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The chaconne had its apotheosis at Versailles. The music master at the court of Louis XIV was Jean-Baptiste Lully, who, like the chaconne itself, came from lowly circumstances; the son of a Florentine miller, he started out laboring as a servant and tutor to a princess who was a cousin of the king. When Lully exhibited performing talent, Louis hired him as a dancer, and shortly after set him to work composing. Lully created a series of grand ballets that he and Louis danced side by side; in later years, he became the chief opera composer of the kingdom, his clout confirmed by his friendship with the sovereign and his scandalous homosexual affairs largely excused. Productions at Versailles were so staggeringly lavish that many in the audience came principally to see the theatrical machinery. Plots were taken from mythology and chivalric tales, with unhappy endings modified to meet the harmonious ideals of the Sun King’s world.
Lully’s theater works routinely culminate in a majestic chaconne or passacaille. The flowing motion of these dances symbolizes the reconciliation of warring elements and the restoration of happiness. At the same time, an exotic association remains; a scholarly study by Rose Pruiksma notes that Lully’s chaconnes and passacailles are linked to Italian, Spanish, North African, even Chinese characters and locales. In Cadmus, a chaconne is performed by “thirteen Africans dancing and playing the guitar.” In Armide, a four-note passacaglia bass stands for the sorcery of the title character. And in the Ballet d’Alcidiane, from 1658, the union of the island princess and the hero Polexandre prompts a Chaconne des Maures, or Chaconne of the Moors. Louis himself performed as one of eight Moorish dancers, donning a black mask. The verses for the scene invoke the irresistible attraction of the darker-skinned males:
One dreads the arms of these lovely shadowed ones
And everything gives way to their charms,
Blondes, I say farewell to you.
As Pruiksma explains, the sight of world cultures happily intermingling provided a mythological justification for Louis XIV’s marriage into the Spanish Habsburg family in 1660. Given the Hispanic origins of the chaconne, the music fit the occasion.
In these same years, the chaconne underwent its epic mutation, taking on a markedly more serious visage. Other dances of the day evolved in much the same way: the racy zarabanda became the stately sarabande, a medium of sober reflection for the likes of J. S. Bach and George Frideric Handel. Composers seemed to compete among themselves to see who could most effectively distort and deconstruct the popular music of the seventeenth century. They must have done so in a spirit of intellectual play, demonstrating how the most familiar stuff could be creatively transformed; such is the implicit attitude of Frescobaldi’s Partite sopra ciaccona and Cento partite. Louis Couperin, a keyboard composer of questing intellect, carried on the game by writing chaconnes that, in the words of Wilfrid Mellers, “proceed with relentless power, and are usually dark in color and dissonant in texture.” The same dusky aura hangs over a Chaconne raportée by the august viol player Sainte-Colombe, which, in a fusion of the chaconne and lamento traditions, begins with a lugubrious chromatic line.
English chaconnes, too, assumed both light and dark shades. The restoration of the English monarchy in the wake of Oliver Cromwell’s republican experiment called for musical spectaculars in the Lully vein, replete with sumptuous dances of enchantment and reconciliation. Several exquisite specimens came from the pen of Henry Purcell, the leading English composer of the late-seventeenth century. In his semiopera King Arthur, nymphs and sylvans in the employ of an evil magician attempt to lure the hero king with a gigantic passacaglia on a Lamento della ninfa bass. Purcell’s The Fairy Queen, a very free adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, culminates in a decorous, Lullyesque chaconne titled “Dance for Chinese Man and Woman.” (The play ends in a not very Shakespearean Chinese Garden.) In works of more intimate character, Purcell often reverted to the lachrymose manner of Dowland and other Elizabethan masters. The lamenting chromatic fourth worms its way through the anthem “Plung’d in the confines of despair” and the sacred song “O I’m sick of life.”
In 1689 or shortly before, Purcell produced the most celebrated ground-bass lament in history: “When I am laid in earth,” Dido’s aria at the end of the short opera Dido and Aeneas. Could Purcell have known Cavalli’s Didone? Probably not, but he did make unforgettable use of the same chromatic-ostinato device that Cavalli implanted in Hecuba’s song. Purcell takes care first to introduce the bass line on its own, so there is no mistaking its expressive role. This is from an eighteenth-century copy:
The notes are like a chilly staircase stretching out before one’s feet. In the fourth full bar there’s a slight rhythmic unevenness, a subtle emphasis on the second beat (one-two-three). You can hear the piece almost as an immensely slow, immensely solemn chaconne. Nine times the ground unwinds, in five-bar segments. Over it, Dido sings her valediction, a blanket of strings draped over her:
When I am laid in earth, may my wrongs create
No trouble in thy breast,
Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.
The vocal line begins on G, works its way upward, and retreats, with pointed repetitions of the phrases “no trouble” and “remember me.” Dido’s long lines spill over the structure of the ground, so that she finds herself arching toward a climactic note just as the bass returns to the point of departure. First she reaches a D, then an E-flat. With the final “remember me” she attains the next higher G, the “me” falling on the second beat. When the song is done, there is a debilitating chromatic slide, undoing, step by step, the effort of the ascent. The ostinato of fate seems triumphant. Yet Dido’s high, brief cry is the sound we remember—a Morse-code signal from oblivion.
CIACCONA IN D MINOR
Bach’s Ciaccona for unaccompanied violin, a quarter-hour-long soliloquy of lacerating beauty, stands at such a distance from the hijinks of the Spanish chacona that the title seems almost ironic. With its white-knuckle virtuosity, its unyielding variation structure, and its tragic D-minor cast, this is a piece from which la vida bona appears to have been banished utterly. Yet the ghost of the dance hovers in the background. The image of Bach as a bewigged, sour-faced lawgiver of tradition has caused both performers and listeners to neglect the physical dimension of his work. To hear the Ciaccona played on the guitar—there are richly resonant recordings by Andrés Segovia and Julian Bream—is to realize that bodily pleasure has its place even in the blackest corners of Bach’s world.
Bach made his name as an organist, joining a starry lineage of northern European organ players that went back to the Dutch composer Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562–1621). Sweelinck, in turn, drew on the tortuous chromatic techniques of late-Renaissance Italy and Elizabethan England. In his Fantasia chromatica, Sweelinck subjects a descending chromatic figure and two companion themes to various contrapuntal manipulations, forming a spidery mass of intersecting lines. The finger-twisting brilliance of the writing is held in check by a taut tripartite scheme: in the first third, the theme proceeds at a regular tempo; in the second, it is slowed down; in the third, it goes faster and faster still. Such music marks the beginning of the Bachian art of the fugue.
The organists of the German Baroque, who included Dietrich Buxtehude and Johann Pachelbel, embraced the practice of “strict ostinato,” in which a short motif repeats in the bass while upper voices move about more freely. (The inescapable Pachelbel Canon is an ostinato exercise in a lulling major key.) The interplay between independent treble and locked-in bass acquires additional drama when the bass lines are bellowed out on the organ’s pedal notes—sixteen- and even thirty-two-foot pipes activated by the feet. Bach’s Passacaglia in C Minor, a looser kind of ostinato piece, begins with the bass alone, in a pattern that winds upward from the initial C before spiraling down an octave and a half to a bottom C that should be heard less as a note than as a minor earthquake. Bach was especially attracted to bass lines that crawled along chromatic steps. One of these shows up in the third movement of the playful little suite Capriccio on the Departure of a Beloved Brother, one of Bach’s earliest extant works. In the 1714 cantata “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen,” a corkscrew chromatic bass portrays the “weeping, wailing, fretting, and quaking” of Christ’s followers.
When, in 1723, Bach took up the position of cantor at St. Thomas School in Leipzig, he pledged that his music would be “of such a nature as not to make an operatic impression, but rather incite the listeners to devotion.” In employing Italian opera devices such as the lamento bass, he might have been trying to sublimate them, taming a dangerously sultry form. A man of religious convictions, Bach wrote in the margins of his favorite Bible commentary that music was “ordered by God’s spirit through David” and that devotional music showed the “presence of grace.” At the same time, though, his arioso melodies had the potential to undermine the austerity of the Lutheran service; even if he never wrote an opera, he displayed operatic tendencies. He presumably understood these contradictions, and possibly relished them. His comment about the “presence of grace” pertained to a faintly occult description of music-making at the Temple, in the second book of Chronicles: “It came even to pass, as the trumpeters and the singers were as one, to make one sound to be heard in praising and thanking the Lord … The house was filled with a cloud, even the house of the Lord.”
