As regular readers of this blog will know, my other hobby besides chamber music is playing board games. And regular readers of this blog will not be at all surprised to learn that I track the games I play, using the wonderful BoardGameGeek website. Top of the list is almost always "Unpublished Prototype", since I have friends who are game designers, and I go to board game conventions where games that are under development get tested. But until now, I've never done the analogous activity in chamber music, to help a composer see how her piece works in real life. I rectified that omission Tuesday evening.
The composer was Pamela Marshall, a friend of a friend of mine, and I got in at the last minute on the first reading of her string quintet "Natural Harmony". The viola part was already taken, so I played second violin. The quintet was for standard string quartet with the addition of a double bass: a very nice combination that unfortunately is under utilized (I can only think of the Dvorak quintet for the same group of players off hand).
I liked "Natural Harmony" pretty well on first hearing, and it definitely grew on me with each subsequent play. I find that's generally true for music written since World War II; each composer has her own language, and it takes a while to figure out the logic of that language, and how everything fits together. That's why I find concerts of new music somewhat frustrating; you get to hear a piece once, and then probably never again.
I don't have a quick enough ear to say that I have any understanding of Marshall's harmonic language. Her rhythmic language is interesting, both in how two parts, playing a temporary duet, will be strikingly rhythmically independent, and in the kinds of rhythms the individual parts contain. It's funny how often you hear dotted-eighth followed by sixteenth in classical and romantic music, and how rarely sixteenth followed by dotted-eighth!
I really enjoyed the experience of being in the first group to bring a piece to life, and I particularly enjoyed talking with Pamela: we bonded over our common experience with Sibelius music layout software. And in discussing page turns, the bane of the existence of anyone who tries to do music layout. If architects cover their mistakes with ivy, and cooks cover their mistakes with sauces, music layout people cover their mistakes with V.S. :-)
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Sunday, July 15, 2012
Two long pieces: Beethoven Op. 131, Schubert Cello Quintet
Last week, I had two evening sessions of chamber music. Tuesday evening was the Beethoven late C-sharp minor string quartet, Op. 131, and Thursday evening, the Schubert Cello Quintet in C major, D. 956. Before I write about the pieces and my experience with them, a brief digression about one of the difficulties of being an amateur chamber musician.
The problem is trying to find a suitable time to play music when you have a day job. I know this isn't the most sensitive thing in the world to complain about, when there are so many people who don't have jobs who need them. But still, I find it difficult to play music on a work night. We usually start at 7:30pm, and particularly if we're playing a long piece, like the two from this past week, we don't stop playing until past 9:30pm. And then there's the tradition of a snack and conversation afterwards, which is such a part of the whole experience that I hesitate to give it up. And then there's potentially driving home, if I'm not hosting, and then I'm so "up" from the experience that I find it difficult to get to sleep. And when you're my age, going to bed past midnight and getting up at 6am doesn't make for a wonderful work day.
So that's one of the reasons I've been trying to do more playing on weekends. I think that generally works better for me, but it does limit both the amount of time you have to play, and the people you can play with. Still, until I either retire or cut back my work hours, I think that will have to be the best solution. I am eager to hear any suggestions my readers can give me!
On to the pieces. The Beethoven Op. 131 quartet: an amazing piece, and one I don't really feel qualified to say much about. But since when has that stopped me? :-) It is fiendishly difficult, in so many ways, constant tempo changes, for one, but I'll just concentrate on one aspect, the key. C-sharp minor is a very difficult key for string instruments, particularly the viola and cello, since they lose the use of three of their four open strings. For me, that pushes me either to first position with an extended fourth finger to reach G-sharp on the C string and D-sharp on the G string, or half position. Half position is the only way to play a C-harp on the C string, and in a piece in C-sharp minor, you play a C-sharp a lot. And half position makes my brain hurt. :-)
(I am unable to find a good link describing half position. Although I think I would like to read this book, even though I'm somewhat outside the demographic for it. :-)
I wrote above that I lost three of my four open strings playing in C-sharp minor, but that's not strictly true. In the harmonic and melodic versions of the minor scale, you borrow the leading tone from the parallel major. In this case, you replace a B-natural with a B-sharp. And, since B-sharp is enharmonic to C-natural, in effect, for this piece, we replace the C string of the cello and viola with a B-sharp string. :-) And, seriously, by the end of the piece, I was really thinking of that thick piece of silver wound around sheep gut, at the left side of my fingerboard, as my B-sharp string. Listen to the beginning of this performance of the last movement (the actual last movement starts 17 seconds in). The end of the first phrase has the quartet in octaves on B-sharp, and you can hear the open strings of the viola and cello ring!
