, at that age, taken to hear that piece.  And paired with Brahms 4?  Not good.

In the end, though, modern rejectionists are missing much.  I remember sitting with a friend at age 15 and snickering all the way through our first exposure to Messiaen.  Reading Queenan’s piece, I felt like I was sitting with him all over again.  Time to grow up, Joe.

Sometime around 1713, while Bach was working in Weimar, he composed a set of 46 organ chorales collectively called the Orgelbüchlein (”Little Organ Book”).   Bach’s original plan called for 164, but the ones that did get written make a set of supremely beautiful miniatures that are a staple of the organ repertoire.  I’m working on a set of realizations of these, and I have set up an index page for the growing collection of MP3s.

Today I uploaded a particularly nice one: Puer Natus in Bethlehem, BWV 603.  More will follow in the near future.

I am truly delighted to see the reopening of the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP), a repository of 17,000 (and growing) public domain sheet music scores served via the MediaWiki software (the platform that powers Wikipedia). Last October, IMSLP shut down after legal threats from Universal Edition Vienna regarding several scores on the site. The arguments revolved around the applicability of Austrian copyright law in Canada, where IMSLP’s servers are located, and it would be a long blog post indeed to recount the various points of view in the resulting posts at the IMSLP forums (which remained up) between the site administrators and UE itself, which chose to get personally involved in the forum discussion.

I have not had nearly enough time to see what has changed (in terms of score content) from the “old” IMSLP, though I do note that UE Mahler scores are still there, and these were apparently one of the original sticking points. I have this odd hunch that UE’s lawyers will be examining the site, and we shall see shat transpires. Judging from the latest open letter from IMSLP’s college-age founder, the site is more prepared to dig in its heels at legal threats this time around.

We shall see what transpires. For now, let me simply offer my opinion of IMSLP as a treasure trove for the world. Copyright — where demonstrably present — must be respected. But public domain must also be protected, especially on the Internet, which offers a brave new world for bringing art to humanity. Here on my site, I try to do with audio, on a vastly smaller scale, what IMSLP does for sheet music: provide quality realizations of great music for your enjoyment. I appreciate your donation or CD purchase, but I don’t make a living this way. Everybody should hear The Art of Fugue, so you can find the full thing here, not just 30-second clips to try to get you to fork over for the CD.  Likewise, everybody who wants to study it should be able to get the score. So, welcome back, IMSLP; it’s good to see you back up.

Check out IMSLP…a fabulous site for any music lover.

Recently, my family and I traveled from our home in Arizona to visit my parents in Virginia. Needless to say, the climatic change from the desert Southwest to the humid central Virginia piedmont is dramatic. Most noticeable is the proliferation of life in eastern North America, both plant and animal, compared to our arid home.

I woke up about an hour before sunrise on the day we were to leave and fly back to Arizona. With a huge travel day ahead, I couldn’t go back to sleep, and as I lay in bed awake, I heard a bird outside in the trees, singing its early morning song over and over, a not quite perfect G4-E4-C5. After a moment, I became aware there was an answering song — not really a note, but a squawk, as some other bird answered the main call. The rhythm of G-E-C call and answering squawk was almost perfectly steady. Then I realized there were two insects chirping in rhythm with the birds, setting up a steady, repeating chorus in the undergrowth.

As dawn grew in the east, other birds and insects began to chime in, and the original ones moved around and slowly shifted the timing of their songs; as they did so, the accents and strong beats in the rhythm of nature gradually morphed from one pulse to another. It eventually grew into a truly beautiful chorus of pulsing sounds — perhaps not a melody in the familiar sense, but beautiful nonetheless, changing imperceptibly from one minute to the next.

And suddenly I realized what I was hearing: Terry Riley’s In C, playing in the world outside. In that work, the instruments slowly enter and drop out, shifting from one motive to the next, in a gradually changing cloud of sound…just as their natural counterparts did on that Virginia morning. Had I not spent three months working through a performance of Riley’s delightful minimalist music, I probably wouldn’t have noticed nature’s version of it outside my window, but there it was. It’s worthwhile music indeed that makes one hear the world in a different way — a world filled with music that might otherwise escape one’s notice.

I have put my Art of Fugue tracks onto a single, 79-minute CD that is now available for purchase. In a small effort to keep the performing arts alive and well, I will donate all proceeds from sales of this CD to the Flagstaff Symphony Orchestra, a very fine symphony that is always a pleasure to hear.

One caveat: my realization of the completion of Contrapunctus XIV appears on this site by permission, and it is not included on the CD. Instead, Contrapunctus XIV will fade out where Bach’s original manuscript ends. Besides that omission, the full-quality audio of all the MP3s found on my Art of Fugue pages is on the CD, in the order presented in the online program.

For a few of my college friends, the eponymous debut of the “supergroup” Asia was the exemplar of overproduced 80s rock, but Asia has always been one of my favorite albums. And it’s not overproduced, just brilliantly arranged. I was surprised to hear last year that, 25 years after Alpha and the breakup of the original quartet of musicians, a new studio album was in the works, and I was interested in what the old lineup of Geoffrey Downes, Steve Howe, Carl Palmer, and John Wetton would come up with.