The Ciaccona for solo violin, which Bach composed in 1720 as part of his cycle of Sonatas and Partitas, possesses something like that ominous, cloudlike presence. It takes the form of sixty-four variations on a four-bar theme in D minor, with each four-bar segment generally repeated before the next variation begins. But the melodic strands of the opening bars—both treble and bass—disappear for long stretches as Bach explores new material. The “theme” is really a set of chords, framing limitless flux. (The copy reproduced on the previous page was probably made not long after Bach’s death.) Lament figures crop up throughout, sometimes plainly presented and sometimes hidden in the seams. A D-major middle section functions as a respite from the prevailing gloom of the piece, yet the apparition of a descending chromatic line high in the treble hints that these brighter days won’t last. Soon after, D minor returns, with a four-note lament motif planted firmly in the bass—the shade of “Fors seulement,” Lachrimae, and Lamento della ninfa.
It would appear that Bach has gone beyond rituals of mourning to a solitary, existential agony. In the words of Susan McClary, “the lone violinist must both furnish the redundant ostinato and also fight tooth and nail against it.” For McClary, the chaconne has become a formal prison for the struggling self. But Bach hasn’t entirely forgotten the sway of the dance. Alexander Silbiger, in a revealing essay, draws attention to passages of “repeated strumming,” “rustling arpeggiations,” “sudden foot-stamping.” Often Bach tests the limits of his variation scheme and lands back in D minor with a precarious lunge: “Some of these ventures bring to mind a trapeze artist, who swings further and further, reaching safety only at the last instant and leaving his spectators gasping.” The violin’s more florid gestures also make Silbiger think of jazz artists and sitar players, who “create the illusion of taking momentary flight from the solid ground that supports their improvisations, to the occasional bewilderment of their fellow performers.” In the end, the Ciaccona might be a grave dance before the Lord, the ballet of the soul in the course of a life.
In 1748 and 1749, the last full years of his earthly existence, Bach assembled his Mass in B Minor, rearranging extant works and writing new material in a quest for a comprehensive union of Catholic and Lutheran traditions. At the heart of the Mass is the section of the Credo that deals with the death of Jesus Christ on the cross:
Crucifixus etiam pro nobis He was also crucified for us
sub Pontio Pilato, passus under Pontius Pilate, suffered,
et sepultus est. and was buried.
To find music for this text, Bach went back thirty-five years in his output, to the “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” chorus, with its twelve somber soundings of a chromatic bass. But he stepped up the pulsation of the ground, so that instead of three half notes per bar we hear a faster, tenser rhythm of six quarter notes per bar. He changed the instrumentation, adding breathy flutes to tearful strings. He inserted a brief instrumental prelude, so that, as in Purcell, we first hear the bass line without the voices. Bach thus expanded the structure from twelve to thirteen parts. Whether he intended any symbolism in the number thirteen is unknown, although most of his listeners would have been aware that the Last Supper had thirteen guests. This is in Bach’s own hand:
As in Didone and Dido and Aeneas, the chromatic pattern evokes an individual pinned down by fate. This time, the struggler is not a woman but a man, one who knows full well what fate has in store. Bach makes Jesus Christ seem pitiably human at the moment of his ultimate suffering, so that believers may confront more directly their own grief and guilt. (Martin Luther vilified the Jews, but he also preached that Christians should hold none but themselves responsible for Christ’s killing.) It is a quasi-operatic scene, although it is witnessed at a properly awed distance. The voices wend away from the bass, moving in various directions. There are slowly pulsing chords of strings on the first and third beats, flutes on the second and third: they suggest something dripping, perhaps blood from Christ’s wounds, or tears from the eyes of his followers. In the thirteenth iteration, the bass singers give up their contrary motion and join the trudge of the continuo section. The sopranos, too, follow a chromatic path. The upper instruments fall silent, as if the dripping has stopped and life is spent. Fate’s victory seems complete. But then the bass suddenly reverses direction, and there is a momentous swerve from E minor into the key of G major. On the next page, the Resurrection begins.
ROMANTIC VARIATIONS
Bach died in 1750, and the Baroque era more or less died with him. Forms of rigid repetition lost their appeal as the Baroque gave way to the Classical period and then to the Romantic: increasingly, composers valued constant variation, sudden contrast, unrelenting escalation. Music became linear rather than circular, with large-scale structures proceeding from assertive thematic ideas through episodes of strenuous development to climaxes of overwhelming magnitude. “Time’s cycle had been straightened into an arrow, and the arrow was traveling ever faster,” the scholar Karol Berger writes. Music would no longer react to an exterior order; instead, it would become a kind of aesthetic empire unto itself. In 1810, E.T.A. Hoffmann wrote a review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony in which he differentiated the Romantic ethos from the more restrained spirit of prior centuries: “Orpheus’s lyre opened the gates of Orcus. Music reveals to man an unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world surrounding him, a world in which he leaves behind all feelings circumscribed by intellect in order to embrace the inexpressible.”
For composers of Mozart’s time and after, the chaconne, the passacaglia, and the lamento aria would have been antique devices learned from manuals of counterpoint and the like. Yet they never disappeared entirely. Beethoven studied Bach in his youth, and at some point he came across the B-Minor Mass, or a description of it; in 1810 he asked his publisher to send him “a Mass by J. S. Bach that has the following Crucifixus with a basso ostinato as obstinate as you are”—and he wrote out the “Crucifixus” bass line. Beethoven was undoubtedly thinking of Bach when, in his Thirty-two Variations in C Minor of 1806, he elaborated doggedly on the downward chromatic fourth. Eighteen years later, a “Crucifixus” figure cropped up in the stormy D-minor opening movement of the Ninth Symphony. Thirty-five bars before the end, the strings and bassoons churn out a basso lamento that has the rhythm of a dirge: you can almost hear the feet of pallbearers dragging alongside a hero’s casket.
Yet the ostinato is a nightmare from which Beethoven wishes to wake. The finale of the Ninth rejects the mechanics of fateful repetition: in the frenzied, dissonant music that opens the finale, the chromatic descent momentarily resurfaces, and when it is heard again at the beginning of the vocal section of the movement the bass soloist intones, “O friends, not these tones!” At which point the Ode to Joy begins. Beethoven might have been echoing the central shift of the B-Minor Mass—the leap from the chromatic “Crucifixus” to the blazing “Et resurrexit.”
The lamento bass would not stay buried. It rumbles in much music of the later nineteenth century: in various works of Brahms, in the late piano music of Liszt, in the songs and symphonies of Mahler. It is a dominating presence in Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony, which ends with a slow movement marked Adagio lamentoso. Even in the first bars of the first movement, double basses creep down step by chromatic step while a single bassoon presses fitfully upward. (The scenario is much like the contrary motion of the upper and lower voices in Dido’s Lament.) The final Adagio begins with a desperately eloquent theme that contains within it the time-worn contour of folkish lament. In the coda, Tchaikovsky combines the modal and chromatic forms of the lamento pattern, creating a hybrid emblem of grief, somewhat in the manner of Bach’s chaconne. The passage plays out over a softly pulsing bass note that recalls the eternal basses of Bach’s Passions.
The affect of the Adagio lamentoso could hardly be clearer. Tchaikovsky seems to have reverted to the mimetic code of Renaissance writers such as Ficino: as the music droops, so droops the heart, until death removes all pain. Indeed, the tone of lament is so fearsomely strong that many listeners have taken it to be a direct transcription of Tchaikovsky’s own feelings. The work had its premiere nine days before the composer’s sudden death, of cholera, in 1893, and almost immediately people began to speculate that it was a conscious farewell. Wild rumors circulated: according to one tale, Tchaikovsky had committed suicide at the behest of former schoolmates who were scandalized by his homosexuality. That last story is a fascinating case of musically induced hallucination, for the biographer Alexander Poznansky has established that no such plot could have existed and that Tchaikovsky was actually in good spirits before he fell ill. The Pathétique is best understood not as a confession but as a riposte to Beethoven’s heroic narrative, the progression from solitary struggle to collective joy. In the vein of Dowland, Tchaikovsky asserts the power of the private sphere—the contrary stance of the happily melancholy self. Indeed, lament has never made so voluptuous a sound.