Because of the pull of this leading tone, it always struck me that C-sharp minor (or major), or, equivalently, D-flat minor (or major) are excellent keys for a string quartet. Too bad they're so difficult to play, and so seldom used. The second Dohnanyi quartet is in D-flat major; I hope to play that someday!
On to Thursday: a bittersweet occasion, the last session with a violinist I've been playing with a lot in the past year, but who's got a great job in another state and so is moving away. She'd asked specifically for the Schubert Cello Quintet, her favorite piece. There had been lots of obstacles in the way of getting this played, but things finally came together, and it was a marvelous evening.
I had been worried about what to play with the Schubert: there aren't that many cello quintets. Brahms wrote one, but destroyed it when he converted the music to his piano quintet. There are lots by Boccherini and Onslow, and ones by Cherubini and Glazunov. I had gotten the parts to the Borodin Cello Quintet on a mistaken recommendation from the second cellist (he was thinking of the famous Borodin Second String Quartet). But in the end, the question of what to play in the same evening with the Schubert Cello Quintet is: nothing. The piece is so long, and so beautiful, that one neither has time nor inclination to play anything else!
I really don't have that much to say about such a famous piece. Well, okay, I have two things to say. First, as I've mentioned before on this blog, one of the things that I find both fun and amusing about playing quartets are the times when the cello goes up high with a melody, I as the violist am always to be found, growling out the bass on my C-string. So, I think to myself, with two cellos in the room, that won't happen, right? Think again! Listen to the beautiful duet between the two cellos that forms the first statement of the second theme in the first movement of the Schubert, and, if you can tear your ears away from the melody, see if you can pick out the pizzicato bass line from the poor, lone viola. (You can catch it at 1:50 here).
The other thing I finally got while rehearsing for this reading was the very end of the last movement. As so often happens with Schubert, he oscillates between major and minor, but the last three notes of the piece are all five players: C, D-flat grace note, C. D-flat isn't in either C major or C minor, and I've never understood what it's doing there. But in my practice, I noticed that the slow movement starts in E major, moves to F minor for the middle section (a semitone higher), and then back to E major for the recap (with a tiny move back towards F minor again just before the end). And the Scherzo is in C major, while its trio is in D-flat major (again, up a semitone and back). So in a sense, the last three notes of the piece are echoing the entire second and third movements, a kind of Schenkerian analysis in miniature! I don't know how much sense that actually makes, but it's enough to make me completely happy with the ending.
A very successful sendoff for my violinist friend, someone I met "cold-calling" from the ACMP list. So let that be a lesson to all of you: blow the dust off your instrument, join the ACMP, and invite people from the list to play music with you! Don't be afraid! Not everyone will be compatible, but some will be, and then you can have a great deal of fun!
The problem is trying to find a suitable time to play music when you have a day job. I know this isn't the most sensitive thing in the world to complain about, when there are so many people who don't have jobs who need them. But still, I find it difficult to play music on a work night. We usually start at 7:30pm, and particularly if we're playing a long piece, like the two from this past week, we don't stop playing until past 9:30pm. And then there's the tradition of a snack and conversation afterwards, which is such a part of the whole experience that I hesitate to give it up. And then there's potentially driving home, if I'm not hosting, and then I'm so "up" from the experience that I find it difficult to get to sleep. And when you're my age, going to bed past midnight and getting up at 6am doesn't make for a wonderful work day.
