Guest Post: TSM Artist Colin Ainsworth

I don’t know about you, but I’m always astounded when I read about prolific composers whose lives were ended prematurely or those who suffered greatly in some way or another. There are numerous examples: Mozart, who wrote over six hundred works including operas, symphonies, concertos, piano and chamber music, died at the age of thirty-five; Schubert, who wrote over one thousand pieces including over six hundred Lieder, died at the age of thirty-one; Beethoven suffered with hearing loss and became completely deaf by his mid-forties. Hugo Wolf was no exception. He died at the age of 42 after admitting himself to an asylum. His life was a sad one – he was extremely poor, he had a hard time getting his music published and he suffered long bouts of illness, depression, and insanity. He did have periods of productive writing but these were brief, overshadowed by his depression and mood swings.

Wolf’s songs have always fascinated me and for the German Art Song recital on August 4^th, I chose a few of my favourites. I have been singing a lot of Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin lately and love the progression of the innocent youth through love and its trials, and tried to weave a similar story through the Wolf songs I chose. Some of them appear to be so simple melodically and harmonically, like Verschiegene Liebe and Der Musikant, and yet others, like Auf dem grünen Balkon and Nimmersatte Liebe are extremely complex – and all his songs are full of depth and emotion. Perhaps this was a reflection of Wolf’s own character and its fluctuations. Liz Upchurch and I, while working on the songs, were chatting about An eine Äolsharfe and its striking similarities to Wagner’s music. You can almost hear Wolfram’s Odu, mein holder Abendstern in there somewhere. Wolf idolized Wagner and championed his music, going as far as heavily criticizing Brahms, who was Wagner’s rival, in the paper where Wolf had a job as a reviewer. How sad that he never would fully realize how important his own songs would become. Here is the text by Eduard Mörikefor An eine Äolsharfe:

Angelehnt an die Efeuwand
Dieser alten Terrasse,
Du, einer luftgebor'nen Muse
Geheimnisvolles Saitenspiel,
Fang' an, Fange wieder an 
Deine melodische Klage! 
Ihr kommet, Winde, fern herüber,
Ach! von des Knaben,
Der mir so lieb war,
Frisch grünen dem Hügel.
Und Frühlingsblüten unterwegs streifend,
Übersättigt mit Wohlgerüchen,
Wie süß, wie süß bedrängt ihr dies Herz!
Und säuselt her in die Saiten,
Angezogen von wohllautender Wehmut,
Wachsend im Zug meiner Sehnsucht,
Und hinsterbend wieder.

Aber auf einmal,
Wieder Wind heftigerherstößt,
Ein holder Schreider Harfe
Wiederholt mir zu süßem Erschrecken
Meiner Seele plötzliche Regung,
Und hier, die volle Rose streut geschüttelt
All' ihre Blätter vor meine Füße!


Leaning up against the ivy-covered wall
Of this old terrace,
You, an air-borne muse,
A lute-melody full of mystery,
Begin, Begin again,
Your melodious lament!

You come, winds, from far away,
Ah! from the boy 
Who was so dear to me,
From his hill so freshly green.
On your way, streaking over spring blossoms
Saturated with sweet scents,
How sweetly, how sweetly you besiege my
heart! You rustle the strings here,
Drawn by harmonious melancholy,
Growing louder in the pull of my longing,
And then dying down again.

But all at once,
The wind blows violently
And a lovely cry of the harp
Echoes, to my sweet terror,
The sudden stirring of my soul,
And here, the ample rose shakes and strews
All its petals at my feet!

Canadian-born tenor Colin Ainsworth has distinguished himself by his
exceptional singing, impeccable diction and a diverse range of repertoire.
See Colin perform in person Toronto Summer Music's An Evening of German
Art Song on Wednesday, August 4. For tickets and information visit our
website.

Guest Post: Stephen Hutchings

"Tree" by Stephens Hutchings. From the series "Landsapes for the End of Time".

One of the interesting aspects of Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time” is the wonderful paradox that exists between the concept of the end of time, itself, and the actual end of one’s own time on earth. For me, this is the essential mystery of life in that it pits the individual up against the eternal, the here-and-now up against the concept of “forever,” and the “self” up against the omnipresent “other.” As a painter working in the landscape genre, this makes me consider what is, in fact, continuous in the world around us. What is it that flows through our lives and through the lives of countless individuals from before the dawn of human time to beyond?