THE LIGETI LAMENTO
In the twentieth century, time’s arrow again bent into a cycle, to follow Karol Berger’s metaphor. While some composers pursued ever more arcane musics of the future, others found a new thrill in archaic repetition. Chaconne and related forms returned to fashion. Schoenberg, hailed and feared as the destroyer of tonality, actually considered himself Bach’s heir, and his method of twelve-tone writing, which extracts the musical material of a piece from a fixed series of twelve notes, is an extension of the variation concept. (So argued Stefan Wolpe, an important Schoenberg disciple, in an essay on Bach’s Passacaglia in C Minor.) “Nacht,” the eighth song of Schoenberg’s melodrama Pierrot lunaire, is subtitled “Passacaglia,” its main theme built around a downward chromatic segment. The revival of Baroque forms quickened after the horror of the First World War, which impelled young composers to distance themselves from a blood-soaked Romantic aesthetic. The circling motion of the chaconne and the passacaglia also summons up a modern kind of fateful loop—the grinding of a monstrous engine or political force. In Berg’s Wozzeck, a passacaglia reflects the regimented madness of military life; in Britten’s Peter Grimes, the same form voices the mounting dread of a boy apprentice in the grip of a socially outcast fisherman.
No modern composer manipulated the lament and the chaconne more imaginatively than György Ligeti, whose music is known to millions through Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Indeed, Ligeti inspired the present essay. In 1993, I heard the composer give a series of dazzlingly erudite talks at the New England Conservatory, in Boston, during which he touched many times on the literature of lament. At one point Ligeti sang the notes “La, sol, fa, mi”—A, G, F, E, the Lamento della ninfa bass—and began cataloguing its myriad appearances in Western music, both in the classical repertory and in folk melodies that he learned as a child. He remembered hearing the bocet in Transylvania: “I was very much impressed by these Romanian lamentos, which old women sing who are paid when somebody is dead in a village. And maybe this is some musical signal which is very, very deep in my subconscious.” He noted a resemblance between Eastern European Gypsy music and Andalusian flamenco. He also spoke of Gesualdo’s madrigals, Purcell’s “When I am laid in earth,” Bach’s “Crucifixus,” and Schubert’s Quartet in G Major—about which more will be said in a later chapter.
Ligeti first encountered the older repertory while studying at the Kolozsvár Conservatory, in the early 1940s. The Second World War interrupted his schooling: after serving in a forced-labor gang, he returned home to discover that many of his relatives, including his father and his brother, had died in the Nazi concentration camps. His first major postwar work, Musica ricercata for piano (1951–53), dabbled in various Renaissance and Baroque tricks; the final movement, a hushed fugue, draws on one of Frescobaldi’s chromatic melodies. After leaving Hungary, in 1956, Ligeti entered his avant-garde period, producing scores in which melody and harmony seem to vanish into an enveloping fog of cluster chords, although those masses of sound are in fact made up of thousands of swirling microscopic figures. In the 1980s, Ligeti resumed an eccentric kind of tonal writing, in an effort to engage more directly with classical tradition; perhaps he also wished to excavate his tortured memories of the European past. The finale of his Horn Trio is titled “Lamento”; at the outset, the violin softly wails in a broken chromatic descent. Although the motif recurs in chaconne style, this is a somewhat unhinged ceremony of mourning, its funereal tones giving way to outright delirium. In the climactic passage, the three instruments execute musical sobs in turn, as if mimicking village cries that Ligeti heard as a child.
In the last phase of his career, Ligeti devised his own lament signature. Richard Steinitz, the composer’s biographer, defines it as a melody of three falling phrases, dropping sometimes by half-steps and sometimes by wider intervals, with the note of departure often inching upward in pitch and the final phrase stretching out longer than the previous two. That heightening and elongating of the phrases is another memory of folk practice. The Ligeti lamento cascades through all registers of the piano etude “Automne à Varsovie”; it also figures in several recklessly intense passages of the Violin Concerto (whose fourth movement is a Passacaglia) and of the Piano Concerto. And in the Viola Sonata, chaconne and lament once again intersect. The final movement of the sonata is titled “Chaconne chromatique,” and the rhythm of the principal theme—short-long, short-long, short-short-short-short long—recalls the languid motion of Dido’s Lament. Then the motif begins to accelerate, becoming, in Steinitz’s words, “fast, exuberant, passionate.” As in Hungarian Rock, Ligeti’s rollicking chaconne for harpsichord, the specter of the old Spanish dance returns, writhing behind a modernist scrim.
THE BLUES
In 1903, the African-American bandleader W. C. Handy was killing time at a train depot in Tutwiler, Mississippi—a small town in the impoverished, mostly black Mississippi Delta region—when he came upon a raggedly dressed man singing and strumming what Handy later described as “the weirdest music I had ever heard.” The nameless musician, his face marked with “the sadness of the ages,” kept repeating the phrase “Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog,” and he bent notes on his guitar by applying a knife to the strings. The refrain referred to the meeting point of two railway lines, but it conjured up some vaguer, supernatural scene. Handy tried to capture the phantom singer of Tutwiler in such numbers as “The Memphis Blues,” “The Yellow Dog Blues,” and “The St. Louis Blues.” The last, in 1914, set off an international craze for the music that came to be known as the blues.
One feature common to many early blues, whether commercial or rural, is the old downward chromatic slide. It runs in an almost subliminal way through the opening sequence of “St. Louis Blues,” and makes an unmistakable appearance in Bessie Smith’s 1925 recording of the song, where the young Louis Armstrong traces rapierlike solos on his trumpet. In Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” it takes on burlesque exuberance, merging with the sassy glissando of the slide trombone.
In the late twenties and thirties, recording technology captured the voices of numerous authentic practitioners of the Delta blues: Charley Patton, Willie Brown, Son House, Skip James, Robert Johnson, and others. These singers made a living variously as field hands, laborers, drifters, and bootleggers, playing in their spare time. All over their records you hear a rapid articulation of the descending chromatic figure—think of the “Crucifixus” bass line sped up and stripped down. When Willie Brown plays it on “Future Blues,” the strings snap violently in emphasis:
Can’t tell my future, I can’t tell my past
Lord, it seems like every minute sure gon’ be my last.
Skip James, the canniest musician among Delta blues singers, uses the chromatic riff for ironic effect in “I’m So Glad”; it’s an ostensibly uplifting number with a gospel tinge, but the continual chromatic undertow undercuts the singer’s claim to be “tired of weeping, tired of moaning, tired of groaning for you.” Chromatic lines snake through James’s “Devil Got My Woman,” a beautifully baleful ode to love gone wrong: “I’d rather be the devil than be that woman[’s] man …” Robert Johnson, rumored to have sold his soul to the devil for the sake of his art, leaned heavily on the chromatic slide in such numbers as “Cross Road Blues,” “Me and the Devil Blues,” and “Walkin’ Blues.”
The origins of the riff are obscure. It seems to have deep roots in black music, reaching back through ragtime to the sketchily documented repertories of nineteenth-century African-American song. It might even be related to slithery chromatic lines that have been recorded in chants of the Ewe and Yoruba peoples, in West Africa. Although it holds to the classic devil’s-staircase shape, it has little apparent connection to the ostinato laments of previous eras: it’s a decorative element, not a bass line. And it gives off a different vibe, in keeping with the emotional complexity of blues form. A blues is sensual, knowing, tough; it’s full of resilience, even as it heeds the power of fate. The gesture of lament annuls itself and engenders its opposite. This is the subtext of Duke Ellington’s pathbreaking 1935 piece Reminiscing in Tempo, a thirteen-minute jazz fantasia propelled by a short chromatic ostinato. It was written in the wake of the death of the composer’s mother, but it keeps sorrow at bay, ending in a jaunty, urbane mood. The trudging ostinato becomes a walking, dancing bass.
Blues chromaticism entered the American mainstream through the hot jazz of the Roaring Twenties. It was also a favorite tool in the workshops of Tin Pan Alley: Gershwin loved to introduce half-step motion into the inner voices of songs like “Someone to Watch Over Me.” A hint of the descending chromatic bass shadows the opening of Richard Rodgers’s “My Funny Valentine.” Of course, Tin Pan Alley writers, many of them from Russian-Jewish backgrounds, had multiple sources for these tricks of the trade; they drew liberally on late-Romantic classical music and also on Yiddish song. One way or another, the sighing chromatic line became so widespread as a sign of worldly-wise sophistication that it turned into a journeyman cliché. Sometimes, though, it came bearing a more urgent message. When Frank Sinatra began making downcast concept albums in the later 1950s—In the Wee Small Hours, Only the Lonely, No One Cares, and other studies in Cold War melancholia—he seemed to require morose chromatic lines to set the tone. A lamenting pizzicato bass prowls through Sinatra’s “Angel Eyes,” whose Scotch-soaked emotional state goes from the vengeful to the suicidal (“Excuse me while I disappear”).
