Beethoven

I am presently reading Beethoven: the Man Revealed by John Suchet.

It is very pleasing to read about such a chaotic life.  He lived in his passions as few great men have.  While Mozart obsessed over his clothing, Beethoven repulsed his long time patron because he wanted Beethoven to play the piano at a dinner.  "There have been and will always be thousands of princes.  There is only one Beethoven."

He had no one to empty his chamber pot or wash his dishes.  In the midst of this chaos he wrote his greatest masterpieces.  We are told about his diarrhea and other digestive difficulties, but never is it suggested that the lack of cleanliness in his environment might be a cause.

He told his opinions out loud.  There is a painting showing him snubbing the Austrian Emperor.  Goethe is shown doffing his hat and bowing, while Beethoven marches on. Notice that the Emperor, the man with his back to us, doffs his hat to Goethe, too.

In Beethoven's life there are mysteries to be solved.  What caused his deafness?  How many people did he completely piss off?  And most mysterious of all:  who was the Immortal Beloved?  We learn that there was a woman who looked very much like Beethoven and was the child of one of the candidates.  There are letters in attics and fun things like that. Any biographer must present a candidate.  In this case two are presented.

The author is always telegraphing what is coming next.  Oh, this next thing is really terrible.  Stuff like that.  It's an easy read.

I love very much the description of him composing the tenor aria from Fidelio.  It is just as it should be.  I think with Beethoven his music and his soul are one.  His volatile emotions are everywhere to be heard in the music.
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Blogging

This blog is sort of a train of thought thing and not really a set of essays.  How does my life intersect with music?

I went to the local college to see The Beggar's Opera, and this has led me to Kurt Weill, which has then in turn led me to actually read the book Kurt Weill on Stage which I have had around the house for a while.  Weill is a long time obsession that I may wish to indulge in.

Suddenly I am wanting to watch Berlin Alexanderplatz which is about this period.

I would have to research this further, but it seems my inability to see a clear Marxist vision in the texts of Bertolt Brecht comes from his own confusion about it.

I also find that I am conflicted about covering students in the form of reviews.

American Weill:

Performance Practice II

Continuing with Singing in Style by Martha Elliott, subtitled A Guide to Vocal Performance Practices:

Isn't this the coolest thing!   I swear I've never heard of this.  Caccini described an ornament where you start a third or fourth below the written pitch and slide up to the real note.  Another guy calls this cercar della nota (searching for the note).  This is an actual thing.  Doesn't that sound like a scoop to you?  Who knew?

For a description of a scoop see here.  For Part I see here.

Performance Practice I

 

 David with his theorbo

I've started reading Singing in Style by Martha Elliott, subtitled A Guide to Vocal Performance Practices, and I am going to be boring you in future weeks with bits from it.

She starts with John Dowland (1563 – 1626 and Giulio Caccini (1551 – 1618), of course.  Dowland accompanied his songs on the lute and composed in tablature.  Baroque tablature was very similar to modern guitar tablature, and made it possible to write out the whole piece in a form that others could play as is.  Caccini and the Italians composed in score with just melody and bass, expecting the player to fill the other parts in to the best of his ability.  I like it that she says that Caccini recommended accompanying yourself on the theorbo which would have stronger low notes than the lute.  At least now you could find a theorbo.

As an old person, I remember when we had no idea how these pieces were actually composed, except we were aware that figured bass started around this time.  We selected a printed realization we liked and went with it.  Ms Elliott recommends that you acquire an original facsimile of your piece.  She provides one sample by Monteverdi.  I think maybe you have to actually go to the library for this, though I see there are facsimiles on line.  She wants the singer to take responsibility for his own performance.  I searched for quite a while for a small sample of a facsimile lute tablature by Dowland but did not find one that I could show.  Amazon sells something in tablature form, but it cannot be downloaded and isn't a facsimile.  One source says that published facsimiles of lute music are rare.  Caccini was easier to find.  Note:  bass is already figured:

FYI:  modern Italian sounds similar to how it would have sounded in Caccini's time, while Dowland's words would have sounded much different from ours. 

In the early Baroque everything is much harder than you thought.