So that's one of the reasons I've been trying to do more playing on weekends. I think that generally works better for me, but it does limit both the amount of time you have to play, and the people you can play with. Still, until I either retire or cut back my work hours, I think that will have to be the best solution. I am eager to hear any suggestions my readers can give me!
On to the pieces. The Beethoven Op. 131 quartet: an amazing piece, and one I don't really feel qualified to say much about. But since when has that stopped me? :-) It is fiendishly difficult, in so many ways, constant tempo changes, for one, but I'll just concentrate on one aspect, the key. C-sharp minor is a very difficult key for string instruments, particularly the viola and cello, since they lose the use of three of their four open strings. For me, that pushes me either to first position with an extended fourth finger to reach G-sharp on the C string and D-sharp on the G string, or half position. Half position is the only way to play a C-harp on the C string, and in a piece in C-sharp minor, you play a C-sharp a lot. And half position makes my brain hurt. :-)
(I am unable to find a good link describing half position. Although I think I would like to read this book, even though I'm somewhat outside the demographic for it. :-)
I wrote above that I lost three of my four open strings playing in C-sharp minor, but that's not strictly true. In the harmonic and melodic versions of the minor scale, you borrow the leading tone from the parallel major. In this case, you replace a B-natural with a B-sharp. And, since B-sharp is enharmonic to C-natural, in effect, for this piece, we replace the C string of the cello and viola with a B-sharp string. :-) And, seriously, by the end of the piece, I was really thinking of that thick piece of silver wound around sheep gut, at the left side of my fingerboard, as my B-sharp string. Listen to the beginning of this performance of the last movement (the actual last movement starts 17 seconds in). The end of the first phrase has the quartet in octaves on B-sharp, and you can hear the open strings of the viola and cello ring!
Because of the pull of this leading tone, it always struck me that C-sharp minor (or major), or, equivalently, D-flat minor (or major) are excellent keys for a string quartet. Too bad they're so difficult to play, and so seldom used. The second Dohnanyi quartet is in D-flat major; I hope to play that someday!
On to Thursday: a bittersweet occasion, the last session with a violinist I've been playing with a lot in the past year, but who's got a great job in another state and so is moving away. She'd asked specifically for the Schubert Cello Quintet, her favorite piece. There had been lots of obstacles in the way of getting this played, but things finally came together, and it was a marvelous evening.
I had been worried about what to play with the Schubert: there aren't that many cello quintets. Brahms wrote one, but destroyed it when he converted the music to his piano quintet. There are lots by Boccherini and Onslow, and ones by Cherubini and Glazunov. I had gotten the parts to the Borodin Cello Quintet on a mistaken recommendation from the second cellist (he was thinking of the famous Borodin Second String Quartet). But in the end, the question of what to play in the same evening with the Schubert Cello Quintet is: nothing. The piece is so long, and so beautiful, that one neither has time nor inclination to play anything else!
I really don't have that much to say about such a famous piece. Well, okay, I have two things to say. First, as I've mentioned before on this blog, one of the things that I find both fun and amusing about playing quartets are the times when the cello goes up high with a melody, I as the violist am always to be found, growling out the bass on my C-string. So, I think to myself, with two cellos in the room, that won't happen, right? Think again! Listen to the beautiful duet between the two cellos that forms the first statement of the second theme in the first movement of the Schubert, and, if you can tear your ears away from the melody, see if you can pick out the pizzicato bass line from the poor, lone viola. (You can catch it at 1:50 here).
The other thing I finally got while rehearsing for this reading was the very end of the last movement. As so often happens with Schubert, he oscillates between major and minor, but the last three notes of the piece are all five players: C, D-flat grace note, C. D-flat isn't in either C major or C minor, and I've never understood what it's doing there. But in my practice, I noticed that the slow movement starts in E major, moves to F minor for the middle section (a semitone higher), and then back to E major for the recap (with a tiny move back towards F minor again just before the end). And the Scherzo is in C major, while its trio is in D-flat major (again, up a semitone and back). So in a sense, the last three notes of the piece are echoing the entire second and third movements, a kind of Schenkerian analysis in miniature! I don't know how much sense that actually makes, but it's enough to make me completely happy with the ending.