Sinatra’s nocturnal ballads of the fifties forecast a weird and wonderful twist of musical history: the return, circa 1965, of the chromatic basso lamento, in strict, almost neo-Baroque guise. Why it came back is difficult to explain. For one thing, the American folk-music revival of the fifties gave new life to ancient ballad forms, which depended on strophic repetition. Also, Baroque music was much in vogue in the later fifties, with I Musici’s recording of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Glenn Gould’s account of the chaconnelike Goldberg Variations selling in mass quantities. And perhaps Brazilian bossa nova played an assisting role; as Peter Williams points out, in his wide-ranging survey The Chromatic Fourth, liquid chromatic lines course through Antônio Carlos Jobim’s “Corcovado,” also known as “Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars.”
Whatever the reason, by the mid-sixties the lamento bass was again the rage. You hear it in “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” the waltzing chimney-sweep song in Richard and Robert Sherman’s movie musical Mary Poppins. You hear it also in “Michelle,” on the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, and in various later Beatles songs. It sounds seven times in Bob Dylan’s psychedelic manifesto “Ballad of a Thin Man,” setting up the refrain “Something is happening here / But you don’t know what it is / Do you, Mr. Jones?” (The song’s dramatis personae, consisting of one-eyed midgets, circus geeks, and sword swallowers in high heels, vaguely resembles the guest list for the wedding of Almadán, as described in Juan Arañés’s “Un sarao de la chacona.”) The rock scholar Walter Everett has catalogued dozens of chromatic basses in sixties and seventies pop: a peculiar playlist could be assembled from the likes of “How Could I Be Such a Fool?” “Can’t Take My Eyes off You,” “My Way,” “Hooked on a Feeling,” “Time in a Bottle,” and the Eagles’ “Hotel California.” As Everett notes, the last song is fittingly set in a decadent Spanish-mission town, by the side of a desert highway.
It fell to Led Zeppelin, the behemoth hard-rock band of the seventies, to perfect the rock Baroque. Dylan and the Beatles may have won the plaudits of the intellectuals, but Led Zeppelin launched a no less ambitious raid on music history, commandeering rock, folk music, Delta blues, Indian and other non-Western music, and smatterings of classical tradition. “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You” and “Stairway to Heaven” both take off from meticulous finger-picking exercises for semi-classical guitar, with descending chromatic lines interwoven; washes of Bachian organ playing give a churchy aura to “Your Time Is Gonna Come” and “Since I’ve Been Loving You.” Several of the band’s weightiest creations rest on artfully repeating bass lines: “Kashmir” is built on a riff that climbs step by chromatic step.
Led Zeppelin’s early magnum opus was “Dazed and Confused,” a tormented love song that Jimmy Page, the band’s fleet-fingered, mildly satanic guitarist, first started playing when he was in the Yardbirds. Page borrowed many elements of the piece from a New York singer-songwriter named Jake Holmes, who included a track with the same name on his 1967 album “The Above Ground Sound” of Jake Holmes. Holmes’s song is anchored in consecutive chromatic descents; they were the work of an itinerant bass guitarist named Rick Randle, whom Holmes later described as “absolutely stone, raving mad,” and who was last reported living in Utah with a witch.
In the Led Zeppelin version, which appeared on the band’s debut album of 1969, John Paul Jones gave the bass line a forbidding, organlike sound—the Delta blues riff monumentalized. In recordings from the band’s stadium tours of the early seventies, where the song stretches on for half an hour or more, the bass motto undergoes ostentatious transformations, sometimes shimmering on Page’s bowed guitar, sometimes shrieking in the high falsetto zone of Robert Plant’s voice. For long stretches, the bass falls silent while singer and guitarist call out to each other, like wanderers lost in a desolate landscape. Finally, in a climactic passage, the theme is thundered out on guitar and bass in tandem, saturating the musical space.
When the chacona first surfaced, at the end of the sixteenth century, it promised an upending of the social order, a liberation of the body. The same outlaw spirit animates modern rock and pop: the swirl of a repeating bass line allows a crowd of dancing fans to forget, for a little while, the linear routines of daily life. When Frescobaldi and Bach recast the dance as a stern, inward-turned form, bending it toward lament, they hinted at a different sort of freedom, that of the individual defining himself in opposition to the mass. “Dazed and Confused,” in its inner sections, implies a similar quest for self: the raw drive of rock and roll gives way to spacey variations. It’s a big, brash rock anthem at heart, but, just as the dance abides in Bach’s chaconne, the lament lingers in the rock arena. Above all, the song demonstrates how the same deep musical structures keep materializing across the centuries. If a time machine were to bring together some late-sixteenth-century Spanish musicians, a continuo section led by Bach, and players from Ellington’s 1940 band, and if John Paul Jones stepped in with the bass line of “Dazed and Confused,” they might, after a minute or two of confusion, find common ground. The dance of the chacona is wider than the sea.
3 INFERNAL MACHINES HOW RECORDINGS CHANGED MUSIC (#ulink_e49cf760-31ce-5355-8512-b1e8085517c9)
More than a century ago, the composer and bandleader John Philip Sousa warned that technology would destroy music. Testifying before the United States Congress in 1906, he said, “These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic development of music in this country. When I was a boy … in front of every house in the summer evenings you would find young people together singing the songs of the day or the old songs. Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day. We will not have a vocal cord left.” Sousa expanded on the theme in subsequent articles and interviews. “The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music,” he declared. “Everyone will have their ready made or ready pirated music in their cupboards.” Something is irretrievably lost when we are no longer in the presence of bodies making music, Sousa also said. “The nightingale’s song is delightful because the nightingale herself gives it forth.”
Before you dismiss Sousa as a curmudgeon, you might consider how drastically music has changed in the past hundred years. It has achieved onrushing omnipresence in our world: millions of hours of its history are available on disc; rivers of digital melody flow on the Internet; MP3 players with forty thousand songs can be tucked in a back pocket or a purse. Yet, for most of us, music is no longer something we do ourselves, or even watch other people do in front of us. It has become a radically virtual medium, an art without a face. When we walk around the city on an ordinary day, our ears will register music at almost every turn—bass lines pumping from passing cars, bits of hip-hop seeping out of the headphones of teenagers on the subway, a lawyer’s cell phone tweeting Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”—but almost none of it will be the immediate result of physical work by human hands or voices. Fewer and fewer people know how to play instruments or read music. In the future, Sousa’s ghost might say, reproduction will displace production. Zombified listeners will shuffle through the archives of the past, and new music will consist of rearrangements of the old.
Ever since Edison invented the phonograph cylinder, in 1877, people have been assessing what the medium of recording has done for and to the art of music. Inevitably, the conversation has veered toward rhetorical extremes. Sousa was a pioneering spokesman for the party of doom, which was later filled out by various reactionaries, contrarians, Luddites, and post-Marxist theorists. In the opposite corner are the utopians, who argue that technology has not imprisoned music but liberated it, bringing the art of the elite to the masses and the art of the margins to the center. Before Edison came along, the utopians say, Beethoven’s symphonies could be heard only in select concert halls. Now recordings carry the man from Bonn to the corners of the earth, summoning the throng hailed in the “Ode to Joy”: “Be embraced, millions!” Glenn Gould, after renouncing live performance in 1964, predicted that within a century the public concert would disappear into the electronic ether, with a largely beneficial effect on musical culture.
Having discovered much of my favorite music through LPs and CDs, I am not about to join the lamenting party. Modern urban environments are often so soulless or ugly that I’m grateful for the humanizing touch of electronic sound. But neither can I accept Gould’s slashing futurism. I want to be aware of technology’s effects, positive and negative. I want a pragmatic theory that mediates between live performance and reproduction, without either apocalyptic screeching or corporate hype. Fortunately, scholars and critics have been methodically exploring this terrain for many decades, trying to figure out exactly what happens when we listen to music with no musicians in the room. They have reached no unshakable conclusions, but they give us most of the conceptual tools we need in order to listen with the alertness—and the ambivalence—that this magical medium demands.