My paintings, which will accompany the Gryphon Trio’s performance of Messiaen’s great Quartet, are attempts to create landscape images that, though specific in their source, are generalised in the final work itself. In this way, they can point to a world that has, indeed, been present before humankind, and, one might assume, will continue after – heaven forbid – our demise.

For instance, the painting “Tree,” which accompanies the 4th movement of Messiaen’s Quartet, was developed from photographic studies of a particular tree in a specific location. The tree in the painting, however, has lost much of that specificity, of its individuality, and is now a good stand-in for the idea of a tree, wherever that tree may exist. Perhaps that tree exists in our memory, or in the longing we have for a balanced life, or a beautiful life, or a life that continues in spite of the knowledge we have of our own mortality. Hence, the quotation from the libretto of Mahler’s “Song of the Earth,” cited previously in this blog by Dan Wang, is very appropriate for both Messiaen’s Quartet  and my understanding of it: 

The sky is endlessly blue, and the earth
will long remain, and bloom in spring.
But you, Man, how long will you remain?
Not even a hundred years shall you enjoy
all the mouldering trinkets of this earth.

Stephen Hutchings is a painter who resides Ottawa, Ontario. He works mainly with landscape images, creating drawings, prints, paintings and videos. Stephen’s series ”Landscapes for the End of Time” will be projected during the Gryphon Trio’s performance of Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time on August 12.

Mahler’s Farewell

The sky is endlessly blue, and the earth
will long remain, and bloom in spring.
But you, Man, how long will you remain?
Not even a hundred years shall you enjoy
all the mouldering trinkets of this earth.

The legendary conductor Bruno Walter called Das Lied von der Erde “the most personal utterance among Mahler’s creations, and perhaps in all music.” The first part is a bold statement; the second approaches sheer folly. The mind races for counter-examples: more personal than Brahms’s German Requiem? Beethoven’s last quartet? Even within Mahler’s body of work the claim is questionable. Why, for instance, would a Bohemian Austrian Jew’s most personal work feature a third movement that sounds like it belongs in a Chinese opera house?

The distinct Oriental shading in much of Das Lied (Adorno suggested that the tenor strains in high passages to mimic the vocal timbre of Beijing opera) is due to the text, which is drawn from Chinese poetry. And it is the text, I think, that bridges the gap to the personal in ways that Mahler’s previous texts could not. There is a gentleness of metaphor in the poems that make up Das Lied, a clarity of colour and line that seems to require solo winds and voices (Schoenberg would later transcribe the piece for chamber ensemble). There is an insistence on sensation, as when the poet describes a field stiffened in frost as though “an artist had strewn jade dust over all the fine blossoms.”

Perhaps the most important thing these poems offered Mahler was a theme that reflected his own preoccupations: the feebleness and futility of life in the face of eternal, impassive nature. “A full glass of wine at the proper moment is worth more than all the riches of the world!” bellows the singer in the first movement, “The Drinking Song of Earth’s Misery.” Between his raucous exertions come moments of gloomy sobriety, in which he intones, always to the same minor-key melody, “Dark is life, is death.”

The second movement, “The Lonely One in Autumn,” entwines the fates of the individual and nature. There are two sources of light in this poem, a lamp and the sun, and before the poem is out both will have extinguished – the small lamp “out with a splutter,” and the sun, a symbol for love and human companionship, ceasing to shine.

After autumn we expect winter, but the next two movements land us in the full bloom of summer. Titled “Of Youth” and “Of Beauty,” these play more like a remembrance, sandwiched as they are between the hermetic opening pair and the 5^th movement, a second drinking song that returns us to the casual recklessness of the beginning. What’s remarkable about these two sunny middle movements is that they are brimming with people – “Youth” describes a group of “beautifully dressed” friends sitting on a pavilion in the middle of a pool, while “Beauty” has young men on horses gallop past a group of girls picking blossoms by the shore.