A very successful sendoff for my violinist friend, someone I met "cold-calling" from the ACMP list. So let that be a lesson to all of you: blow the dust off your instrument, join the ACMP, and invite people from the list to play music with you! Don't be afraid! Not everyone will be compatible, but some will be, and then you can have a great deal of fun!
Monday, July 9, 2012
Eighty-eight years apart: Mozart, Brahms, Riley
Sometimes you have a session of chamber music for which the blog post practically writes itself. That's what happened on Sunday. Purely by chance, I played three pieces spaced almost exactly 88 years apart from each other, and nearly played a fourth with a similar spacing. A wonderful trip through music history!
Now that I've finished the Haydn Project, I'm looking for other pieces to play that I haven't played before. Sometimes I think I should have been a bird-watcher or stamp-collector, rather than a chamber musician, since I'm so focused on checking things off my list. :-) Mozart is an obvious choice, but I've played the ten "famous" quartets, and the thirteen I haven't played he wrote in utero and so people tend not to be too psyched to play them. But we found an alternative this morning: the Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546, written in 1788. This is not strictly a string quartet, but it is in the second volume of the Peters Edition of the Mozart quartets, and I hadn't played it before, so I readily agreed.
I have to say, though, that I wasn't very happy with the fugue the first time we played through it. In part that was because one of the players got lost in the middle, which can be suboptimal for counterpoint. :-) But mainly, I think, because, at least as reproduced in the Peters Edition, Mozart marks a dynamic marking of forte at the beginning, and never changes it. Dynamics have always been embarrassingly low down on my list of things to think about in playing and listening to music, but that's starting to change, particularly as I work on the Beethoven Op. 59 No. 3 quartet; dynamics are so central to Beethoven's music. Anyway, the second time we attempted the fugue, we put in our own group dynamics, by bringing out themes and listening to each other, and it was much more satisfying.
Next, we played the Brahms B-flat major string quartet, Op. 67, written in 1875 and first performed in 1876 (so 88 years or so after the Mozart). I think this is one of my absolute favorite string quartets, for so many reasons. Not only is the third movement practically a viola concerto, and the beginning of the fourth movement almost the same, there's just so much more of interest going on. It feels as if it's quite harmonically adventurous, although my theory chops aren't good enough to be sure (although the last movement has, in the viola part, not only B natural and B flat, but B sharp and B double flat; that must count for something). It's certainly rhythmically adventurous, with the usual Brahms nothing-on-the-downbeat and three-against-two, with addition of lots of three-against-four, and even some 5/4 measures (something which I think is very unusual in Brahms). And it's formally very interesting, with the last movement, a theme and variations, bringing in both the first and second themes of the first movement (who knew those were lurking in there?) Add in a gorgeous slow movement, and you have an absolute masterpiece. I don' t know what Brahms was thinking when he called it a "useless trifle", but I think Brahms often said things about his music that were obviously untrue.
We had an extra violinist showing up in time for a short piece (and the lunch following) which provided a quandary: what to play? The problem with violinists (well, one of the problems with violinists :-) is that while one is good, and two are wonderful, three are a complete disaster. IMSLP gave me almost nothing for the combination of three violins, one viola, and one cello: amazingly, no one has arranged any of the famous viola quintets for that combination. I thought we were going to have to fall back on the Pachelbel Canon, with me improvising a viola part from the continuo part. That would have fit the instrumentation (and the accidental theme, nearly, since it's from 1694), but a chance remark reminded me that I had another piece that would work for this combination.
That piece was Terry Riley's In C, written and first performed in 1964 (and so eighty-eight years after the Brahms quartet!). This is a famous piece of modern classical music (there was even a Radiolab podcast about it). In C was one of the first pieces of minimalist music, and also one of the early examples of aleatoric (i.e. chance) music. The score consists of 53 phrases of varying lengths: the instructions are that each musician plays each phrase in order as many times as he or she feel like. The directions say that the group can be aided by someone playing continuous eighth-note Cs; I took on that job. We didn't do a great job: I'd forgotten to print out the instructions, and we didn't try to stay within a few phrases of each other, as Riley directs. But it was great fun, and people were eager to try it again. I'm hatching a plot to get together a large group of strings to play In C on or near the 50th anniversary of its first performance, which will be on November 4, 2014. But hopefully I'll get to play it again before then!