The principal irony of the history of recording is that Edison did not make the phonograph with music in mind. Rather, he conceived of his cylinder as a business gadget, one that would supersede the costly, imperfect practice of stenography and have the added virtue of preserving in perpetuity the voices of the deceased. In an 1878 essay titled “The Phonograph and Its Future,” Edison or his ghostwriter proclaimed that his invention would “annihilate time and space, and bottle up for posterity the mere utterance of man.” “Annihilation” is an interestingly ambiguous figure of speech. Recording opened lines of communication between far-flung worlds, but it also placed older art and folk traditions in danger of extinction. With American popular culture as its house god, it brought about a global homogenization of taste, the effects of which are still spreading.
Although Edison mentioned the idea of recording music in his 1878 article, he had no inkling of a music industry. He pictured the phonograph as a tool for teaching singing and as a natural extension of domestic music-making: “A friend may in a morning-call sing us a song which shall delight an evening company.” By the 1890s, however, alert entrepreneurs had installed phonographs in penny arcades, allowing customers to listen to favorite songs over ear tubes. In 1888, Emile Berliner introduced the flat disc, a less cumbersome storage device, and envisioned with it the entire modern music business—mass distribution, recording stars, royalties, and the rest. In 1902, the first great star was born: the tenor Enrico Caruso, whose voice remains one of the most transfixing phenomena in the history of the medium. The ping in Caruso’s tone, that golden bark, made the man himself seem viscerally present, proving Edison’s theory of the annihilation of space and time. Not so lucky was Johannes Brahms, who, in 1889, attempted to record his First Hungarian Dance. The master seems to be sending us a garbled message from a spacecraft disintegrating near Pluto.
Whenever a new gadget comes along, salespeople inevitably point out that an older gadget has been rendered obsolete. The automobile pushed aside the railroad; the computer replaced the typewriter. Sousa feared that the phonograph would supplant live music. His fears were excessive but not irrational. The Victor Talking Machine Company, which the engineer Eldridge Johnson founded in 1901, marketed its machines not just as vessels for music but as instruments in themselves. In a way, Victor was taking direct aim at the piano, which, around the turn of the century, dominated domestic musical life, from the salon to the tavern. The top-selling Victrola of 1906, a massive object standing four feet tall and weighing 137 pounds, was encased in “piano-finished” mahogany, if anyone was missing the point. Ads showed families clustered about their phonographs, no piano in sight. Edison, whose cylinders soon began to lag behind flat discs in popularity, was so determined to demonstrate the verisimilitude of his machines that he held a nationwide series of Tone Tests, during which halls were plunged into darkness and audiences were supposedly unable to tell the difference between Anna Case singing live and one of her records.
Each subsequent leap in audio technology—microphones, magnetic tape, long-playing records, stereo sound, transistors, digital sound, the compact disc, and the MP3—has elicited the same kind of over-the-top reaction. The latest device inspires heady confusion between reality and reproduction, while yesterday’s wonder machine is exposed as inadequate, even primitive. When, in 1931, the composer and critic Deems Taylor heard a pioneering example of stereophonic recording, he commented, “The difference between what we usually hear and what I heard was, roughly, the difference between looking at a photograph of somebody and looking at the person himself.” Twenty years later, Howard Taubman wrote of a long-playing record on the Mercury label: “The orchestra’s tone is so lifelike that one feels one is listening to the living presence.” (Mercury promptly adopted “Living Presence” as its slogan.) A high-fidelity ad of the 1950s offered users “the finest seat in the house”—an experience not simply equal to the concert hall but superior to it, cleansed of the inconvenience of “audience distraction.” A television commercial of the seventies, starring Ella Fitzgerald, famously asked, “Is it live or is it Memorex?” Compact discs promised “perfect sound forever.”
Just as inevitably, audiophile happy-talk leads to a backlash among listeners who doubt the rhetoric of fidelity and perfection. Dissenters complain that the latest device is actually inferior to the old—artificial, inauthentic, soulless. Greg Milner has documented this never-ending back-and-forth in his book Perfecting Sound Forever, a smartly skeptical account of the ideology of audio progress. Some enthusiasts of the Edison cylinder felt that no other machine gave such a faithful sensation of the warmth of the human voice. When electrical recording came in, a few stalwarts detected nothing but fakery in the use of microphones to amplify soft sounds and invent a sonic perspective that does not exist for human ears. “I wonder if pure tone will disappear from the earth sometimes,” a British critic wrote in 1928.
Magnetic tape led to the most crucial shift in the relationship between recordings and musical reality. German engineers perfected the magnetic tape recorder, or Magnetophon, during the Second World War. Late one night, an audio expert turned serviceman named Jack Mullin was monitoring German radio when he noticed that an overnight orchestral broadcast was astonishingly clear: it sounded “live,” yet not even at Hitler’s whim could the orchestra have been playing in the middle of the night. After the war was over, Mullin tracked down a Magnetophon and brought it to America. He demonstrated it to Bing Crosby, who used it to tape his broadcasts in advance. Crosby was a pioneer of perhaps the most famous of all technological effects, the croon. Magnetic tape meant that Bing could practically whisper into the microphone and still be heard across America; a marked drop-off in surface noise meant that vocal murmurs could register as readily as Louis Armstrong’s pealing trumpet.
The magnetic process also allowed performers to invent their own reality in the studio. Errors could be corrected by splicing together bits of different takes. In the sixties, the Beatles and the Beach Boys, following in the wake of electronic compositions by Cage and Stockhausen, constructed intricate studio soundscapes that could never be replicated onstage; even Glenn Gould would have had trouble executing the mechanically accelerated keyboard solo in “In My Life.” The great rock debate about authenticity began. Were the Beatles pushing the art forward by reinventing it in the studio? Or were they losing touch with the rugged intelligence of folk, blues, and rock traditions? Bob Dylan stood at a craggy opposite extreme, turning out records in a few days’ time and avoiding any vocal overdubs until the seventies. The Dylan scholar Clinton Heylin points out that while the Beatles spent 129 days crafting Sgt. Pepper, Dylan needed only 90 days to make his first fifteen records. Yet frills-free, “lo-fi” recording has no special claim on musical truth; indeed, it easily becomes another effect, the effect of no effect. Today’s neoclassical rock bands pay good money to sound old.
The advent of digital recording was, for many skeptics, the ultimate outrage. The old machines vibrated in sympathy with their subjects: the hills and valleys on a cylinder or a flat disc followed the contours of the music. Digital technology literally chopped the incoming vibrations into bits—strings of 0’s and 1’s that were encoded onto a compact disc and then reconstituted on a CD player. Traditionalists felt that the end product was a kind of android music. Neil Young, the raw-voiced Canadian singer-songwriter, was especially withering: “Listening to a CD is like looking at the world through a screen window.” Step by step, recordings have become an ever more fictional world, even as they become ever more “real.” The final frontier—for the moment—has been reached with Auto-Tune, Pro Tools, and other forms of digital software, which can readjust out-of-tune playing and generate entire orchestras from nowhere. At the touch of a key, a tone-deaf starlet becomes dulcet and a college rock band turns Wagnerian.
Yet some audio equivalent of the law of conservation of energy means that these incessant crises have a way of balancing themselves out. Fakers, hucksters, and mediocrities prosper in every age; artists of genius manage to survive, or, at least, to fail memorably. Technology has certainly advanced the careers of nonentities, but it has also lent a hand to those who lacked a foothold in the system. Nowhere is this more evident than in the story of African-American music. Almost from the start, recording permitted black musicians on the margins of the culture—notably, the blues singers of the Mississippi Delta—to speak out with nothing more than a voice and a guitar. Many of these artists were robbed blind by corporate manipulators, but their music got through. Recordings gave Armstrong, Ellington, Chuck Berry, and James Brown the chance to occupy a global platform that Sousa’s idyllic old America, racist to the core, would have denied them. The fact that their records played a crucial role in the advancement of African-American civil rights puts in proper perspective the debate about whether or not technology has been “good” for music.