Bottom line: two thumbs up, though even some Asia fans may need a few listens to buy into this new offering. Mainly this is because the album, on the whole, is rather dark. Most of it is in minor mode, starting with the A minor in-your-face opener to the stalking G minor of the second track. Add introspective lyrics and reduced reliance on highly catchy hooks, and you have an album less immediately approachable than the 1982 debut. This mood, though, can hardly be accidental. It is announced from the outset by Roger Dean’s cover art (shown at left, linked from Asia’s Web site), which is austere compared with his other work for Asia’s albums, and in the final analysis, this more mature approach is why Phoenix succeeds. From Palestrina, to Beethoven, to avant garde and popular music, watching the evolution of music — and its makers — is a fascinating exercise. The dark, moody Phoenix is an evolution, and a welcome one.

One can commend the CD’s generous 65 minute running time, but the program might have benefited from judicious shortening. Less is often more, and without Alibis and Orchard of Mines, the album still is a respectable 54 minutes and feels tighter, musically and thematically. This also aids the ear, since Geoff Downes’s lush keyboards fill the sonic space throughout; as much as I enjoy this sound, the whole album at one sitting gets a bit fatiguing. So spacious is the cloud of synthesizer sound, in fact, that Wetton’s voice occasionally sounds a bit overpowered, as do even Palmer’s drums in places. The booklet notes indicate that several individuals mixed the various tracks, with the effect that the lead vocal has a slightly uneven presence from song to song (just a bit buried in the Never Again mix, rich and reverberant in Heroine), though not to the point of being jarring.

Overall, however, Phoenix rises. The long multi-part tracks are inventive and interesting, and they unify the album in multiple ways, both structurally (dividing the program into thirds, and themselves having three parts each) and musically (e.g., the opening ostinato motive of Sleeping Giant appears in retrograde to form the main motive of the verses in An Extraordinary Life). Throughout the album, the arrangements and variations from verse to verse are creative and written with Asia’s usual excellent sense of timing and dramatic punch. Most of the songs conclude with cadences instead of fadeouts (my pet peeve of rock; only Tchaikovsky and Holst have truly nailed a fadeout). The tracks are impeccably played and are, at their core, melodic, beautiful music.

The closer, An Extraordinary Life, employs the well worn I-V-vi-iii-IV progression that recalls Johann Pachelbel’s now immortal Canon in D. In 1683, the 30 year old Pachelbel was living in Erfurt, Germany, with his wife of two years and infant son. History books note in passing that his wife and son died that year in an outbreak of plague — a terse assessment of a confrontation of mortality no doubt as profound as an emergency triple bypass. And so, as the concluding refrain breaks forth into radiant C major, Wetton binds the album’s sendoff to the music of a gentleman three centuries past who surmounted his own horrors and became one of the most accomplished composers of his day. An uplifting end to a somewhat troubled Phoenix, and all the more effective for it.

It’s nice to see the old Asia back, because Wetton, Downes, Howe, and Palmer are just very good musicians. Carpe diem indeed, guys, and keep making music.

Here’s wishing everyone a happy Pentecost. Here at Epiphany Episcopal in Flagstaff, our sanctuary was decorated with red balloons and a huge mobile with about 200 doves suspended above the chancel — it was a beautiful atmosphere. Our excellent organist Charly Spining played Bach’s massive chorale Komm, Herr Gott, Heiliger Geist, BWV 651, as the postlude. It’s one of my favorite Bach chorales, and you can listen to my realization of it here. If you want the original audio, it’s one of the pieces I chose for my CD The Trinity According to Bach.

I see from my weblogs that I have quite a few repeat visitors to my Art of Fugue site, much to my delight. As a heads-up: I re-uploaded it this evening, after redoing the equalization slightly on a couple of the tracks, and generally increasing the gain a bit. I had the whole thing mixed on the soft side before, and the new MP3s match the other clips on this site a little more closely, so you shouldn’t need to adjust your volume if you go from AOF to something else. Otherwise, nothing has changed. Thanks to all of you who have emailed me about this realization — I’m very glad you’ve enjoyed it.

I’ve set up a ragtime project page here on the site. I have a number of MIDI sequences of rags on my hard drive, and now that I’ve got Art of Fugue under control, I’m getting back to work on some of them. I’ll collect my ragtime realizations in an index on the main page, and I hope you enjoy them. Three of my original rags are available there as well.

If you’ve already listened to some of the rags I had on here before, I have recently uploaded a new one: Harlem Rag, by one of the great early ragtime composers, Thomas Million Turpin. It’s one of the earliest published rags, the first by an African American, and it’s a delightful piece. Listen to it using the Flash player, or if you want, download the MP3 (192 Kbps).

Here’s the link to a free software utility I can’t do without: Notepad++. I’m always looking for good open source products, and this one is really the cat’s meow. It’s the minimal little Windows notepad on serious steroids, with tabs, syntax coloring and folding, macros, and more. I wrote this entire site using Notepad++, and it has made both editing this site and many other tasks much simpler. A must have IMO!