Now that I've finished the Haydn Project, I'm looking for other pieces to play that I haven't played before. Sometimes I think I should have been a bird-watcher or stamp-collector, rather than a chamber musician, since I'm so focused on checking things off my list. :-) Mozart is an obvious choice, but I've played the ten "famous" quartets, and the thirteen I haven't played he wrote in utero and so people tend not to be too psyched to play them. But we found an alternative this morning: the Adagio and Fugue in C minor, K. 546, written in 1788. This is not strictly a string quartet, but it is in the second volume of the Peters Edition of the Mozart quartets, and I hadn't played it before, so I readily agreed.
I have to say, though, that I wasn't very happy with the fugue the first time we played through it. In part that was because one of the players got lost in the middle, which can be suboptimal for counterpoint. :-) But mainly, I think, because, at least as reproduced in the Peters Edition, Mozart marks a dynamic marking of forte at the beginning, and never changes it. Dynamics have always been embarrassingly low down on my list of things to think about in playing and listening to music, but that's starting to change, particularly as I work on the Beethoven Op. 59 No. 3 quartet; dynamics are so central to Beethoven's music. Anyway, the second time we attempted the fugue, we put in our own group dynamics, by bringing out themes and listening to each other, and it was much more satisfying.
Next, we played the Brahms B-flat major string quartet, Op. 67, written in 1875 and first performed in 1876 (so 88 years or so after the Mozart). I think this is one of my absolute favorite string quartets, for so many reasons. Not only is the third movement practically a viola concerto, and the beginning of the fourth movement almost the same, there's just so much more of interest going on. It feels as if it's quite harmonically adventurous, although my theory chops aren't good enough to be sure (although the last movement has, in the viola part, not only B natural and B flat, but B sharp and B double flat; that must count for something). It's certainly rhythmically adventurous, with the usual Brahms nothing-on-the-downbeat and three-against-two, with addition of lots of three-against-four, and even some 5/4 measures (something which I think is very unusual in Brahms). And it's formally very interesting, with the last movement, a theme and variations, bringing in both the first and second themes of the first movement (who knew those were lurking in there?) Add in a gorgeous slow movement, and you have an absolute masterpiece. I don' t know what Brahms was thinking when he called it a "useless trifle", but I think Brahms often said things about his music that were obviously untrue.
We had an extra violinist showing up in time for a short piece (and the lunch following) which provided a quandary: what to play? The problem with violinists (well, one of the problems with violinists :-) is that while one is good, and two are wonderful, three are a complete disaster. IMSLP gave me almost nothing for the combination of three violins, one viola, and one cello: amazingly, no one has arranged any of the famous viola quintets for that combination. I thought we were going to have to fall back on the Pachelbel Canon, with me improvising a viola part from the continuo part. That would have fit the instrumentation (and the accidental theme, nearly, since it's from 1694), but a chance remark reminded me that I had another piece that would work for this combination.
That piece was Terry Riley's In C, written and first performed in 1964 (and so eighty-eight years after the Brahms quartet!). This is a famous piece of modern classical music (there was even a Radiolab podcast about it). In C was one of the first pieces of minimalist music, and also one of the early examples of aleatoric (i.e. chance) music. The score consists of 53 phrases of varying lengths: the instructions are that each musician plays each phrase in order as many times as he or she feel like. The directions say that the group can be aided by someone playing continuous eighth-note Cs; I took on that job. We didn't do a great job: I'd forgotten to print out the instructions, and we didn't try to stay within a few phrases of each other, as Riley directs. But it was great fun, and people were eager to try it again. I'm hatching a plot to get together a large group of strings to play In C on or near the 50th anniversary of its first performance, which will be on November 4, 2014. But hopefully I'll get to play it again before then!
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