Hip-hop, the dominant turn-of-the-century pop form, gives the most electrifying demonstration of technology’s empowering effect. As Jeff Chang recounts, in his book Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, the genre rose up from desperately impoverished high-rise ghettos, where families couldn’t afford to buy instruments for their kids and even the most rudimentary music-making seemed out of reach. But music was made all the same: the phonograph itself became an instrument. In the South Bronx in the 1970s, DJs like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash used turntables to create a hurtling collage of effects—loops, breaks, beats, scratches. Later, studio-bound DJs and producers used digital sampling to assemble some of the most densely packed sonic assemblages in musical history: Eric B. and Rakim’s Paid in Full, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic.
Sooner or later, every critique of recording gets around to quoting Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” written in the late 1930s. The most often cited passage is Benjamin’s discussion of the loss of an “aura” surrounding works of art—the “here and now” of the sacred artistic object, its connection to a well-defined community. This formulation seems to recall the familiar lament, going back to Sousa, that recordings have leeched the life out of music. But when Benjamin spoke of the withering of aura and the rise of reproducible art, lamentation was not his aim. While he stopped short of populism, he voiced a nagging mistrust of the elitist spiel—the automatic privileging of high-art devotion over mass-market consumption. The cult of art for art’s sake, Benjamin noted, was deteriorating into fascist kitsch. The films of Charlie Chaplin, by contrast, mixed comic pratfalls with subversive political messages. In other words, mechanical reproduction is not an inherently cheapening process; an outsider artist may use it to bypass cultural gatekeepers and advance radical ideas. That the thugs of commerce seldom fail to win out in the end does not lessen the glory of the moment.
Although classical performers and listeners like to picture themselves in a high tower, remote from the electronic melee, they, too, are in thrall to the machines. Some of the most overheated propaganda on behalf of new technologies has come from the classical side, where the illusion of perfect reproduction is particularly alluring. Classical recordings are supposed to deny the fact that they are recordings. That process involves, paradoxically, considerable artifice. Overdubbing, patching, knob-twiddling, and, in recent years, pitch correction have all come into play. The phenomenon of the dummy star, who has a hard time duplicating in the concert hall what he or she purports to do on record, is not unheard of.
Perhaps there is something unnatural in the very act of making a studio recording, no matter how intelligent the presentation. At the height of the hi-fiera, leading classical producers and executives—Walter Legge, at EMI; Goddard Lieberson, at Columbia Records; and John Culshaw, at Decca, to name three of the best—spent many millions of dollars engaging top-of-the-line orchestras, soloists, and conductors in an effort to create definitive recordings of the peaks of the repertory. They met their goal: any short list of gramophone classics would include Maria Callas’s Tosca, Wilhelm Furtwängler’s Tristan und Isolde, Georg Solti’s Ring, and Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations, all recorded or set in motion in the fifties. Yet the excellence of these discs posed a problem for the working musicians who had to play in their wake. Concert presenters began to complain that record collectors had formed a separate audience, one that seldom ventured into the concert hall. Recordings threatened to become a phantasmagoria, a virtual reality encroaching on concert life. (Gould claimed that the Decca Ring achieved “a more effective unity between intensity of action and displacement of sound than could be afforded by the best of all seasons at Bayreuth.”) When people did venture out, they brought with them the habits of home listening. The solitary ritual of absorbing symphonies in one’s living room almost certainly contributed to the growing quietude of the classical public; that applause-free spell after the first movement of the Eroica matches the whispery groove on the long-playing record.
Like Heisenberg’s mythical observer, the phonograph was never a mere recorder of events: it changed not only how people listened but also how they sang and played. Mark Katz, in his book Capturing Sound, calls these changes “phonograph effects.” (The phrase comes from the digital studio, where it is used to describe the crackling, scratching noises that are sometimes added to pop-music tracks to lend them an appealingly antique air.) Katz devotes one chapter of his book to a shift in violin technique that occurred in the early twentieth century. It involved vibrato—the trembling action of the hand on the fingerboard, whereby the player is able to give notes a warbling sweetness. Early recordings and written evidence suggest that in prior eras vibrato was used more sparingly than it is today. By the twenties and thirties, many leading violinists had adopted continuous vibrato, which became the approved style in conservatories. Katz proposes that technology prompted the change. When a wobble was added to violin tone, the phonograph was able to pick it up more easily; it’s a “wider” sound in acoustical terms, a blob of several superimposed frequencies. Also, the fuzzy focus of vibrato enabled players to cover up inaccuracies of intonation, and, from the start, the phonograph made players more self-conscious about intonation than they were before. What worked in the studio then spread to the concert stage.
Robert Philip, a British scholar who specializes in performance practice, tackles the same problem in his book Performing Music in the Age of Recording. He proposes that when musicians listened to records of their own playing they passed through a kind of mirror stage; for the first time, they were forced to confront their “true” selves. “Musicians who first heard their own recordings in the early years of the twentieth century were often taken aback by what they heard, suddenly being made aware of inaccuracies and mannerisms they had not suspected,” Philip writes. When they went back onstage, he says, they tried to embody the superior self that they glimpsed in the phonographic mirror, and never again played in quite the same way.
Philip gives a riveting description of what classical performances sounded like at the turn of the last century. “Freedom from disaster was the standard for a good concert,” he writes. Rehearsals were brief, mishaps routine. Precision was not a universal value. Pianists rolled chords instead of playing them at one stroke. String players slid expressively from one note to the next—portamento, the style was called—in imitation of the slide of the voice. In a 1912 recording, the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe “sways either side of the beat, while the piano maintains an even rhythm.” Orchestras flirted with chaos in an effort to generate maximum passion—witness Edward Elgar’s recordings of his music. And the instruments themselves sounded different, depending on the nationality of the player. French bassoons had a pungent tone, quite unlike the rounded timbre of German bassoons. French flutists, by contrast, used more vibrato than their German and English counterparts, supplying a warmer, mellower quality. American orchestral culture, which brought together immigrant musicians from all European countries, began to erode the differences, and recordings helped to cement the new standard practice. Whatever style sounded cleanest on the medium—in these cases, German bassoons and French flutes—became the golden mean. Young virtuosos today may have recognizable idiosyncrasies, but their playing seldom indicates that they have come from any particular place or that they have emerged from any particular tradition.
Opera is prey to the same standardizing trend. The conductor and scholar Will Crutchfield cites a startling example of a “phonograph effect” in an essay on changing perceptions of operatic style. He once sat down to compare all extant recordings of “Una furtiva lagrima,” the plaintive tenor aria from Donizetti’s bel-canto comedy L’elisir d’amore. Crutchfield wanted to know what singers of various eras have done with the cadenza—the passage at the end of the aria where the orchestra halts and the tenor engages in a few graceful acrobatics. Early recordings show singers trying out a range of possibilities, some contemplative, some florid, none the same. Then came Caruso. He first recorded “Una furtiva lagrima” in 1902, and returned to it three more times in the course of his epochal studio career. After that, tenors began imitating the stylish little display that Caruso devised: a quick up-and-down run followed by two slow, tender phrases. Out of more than two hundred singers who have recorded the aria since Caruso’s death, how many try something different? Crutchfield counts four. Many operagoers would identify Caruso’s cadenza as the “traditional” one, but Crutchfield calls it the “death-of-tradition” cadenza, the one that stifled a long-flourishing vocal practice.
The tics and traits of old-school performance—moving ahead or behind the beat, sliding between notes, breaking chords into arpeggios, improvising cadenzas, adding ornaments as the style demands—are alike in bringing out the distinct voices of the performers, not to mention the mere fact that they are fallible humans. Most modern playing tends to erase all evidence of the work that has gone on behind the scenes: virtuosity is defined as effortlessness. One often-quoted ideal is to “disappear behind the music.” But when precision is divorced from emotion it can become anti-musical, inhuman, repulsive. Is there any escape from the cycle? Robert Philip, having blamed recordings for a multitude of sins, ends by saying that they may be able to come to the rescue. By studying artifacts from the dawn of the century, musicians might recapture what has gone missing from the perfectionist style. They can rebel against the letter of the score in pursuit of its spirit. There are, however, substantial psychic barriers in the way of such a shift: performers will have to be unafraid of trying out mannerisms that will sound sloppy to some ears, of committing what will sound like mistakes. They will have to defy the hyper-competitive conservatory culture in which they came of age, and also the hyper-professionalized culture of the ensembles in which they find work.