This first chapter includes an extended discussion and quotes from historical sources about vibrato, tremolo, trill, etc.  It is very important to realize that true knowledge of the constantly fluctuating singing voice required modern technology.  It is only when you record the voice on a graph that you can see that it is always fluctuating.  It even fluctuates as it slides from one note to another.  It is not possible to truly understand this using the ear alone.  It is important to make this modern interpretation of ancient sources.

I have discussed this topic here, here and here.

My own discussion of singing in the Italian Baroque had only to do with the prominence of castrati and preference for high voices.  I don't know how practical it is to require everyone to become a musicologist.  Perhaps if you major in theorbo this would be necessary.

True Tales

I am currently reading Lotfi Mansouri's memoir, True Tales from the Mad, Mad, Mad World of Opera.  Mansouri is shown above laughing with Donald Runnicles, probably from the days when they were the tag team running the San Francisco Opera.

Let's just say he names names.  One anecdote about a soprano whose mother comes to the house to tell her daughter of the evils of opera singing, isn't named.  But that's about it.  Jon Vickers, we are told, could and did recite long passages from the Bible when he was supposed to be rehearsing.  Renata Scotto didn't want anyone to stand within 20 feet of her.  Pavarotti liked cash donations.  Stuff like that.

When he gets to his chapter on opening nights at the San Francisco opera, I start having questions. He remembers the night when Otello started over 3 hours late, and how much the opera board members liked the time spent getting drunk waiting for the opera to start.  I would have thought, in fact always have thought, that serving booze at the opera was a money making idea.  I would have kept track of how much money each intermission generated and whether or not the money increased with the length of the intermission.  So exactly why is it that the number of intermissions keeps getting smaller?  Don't they like money?  And if overtime kicks in at midnight, why is it that the intermissions aren't timed to end the opera just before that?  One isn't allowed to ask these questions.

It used to be that things that went on behind the scenes at the opera made it into the newspapers.  Why doesn't that happen any more?  It is a fun book with lots of insider information.  I tend to find books annoying these days because they don't have a like button.  (Like)

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Maestro Myth

I have two of them around my house, but I've actually never read any of Norman Lebrecht's books. Of the two I have The Maestro Myth looked the more interesting.

I'm not sure he's actually making the point he's trying to make. For instance, Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini became the icons they became by rescuing for all time the important cultural institutions, respectively, the Wiener Staatsoper and La Scala Milano. And they each did this single-handedly, without the help of incompetent administrators. So we should hire someone else over them to screw that up?  For me it doesn't damage either one of their reputations to know they were pretty weird ducks.  I've known a few musicians, and a lot of them are.  The fact that they come out dressed in tails doesn't mean they suddenly became normal.

The point it seems he is trying to make is that the mythology that surrounds the historical great conductors is just puffery. So what great cultural institution did he rescue? Norman Lebrecht, apparently. I didn't know that it was Mahler who wanted the Leonora Overture in the middle of Fidelio.  I'm glad this tradition seems to be dying.

The most shocking thing I've read so far is about Toscanini.  I already knew that he threw things around the rehearsal room when things didn't go his way.  No.  The shocking part was that it turns out there were two reasons why he always conducted from memory--the one about la bella figura where he was too vain to want to be seen wearing glasses we already knew.  He preached the gospel of following the composer's wishes, of the one true interpretation--his own, of course--which erases and supersedes all others while secretly rewriting the music whenever it didn't sound the way he wanted it to.  He wouldn't dare bring these obviously altered scores into the house where someone might see them.  Hmmm.

I'm on the other side of this argument.  For you there may well be only one true interpretation.  But someone else may hear and feel this same music differently.  For that person that is the one true interpretation.  It is vital to have one, but if you have truly done your work, your performance will sound completely original.  Few actually achieve this, but Toscanini was one of those.

For the public impossible fanatical standards of ones cultural leaders are an unqualified blessing.  It is the imposed identity that creates greatness.  Striving for mediocrity is what kills art.
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Herbert Breslin and the King

Herbert Breslin (October 1, 1924 – May 17, 2012) died recently, and this stimulated me to read his book called The King and I, a book about himself and Luciano Pavarotti. Pavarotti and Breslin had split in 2002 over the divorce after working together since 1967, so Breslin wrote the book with Anne Midgette. 