The despair of being alone in nature is erased by the companionship of humanity, but even here nature is not fully gone; see, for instance, the way the pavilion and the silk-clad friends are reflected in the pool below:

On the small pool’s still
surface, all things are reflected
wonderfully in reverse.

The bridge stands like a halfmoon,
its arch inverted. Friends,
beautifully dressed, are drinking and chatting.

This reversal takes on a transcendent dimension in the work’s final movement, “Der Abschied” (“The Farewell”), nearly as long as the first five movements combined. The poet is alone again, but in a sublime gesture she looks up as the moon, like a silver boat, “sails up into the lake of the sky.” Water is reflected in sky, and more significantly, it is the man-made boat that is transformed into the natural moon, becoming a part of nature. The boundary between the individual and nature begins to disappear as the poet becomes more attuned to the wilderness that surrounds her, and the earth, bizarrely and sublimely, begins to breathe as if human:

The brook sings loudly through the darkness.
The flowers stand out palely in the twilight.
The earth breathes, full of peace and sleep.

And out of this transformation comes the most astonishing of confessions, as a new figure enters that very likely speaks for Mahler himself, poor displaced soul that he was:

He dismounted and handed him the drink
of parting. He asked him where
he would go, and also why it must be.
He spoke, his voice was choked: “My friend,
on this earth, fortune has not been kind to me!
Where do I go? I will go, wander in the mountains.
I seek peace for my lonely heart.
I wander to find my homeland, my home.
Quiet is my heart, waiting for its hour!”

 

The final bars linger on the word ewig, or “endless”; the body disappears, is subsumed by nature. The final transformation is complete, the paradox of mind and body, nature and consciousness solved at last by the final farewell. The body of the poet is transmuted into the body of the Earth, and the Earth is made to sing.

written by Dan Wang. Dan is the Festival and Academy Coordinator for Toronto Summer Music.

The composer, mechanical

by Dan Wang

A recent article in Slate magazine profiles David Cope, a man who has been using computers to write music for a long time. I first came across his work in the documentary Mozartballs, in which Cope’s computer (cutely named “Emmy”) analyzes reams of Mozart’s music and writes a new cello concerto in a Mozartean idiom in one second. It was a long time ago, but I remember the documentary then showed a cellist who played the piece – which likely sounds alright to ears not familiar with Mozart – and commented that, while all the gestures looked like Mozart, there was something about it that was deeply un-Mozart-like. Indeed.

Journalists are often not responsible for their articles’ subheadings, but the one for this piece – “A computer program is writing great, original works of classical music. Will human composers soon be obsolete?” – seems to me to encapsulate the very blunders of reason that draw people to these kinds of stories. Leaving aside the anachronism of the machine writing “classical music” roughly two centuries after human beings stopped writing “classical” music, other questions are begged. Like: what does the article mean by “original”? It seems, in fact, to spend much of its word count arguing just the opposite: that the computer cribs Beethoven who cribs Mozart who cribs pre-Mozart, and humans are much more recycling algorithms, much more mechanical, than we like to think.

The argument is presumably meant to validate the machine’s own cribbing brand of creativity, a “you think Emmy’s just copying existing music? That’s what humans do, too!” kind of thing. What the article – which, after all, is in Slate and therefore has neither the platform nor the space nor the readership to explore this matter to any degree of depth – fails to mention is that the idea of art as “copying” is far from new. In 2007, the American novelist Jonathan Lethem wrote “The Ecstasy of Influence,” a love letter to “plagiarism” in art, in which he quotes the following from John Donne:

All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. . . .

A belief in art as inherently genealogical – that is, made from the stuff of the ancestors, rather than created ex nihilo – is not only championed by artists such as Donne or Lethem. Roland Barthes, the literary theorist whose ideas held much sway over the entire body of French literary thinking (and subsequently of the world entire) in the 60s and on, goes so far as to erase the author, so convinced is he that all artists do is rearrange what has come before. This is not a denigration of the value of art or artists, but rather a statement of what Barthes thought was perfectly clear: that we are all born into a system and cannot escape that system. We read, we listen, we breathe in air and release it again in an altered but not fundamentally new form. All art is a conversation with all other art.