In at least one area, performance style has undergone a sea change. Early music long had the reputation of being the most pedantically “correct” subculture in classical music, but in recent years the more dynamic Renaissance and Baroque ensembles—Jordi Savall’s Hespèrion XXI, William Christie’s Les Arts Florissants, Rinaldo Alessandrini’s Concerto Italiano, and various groups led by the violinist Andrew Manze and the keyboard player Richard Egarr, to name a few—have begun exercising all the freedoms that have gone missing in much modern performance. They execute some notes cleanly and others roughly, they weave around the beat instead of staying on top of it, they slide from note to note when they are so moved. If the score calls for or expects a cadenza or improvisation, they execute one of their own invention. As a result, the music feels liberated, and audiences respond in kind, with yelps of joy. Christie has said that his group is modeled on Duke Ellington’s band of 1929: players amble in and out of the spotlight, adding daubs of color before rejoining the background. If, in coming years, the freewheeling spirit of the early-music scene enters into performances of the nineteenth-century repertory, classical music may finally kick away its cold marble façade.
For those of us who grew up during the extended heyday of recordings, the digital landscape of the early twenty-first century presents a confusing picture. The record labels, which long held sway with an iron or velvet fist, are reeling, their products downloaded everywhere on file-sharing networks, their attempts to police piracy verging on the fascistic. The concept of a discrete album of songs or works is probably in terminal decline. In pop, the main money is now to be made in the packaging of tours and the selling of merchandise. Prince gave away millions of copies of his 2007 album Planet Earth as a way of luring audiences to his shows. In the same year, Radiohead offered its latest album, In Rainbows, through its own website, instructing fans to pay whatever they wished. The technology of easy access has become so sophisticated that it is undermining the corporate structure which brought it into being—a development that might have delighted Walter Benjamin. The brainy moguls of decades past are to be mourned, but in the long run it may not be a bad thing that young people have stopped hoarding music in the form of packaged objects. Music is no longer a prize in a collection; it is returning to its natural evanescent state.
Classical music, or a portion thereof, is thriving online in unexpected ways. Perhaps no one should be surprised; if, as people say, the Internet is a paradise for geeks, it would logically work to the benefit of one of the most opulently geeky art forms in history. The more resourceful organizations are offering live and archived audio (you can hear almost every event in London’s summertime Proms series through the website of the BBC), setting up online listening guides (the San Francisco Symphony has hightech maps of the Eroica and The Rite of Spring), assembling fastidious archives (the Metropolitan Opera site can tell you in a matter of seconds when any singer made his or her debut), and peddling studio-master-quality audio downloads (the Tallis Scholars sell their impeccable recordings of Renaissance masses). Web-savvy young composers, meanwhile, no longer depend on publishers to reach their public, distributing their wares through blogs, MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and whatever social network becomes fashionable after this book goes to press.
The diffusion of classical music online is a boon for fans, and it may also ease the fears of the infamous “culturally aware non-attenders.” Novice concertgoers and operagoers can shop for tickets, read synopses of unfamiliar plots, listen to snippets of unfamiliar music, read performers’ blogs, and otherwise get their bearings out on the tundra of the classical experience. First-time record-buyers can read reviews, compare audio samples, and decide on, for example, a Beethoven recording by Furtwängler, all without risking the humiliation of mispronouncing the conductor’s name under the gaze of a grumpy record clerk. In the days before the collapse of the record business, when megastores like Tower Records were thriving, sepulchral soundproofed doors divided the classical department from the rest of humanity. For better or worse, classical music no longer inhabits a separate room; it is in the mix.
At the same time, classical music stands partly outside the technological realm, because most of its repertory is designed to resonate naturally within a room. By contrast, almost all pop music is written for microphones and speakers. In a totally mediated society, where some form of electronic sound saturates nearly every minute of our waking lives, the act of sitting down in a concert hall, joining the expectant silence in the moments before the music begins, and surrendering to the elemental properties of sound can have an almost spiritual dimension. Classical supremacists of prior years might have described it as a rite of elevation, but for me it is something more primal and enigmatic. Forms coalesce and then vanish, like Rimsky-Korsakov’s phantom city of Kitezh.
In 1926, twenty years after Sousa foretold doom, the critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt reflected on the mechanization of music and came to this eminently sane conclusion: “The machine is neither a god nor a devil.” Mark Katz uses that quotation as an epigraph to Capturing Sound, and it nicely sums up the whole shebang. Neither the utopian nor the apocalyptic vision of the musical future has come to pass. People have plenty of pirated music in their cupboards, but they are still turning out for live performances, paying hundreds or even thousands of dollars to catch a glimpse of their idols. Music education is in tatters, but the impulse to make music with the voice, with an instrument, or on a computer remains. The critic David Hajdu, in an essay on the phenomenon of home remixing (creating new versions of songs on home computers), notes a curious throwback. “Members of the musical public are again assuming participatory roles, interpreting compositions at home, much as late Victorians played sheet music in parlor musicales,” he writes. In other words, we are almost back to where we started.
When I sift through my musical memory, I find that real and virtual events are inextricably jumbled. The strongest echoes are of live performances that shook me to the core: Mahler’s Eighth Symphony at Carnegie Hall, under the direction of the incomparable choral conductor Robert Shaw, with more than four hundred singers roaring forth in the first- and second-tier boxes; the post-punk bands Fugazi and the Ex in a sweat-drenched church basement in Washington, D.C., firing up a mass of youthful bodies; Gidon Kremer and five other musicians in an Austrian village church at midnight, presenting an extraordinarily eerie chamber arrangement of Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony. Then again, certain recordings carry an acute emotional charge: I think of the Bernstein Eroica that I pretended to conduct as a child, the LPs of Mahler’s Sixth that I blasted in high school late at night, the Pere Ubu CD that forced me to abandon my cavalier dismissal of rock music. But I can’t replicate the psychic impact of those first encounters. They were unrepeatable events on a private stage. As the composer and theorist Benjamin Boretz has written, “In music, as in everything, the disappearing moment of experience is the firmest reality.”
Nothing in my listening life can compare to the experience of Hans Fantel, an author and critic who for many years covered audio matters for The New York Times. In 1989 he wrote about what it was like for him to listen to a CD reissue of a classic disc: a live recording, made on January 16, 1938, of the Vienna Philharmonic playing Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, under the direction of Bruno Walter. Fantel spent his childhood in Vienna, and he attended that performance with his father.
“We could not know on that winter Sunday that this would turn out to be the last performance of the Vienna Philharmonic before Hitler crushed his homeland to make it part of the German Reich,” Fantel wrote. “The music, captured that day by the bulky old microphones I remember strung across the stage, was the last to be heard from many of the musicians in the orchestra. They and their country vanished.” Fantel put on the record and relived the occasion. “I could now recognize and appreciate the singular aura of that performance: I could sense its uncanny intensity—a strange inner turmoil quite different from the many other recordings and performances of Mahler’s Ninth I had heard since.”
Some of the turmoil was Fantel’s own. “This disc held fast an event I had shared with my father: seventy-one minutes out of the sixteen years we had together. Soon after, as an ‘enemy of Reich and Führer,’ my father also disappeared into Hitler’s abyss. That’s what made me realize something about the nature of phonographs: they admit no ending. They imply perpetuity … Something of life itself steps over the normal limits of time.”
PART II (#ulink_7e341996-fc6c-5d2b-aee2-ad5e0703efc6)
4 THE STORM OF STYLE MOZART’S GOLDEN MEAN (#ulink_6d15e224-32e6-5332-b2c3-3d314362bd70)
Wolfgang Amadè Mozart, as he usually spelled his name, was a small man with a plain, pockmarked face, whose most striking feature was a pair of intense blue-gray eyes. When he was in a convivial mood, his gaze was said to be warm, even seductive. But he often gave the impression of being not entirely present, as if his mind were caught up in some invisible event. Portraits suggest a man aware of his separation from the world. In one, he wears a hard, distant look; in another, his face glows with sadness. In several pictures, his left eye droops a little, perhaps from fatigue. “As touchy as gunpowder,” one friend called him. Nonetheless, he was generally well liked.