He advises not to look too hard for the next big thing.  He didn't like any of this generation's tenors and seems not to have noticed Jonas Kaufmann.  Germans are not supposed to count.

It's interesting to read about the early years of Pavarotti's career.  It was another world, one in which Americans still purchased recordings of people singing classical music.  If I wanted to know the details, I could read one of Norman Lebrecht's books: Who Killed Classical Music?: Maestros, Managers, and Corporate Politics or The Life and Death of Classical Music. By "Classical Music" he means classical recordings. The music itself seems to go on.

We sort of suspected that Pavarotti was more interested in the money and fame than he was in the music.  I personally think that his musical creative process was intuitive and based on the place of classical music in his childhood.  Breslin seems to have a similar opinion.  I get annoyed with Pavarotti's disinterest but then remember the incredible late recording of Manon Lescaut, probably my favorite Pavarotti.


There's a great anecdote of Pavarotti eating about a kilo of caviar and getting very sick.  You had to be there.  My sense of Pavarotti is that he was all of a piece--you simply cannot separate his personality from his music.  Everything flows out without any kind of inhibition.

I can't actually recommend reading this.  It's well written and interesting, but one might rather not know.  It descends, like his relationship to Pavarotti, into nastiness.

One interesting feature I've never seen in a biography before is long quotes from most of the concerned characters.  And pop star Pavarotti was the invention of his second wife Nicoletta.

This is the only Ernani I ever care to hear.


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Musical Murder

I enjoy a good murder mystery, and lately I have discovered a new writer, Paul Adam, who writes mysteries with musical content.  His lead character, Gianni Castiglione, is a violin maker in Cremona, and his main subject is violins.

He includes a lot of historical detail, including in his latest, Paganini's Ghost, information about Isabella Colbran and her unfortunate marriage to Rossini.  The picture is Colbran with a lyre.  Sorry, no Colbran with a violin.

The thing that attracted my interest was the connection between opera and gambling.  Apparently those enormous useless lobbies found in most opera houses were gambling casinos.  Opera was financed with gambling.  Now there is something to think about.
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Christa Ludwig

I apologize for the snail's pace of my journey through Christa Ludwig's autobiography.  Charlie Chaplin, and a lot more celebrity types, wrote an endless "and then I met" name dropping list.  Christa writes about the business.

She writes about her take on each of her major roles, of her own particular style in creating characters. She tells us that somewhere there exists a score where she and Gottfried von Einem rewrote the opera Der Besuch der alten Dame to suit her voice. She thinks it is unfortunate that this opera is no longer performed.

We learn in a footnote that there is a privately printed newspaper by and for the standees of the Vienna State Opera. This is now called Der neue Merker and, of course, is available on line here. Who knew?

She writes the most amazing things about Lady Macbeth from Verdi's opera Macbeth. It wouldn't have occurred to me that a mezzo would sing this. She tells a wonderful story about studying this with Zinka Milanov. They agreed on a bel canto approach to the role. Perhaps this is the problem. This is SOOO interesting.

I promise to finish eventually.
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"For my Mother"

I'm reading Christa Ludwig's autobiography In My Own Voice, and she makes the most amazing statement. She writes about makeup artists, especially admiring the ones at the Met, and then says that in modern German productions no one wears any makeup. The singers apply their makeup when they prepare to go home. Oy.

She writes about the things I would want to read about.

Christa Ludwig's book is dedicated to her mother, and the dedication is a list of wise sayings from her mother.

I, of course, am most attracted to the wise sayings about vocal technique.

"Breath, vocalization, and overtones are the pillars of good singing technique. Everything else comes from differences in body structure. Different cavities resonate differently from person to person." This is really all there is to singing technique. Controlling the breath controls the vocalization, which is really the smallest part. It controls the tessitura and registers. You only need to have heard the unresonated voice once to recognize this. Everything else is resonance.

"Never strive to sing loudly. Only aspire to make a beautiful sound. Practice singing every note smoothly from pianissimo to forte, and back, at least forty times every day." Does this remind you of something? It should. It's the short version of my chapter on the messa di voce. I am amazed.

It is so cool to read this. If you were attempting to boil it all down, you could hardly beat this.