The question then remains as to whether a machine can have a meaningful conversation with a person. Or put another way: if the purpose of conversation is to reveal through words our intentions, is it possible for a machine to intend? Or can it only do?

The article in Slate seems to think that Emmy and her inevitable spinoffs are humans in reduced capacity, and that the compositions are not better only because the technology is not yet there. When it is, who knows what could happen? It claims that Emmy is “already a better composer than 99% of the population,” and grants the possibility that a machine might write music of “lasting significance.” So, in twenty years, might we have a program pairing a Beethoven quartet with a song cycle by HAL 9000? Symphony No. 73B by that Honda robot? Will we study computer programmers in music history, count algorithms instead of tone rows in music theory?

Or the question I really want to ask: Why do we listen to music, or make time for any art, at all?

In Middlemarch, George Eliot writes: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.” The first time I read this I stopped dead in my tracks (I was walking), stunned by how perfect a description this was of what art, in my opinion, tries to do. To listen to the grass grow and record that roar which lies on the other side of silence, silence being death or the magnitude of the universe or the separateness of human existence. There is a roar underneath, a graspable truth that we all feel or hear at some time or another and which artists try to communicate – that is their “intention” – in their respective medium. To hear the roar and to say it.

When I listen to, I dunno, the Cavatina from Beethoven’s Op. 133 String Quartet, the music – as beautiful as it is – falls away and I am left with the impression of effort, Beethoven’s effort to understand and wrestle with something and then give us the traces of his effort, so that we might feel less alone with ours. The Cavatina is imperfect, as all great music is, but it is something said by one person to another, which is also what all great music (or even all human music) tries to do.

The materiality of music – the technicians and paper-printers, the instruments, the notes and even the sounds – this all is just connecting fodder meant to bridge the gap between consciousnesses, which is a process Emmy can never participate in or understand. Regardless of how far this technology develops or how ingeniously or convincingly future Emmys can recombine and repurpose music, if a machine cannot hear the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, then it cannot write music – however perfect – that matters to me.

Korngold, a “degenerate”?

Can you imagine what it would be like to attend a classical music concert and never have the opportunity to hear your favourite composer in any program? Are you a fan of Mendelssohn, Hindemith, Mahler, or maybe even Korngold? Well, unfortunately, if you fall under the latter category, you’d be hard pressed for luck (in 1930s Germany that is). 

For most of us, listening to classical music is a means of escapism, solitude, and pure aural pleasure. But imagine being stripped of your listening privileges. Imagine being subject to severe punishment for, let’s say, popping in your favourite CD of London Symphony Orchestra’s Mahler no. 5 while cruising down the Gardiner Freeway as suddenly, you hear a police cruiser addressing you from a loudspeaker: “Pull over. No Mahler!” Fortunately, this is not the case.

Degenerate Music (Entarte Musik) was a term coined by Hitler’s Nazi regime, banning and disgracing music composed by Jewish and Jewish origin composers, Modernist music composers such as Hindemith, and any composer found guilty of supporting an opponent of the Nazi regime. In 1933, Hitler’s Third Reich introduced the Reich Music Chamber (Reichsmusikkammer), an institution enforcing registration of all musicians in Germany. This led to the demise of many composers simply because of race or religion and by 1938, composers such as Schoenberg and Mahler were made primary examples of composers not to be listened to in the Entarte Musik Exhibit.

Luckily, with the passing of Hitler’s regime, some of history’s best (and most suppressed) composers were able to flourish and as a result of this, we now have an incredible body of diverse repertoire from this period of time.

On Thursday, July 29, Toronto Summer Music showcases works by Erich Korngold, a Jewish child prodigy from Vienna who fell under the category of “degenerate composer”. Toronto’s Andrew Burashko and the Art of Time Ensemble will play Korngold’s Suite for piano, two violins and cello, followed by six new songs inspired by the Suite.

*Erich Korngold was the winner of two Academy awards for film scoring for Anthony Adverse (1936) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).

“I have at last learned the lesson that has been forced upon me during this year, and I shall not ever forget it. It is that I am not a German, not a European, indeed perhaps scarcely a human being (at least the Europeans prefer the worst of their race to me) but I am a Jew.”-Arnold Schoenberg