He was born in the archbishopric of Salzburg in 1756, and he died in the imperial capital of Vienna in 1791. He was a thoroughly urban creature, one who never had much to say about the charms of nature. A product of the artisan classes—his ancestors were bookbinders, weavers, and masons—he adopted aristocratic fashions, going around Vienna in a gold-trimmed hat and a red coat with mother-of-pearl buttons. He was physically restless, quick-witted, sociable, flirtatious, and obscene; one of the more provocative items in his catalogue is a canon for six voices titled Leck mich im Arsch (K. 231/382c). He frittered away money, not least on apartments that he could ill afford. He had considerable success, although he knew that he deserved more. If audiences were occasionally perplexed by his creations, listeners in high places recognized his worth. Emperor Joseph II was a fan of Mozart’s work, and, in 1787, to prevent “so rare a genius” from going abroad, he gave the composer a well-paying position that required little more than the writing of dances. In a letter to his father, Leopold, Mozart had warned that “the Viennese gentry, and in particular the Emperor, must not imagine that I am on this earth solely for the sake of Vienna.”
As a child, Mozart was advertised in London as “the most extraordinary Prodigy, and most amazing Genius, that has appeared in any Age.” Leopold dubbed him “the miracle whom God allowed to be born in Salzburg.” Prince Kaunitz, Joseph II’s chief minister, said, “Such people only come into the world once in a hundred years.” Praise at this level, however justified, takes its toll on a man’s humility. Mozart, by his own admission, could be “as proud as a peacock,” and the Archbishop of Salzburg, whose service he quit in 1781, was not the only person who considered him “dreadfully conceited.” Conceit edges easily into paranoia, and Mozart was not immune. “I think that something is going on behind the scenes, and that doubtless here too I have enemies,” he wrote from Paris, in 1778. “Where, indeed, have I not had them?” As he traces conspiracies, mocks the French, and extols the Germans, he sounds curiously like Richard Wagner.
Later, in Vienna, Mozart clung to the idea that Antonio Salieri, the Imperial Kapellmeister, was plotting against him. Whether or not such intrigues existed—John Rice’s biography of the supposedly dastardly Salieri portrays him as a likable character, and an intermittently imaginative composer—Mozart himself was not above politicking: when he applied for the job of second Kapellmeister, he pointedly observed that “Salieri, that very gifted Kapellmeister, has never devoted himself to church music.”
Playfulness was Mozart’s saving grace. His counterpart in modern times is perhaps George Gershwin, who was charming and self-infatuated in equal measure. Latter-day attempts to find a dark, despondent layer in Mozart’s psychology have been unconvincing. In his correspondence, he once or twice displays depressive symptoms—alluding to his “black thoughts,” describing sensations of coldness and emptiness—but context is all-important: in the first instance, he is begging for money, and in the second he is telling his wife, the demanding Constanze, how much he misses her. Nor should too much be made of a letter in which Mozart tells his dying father that death is the “true goal of our existence,” the “best and truest friend of mankind.” These sentiments were commonplace in a world where lives ended early and without warning. Of the seven children born to Leopold and Maria Anna Mozart, Wolfgang was one of two who survived infancy; only two of his own six children lived to adulthood. Against this backdrop, Mozart seems, if anything, indefatigably optimistic.
Leopold Mozart said of his son, “Two opposing elements rule his nature, I mean, there is either too much or too little, never the golden mean.” Often, an artist sets forth in his work what he cannot achieve in life, and Mozart’s music is the empire of the golden mean. Nicholas Kenyon, in The Pegasus Pocket Guide to Mozart, writes, “Other great composers have expressed the extremes of life: affirmation, despair, sensual pleasure, bleak emptiness, but only in Mozart can all these emotions coexist within the space of a short phrase.” Mozart inhabits a middle world where beauty surges in and ebbs away, where everything is contingent and nothing pure, where, as Henry James’s Madame Merle says, an envelope of circumstances encloses every human life. It is a place where genres meld; where concertos become operatic and arias symphonic; where comedy and tragedy, and the sensual and the sacred, are one.
You can find the golden mean running through the Andante of the Sinfonia Concertante for Violin and Viola, from 1779–80. A beguiling four-bar melody appears twice, in E-flat major in the middle and in C minor at the end. The first time, the major mode is briefly shadowed by a turn into the relative minor. The second time, minor is flecked by major, creating the effect of a light in the night. The two passages are more or less the same, but the space between them could contain a novel.
The musicologist Scott Burnham has observed that Mozart offers the “sound of the loss of innocence, the ever renewable loss of innocence.” There is no more potent subject for an artist, and it explains why Mozart remains so vivid a presence. As ever, the slow movement of the Piano Concerto No. 23 sends us into a pensive trance, the finale of the “Jupiter” Symphony wakes us up into a uniquely Mozartian kind of intelligent happiness, and the catastrophic climax of Don Giovanni stirs our primal fear of being weighed in the balance and found wanting. The loss of innocence was Mozart’s, too. Like the rest of us, he had to live outside the complex paradise that he created in sound.
Thousands of books have been written about Mozart, and they present a bewildering variety of images. For a long time, well into the twentieth century, many people pictured Mozart as the “eternal child”—an antic boy-man who happened to write sublime music. This was a theme of Alfred Einstein’s 1945 biography, long considered the standard work. Pushkin, in his play Mozart and Salieri, came up with an influential variant: Mozart as “idle hooligan.” This led to the eternal adolescent of the play and movie Amadeus—a potty-mouthed punk who happened to write sublime music. Other commentators have made Mozart out to be a Romantic in the making or a modernist before the fact—an aloof, tortured character, an agent of sexual subversion, or a clandestine social revolutionary.
Present-day scholars are picking away at the myths and fantasies that have encrusted the composer. They describe him not as a naïve prodigy or a suffering outcast but as a hardworking, ambitious, successful musician—“Mozart as a Working Stiff,” to borrow the title of an essay by Neal Zaslaw. One notable upshot has been the rehabilitation of Leopold Mozart, who long loomed over his son’s life story as an oppressive, even abusive, figure. Maynard Solomon, in his 1995 biography, presented damning evidence against Leopold, writing of the father’s “erotically tinged drive to dominate” his son. Leopold is said to have exploited Wolfgang in his early years, squirreling away profits from their European tours. When the gifted child became a problematic teen, Leopold exhibited an unhealthy possessiveness, opposing his son’s marriage plans and berating him for what he considered spendthrift behavior. His letters contain passages of world-class manipulation. “Your whole intent is to ruin me so you can build your castles in the air,” Leopold wrote in 1778, not long after his wife died while accompanying her son to Paris. “I hope that, after your mother had to die in Paris already, you will not also burden your conscience by expediting the death of your father.”
Leopold was a bit of a monster, but the job of raising the Miracle of Salzburg would have sapped anyone’s patience. Ruth Halliwell made the case for Leopold in her illuminating 1998 book, The Mozart Family. The father didn’t so much exploit the son as make him possible. Those long European tours gave Mozart an incomparable education; he went to London, Paris, Vienna, Milan, and Munich, met the monarchs and princes of the day, and talked to most of the leading composers. Knowing that his son’s musical gifts far exceeded his own, Leopold offered advice on the practical aspects of art and life, in which he was rather better versed. Who can deny the truth of Leopold’s maxim “Where money is plentiful, everything is dear, and where living is cheap, money will be scarce”? Or: “The best way to make people feel ashamed of themselves is to be extremely friendly and polite to those who are your enemies”? Mozart’s path would have been easier if he had absorbed a few of the bland but useful adages that his father passed along.
The letters between father and son become much livelier when music is the subject. On musical matters, the Mozarts are essentially of one mind; Leopold never seems to be reining in his son’s imagination. In late 1780 and early 1781, Mozart was in Munich, preparing his first major opera, Idomeneo, while Leopold was in Salzburg, supervising the librettist. The young composer was unleashing every expressive device available to him: as David Cairns writes, in his 2006 book Mozart and His Operas, Idomeneo touches on “love, joy, physical and spiritual contentment, stoicism, heroic resolution; the ecstasy of self-sacrifice, the horrors of dementia, the agonizing dilemma of a ruler trapped in the consequences of his actions; mass hysteria, panic in the face of an unknown scourge, turning to awe before the yet more terrible fact; the strange peace that can follow intense grief; the infinite tenderness of a father’s last farewell to his son.” Leopold was mostly a bystander to Mozart’s feat, but he did make one crucial contribution: for a pivotal scene in Act III, when the voice of Neptune’s oracle rises from the depths, he requested “moving, terrifying, and altogether unusual” music, and went on to suggest a series of sudden crescendos and decrescendos in the brass and winds, bracketing the vocal phrases. Exactly this effect appears in the finished score.