"Singing is spiritual. Physical technique is the base, but you must also be in spiritual harmony with yourself and with your surroundings." And, "Love must flow from you when you sing."

She writes what I would want to read--the parts that give her joy, the parts she loves.

She calls herself "we Austrians," though she is certainly German. "In Vienna, all that's wanted is bread and circuses--or rather pastry and opera." I've read singer autobiographies before, but never one written by someone who was so passionate about opera.

Charlie Chaplin, and a lot more celebrity types, wrote an endless "and then I met" name dropping list.  Christa writes about the business.

She writes about her take on each of her major roles, of her own particular style in creating characters. She tells us that somewhere there exists a score where she and Gottfried von Einem rewrote the opera Der Besuch der alten Dame to suit her voice. She thinks it is unfortunate that this opera is no longer performed.

We learn in a footnote that there is a privately printed newspaper by and for the standees of the Vienna State Opera. This is now called Der neue Merker and, of course, is available on line here. Who knew?

She writes the most amazing things about Lady Macbeth from Verdi's opera Macbeth. It wouldn't have occurred to me that a mezzo would sing this. She tells a wonderful story about studying this with Zinka Milanov. They agreed on a bel canto approach to the role. Perhaps this is the problem. This is SOOO interesting.

I've started to think I'm channeling Christa Ludwig, we think so much alike.  If you read nothing else, read "The Greatest Artists are always Searching."

She likes any staging as long as it "doesn't distract from the music."  What have I been saying? She then goes on to complain about various stagings, but I think this is a German perspective where everywhere they have regie theater. I would enjoy seeing a Despina that tends bar. I think.

She says, "I believe that a talented interpreter not only has the right, but the duty to always examine and create a piece of theater anew." And then she goes on to quote Goethe: "...individuality of expression is the beginning and end of all art." I have always loved Goethe.

Singing is above all else an act of creation.  She calls the score the "golden bonds" from which and through which art is created. She urges singers not to imitate but to create their own art. She tells us that Herbert von Karajan thought there was no absolutely right tempo. The pulse and the tempo are related. It is part of the individual interpretation--whatever flows for you is right for you.

Oh! "A professor teaches and an artist searches." What could be cooler than that?

We part company only in her criticism of original instrument orchestras, a phenomenon I have been slow to understand. I think the same movement that wanted original instruments also has resulted in far more ornamentation in Baroque styles these days than was the case in my youth. Unless you're talking about Marc Minkowski who only wants the da capo sections to be sung sotto voce. Bah! The idea of individualized ornamentation is one of the most powerful trends in modern opera performance.

She writes what I would want to read--the parts that give her joy, the parts she loves.

She calls herself "we Austrians," though she is certainly German. "In Vienna, all that's wanted is bread and circuses--or rather pastry and opera." I've read singer autobiographies before, but never one written by someone who was so passionate about opera.

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Nerd Alert

Someone has written a book about musicology:  Joseph Kerman, Contemplating Music.  For me this is interesting stuff.

Part I

To start with he worries about why musicology.  Musicology, the study of music in history, is basically the same profession as art historian.  Does anyone ask why art history?  If you go to a museum, there are pictures hanging.  Someone has to decide what you get to see, and that person is an art historian.  They decide what is worth looking at and what isn’t.  Art is interesting, so people study it and become art historians.

Musicologists have a similar function, but there are subtle differences.  Music is interesting, so people study it.  But unlike art which exists whether anyone looks at it or not, music only exists if someone is listening.  It exists only in the moment.  Musicologists spend a lot of time on studying old manuscripts, transcribing them into modern notation and creating critical editions for potential performances.  To create the moment of existence. 

The reason for musicology is love.  Someone loves a particular music and studies it.  Usually Germans study German music, British people study British music.  Only Americans appear to be generalists and study music from other countries.  He complains that there is little evaluation of whether or not the particular music being studied is worthy of the attention being paid to it.  He complains a lot.

He traces the history of musicology back to the rediscovery of Bach early in the 19^th century.  The primary focus of musicology is what he calls western art music.  However, his primary focus is the entire intellectual musical landscape of the post WWII period.

The closest I came to musicology came from having failed the history portion of the entrance exam to Indiana University.  My repertoire and therefore my knowledge was from the Romantic and Modern periods, so I breezed through those.  I recognized the Lied that was asked about.  I recognized the peculiar chord from the Symphony of Psalms.  But earlier periods were something else entirely, and I had to study them painstakingly from a real musicologist.  He wanted facts and lots of them.

One of the results of all this is the history book posted in the links at left.  I found it useful and fascinating to group music into generations and recognize that there were common features to all the music of a single generation, that things changed in discrete chunks of time.   You could teach yourself to recognize the dates and identities of composers and pieces of music just by pegging them on one of these style periods.  I felt a sudden useful clarity.  It is a conceptual generalization and not a set of facts.  If I were to try to improve it today, I would add more style information.

[Please note. Just as I am not an opera critic, I am also not a book critic. I review based on what thoughts the book stimulates while I am reading it. The more diverse the thinking, the better the book.]

I am finding Kerman's book fascinating, even though I don’t always get what he’s talking about. Kerman talks about generalizations a lot without really tying them to the specific examples. Positivism, for instance. He appears often to be preaching to the choir. These guys all know what he’s talking about, I suppose.

There is a nice section in Contemplating Music about the progress of Bach scholarship since WWII. It is fascinating to think that the same composer that set off the existence of musicology continues to stimulate thinking. His dates of composition have all been rearranged to put all the church cantatas before the Matthew Passion. This is fact based musicology.

There is something very satisfying about studying Bach. For instance, he was a master of counterpoint in a way that perhaps no one else was. Kerman talks about his use of prima pratica, the style of composition that points back to Palestrina, and says that parts of the B minor mass are in this style. He also talks about Bach’s familiarity with the very Rococo Pergolesi and his son CPE Bach. I was taught that Bach was stuck in the past, that by 1740 the world had passed him by. It would be nice to think that this wasn’t true. What would make this really interesting for me would be a list of specific examples. This is the world of YouTube. We never have to go without examples.

The big topic seems to be musicology vs. criticism. Our art historian would not worry about this. If he is picking out pictures for the walls of the Metropolitan Museum, he requires critical judgments and not just facts. Usually the musicologist isn’t the one who selects what pieces are played, but perhaps this is changing.

Part II

I am not having the easiest time with Kerman's book.  I am making a bigger effort not to schmooze while discussing this very intellectual writing.

I'm pleased to see he validates one of my perceptions.  Intellectual writing about music tends to focus on form and analysis--the process of evaluating the overall structure of a piece.  This process puts all Italian music at a severe disadvantage, since that simply isn't what it's about for them.

Musicologists write about whatever is at hand, and this used to be mostly music of the Renaissance.  Audiences are interested primarily in music of the nineteenth century and the neo-Romantics that lap over into the twentieth century like Mahler and Strauss.  Musicologists haven't really been worrying about what pictures to hang on the walls of their museum.

(Classical / Western Art) Music used to be about music.  Tonality was well established by composers before Rameau came along to propose the fundamental bass.  The composer dog created the material for the analyst tail.  Now music is about inventing a theory and then composing stuff to fit the theory.  The tail is wagging the dog. Evaluation is based on how complicated the theory is and not on whether or not anyone would want to listen to it.

My flaw, I know, is that I can't help editorializing.  For me editorializing is the whole point.

Bottom line:  there isn't necessarily any correlation between the musical value of a piece and how fun / interesting it is to analyze. I would go to a ridiculous extreme: you are only allowed to evaluate the music if upon hearing it you are absolutely unaware of the theory upon which it is based. You might still like it, but it won't be because the theory is cute.

I, for instance, am well aware that Messiaen composes based on his own complicated theory. I have no idea what this is, but when I listen to his music, I like it anyway.

Part III

I have no excuse for writing about this. By all means please skip this.

I love reading books about music and the brain because it is our brains that create the music. The only theoretical analysis that means anything is the one that our brains do all by themselves. We can help it along, but the brain does all the heavy lifting.  This is why the case of tonality is so interesting.

What is tonality? It's the idea that at every point in the phrase, on every chord in the phrase your ears hear the pull to the tonic or key note. The English invented it. Dowland's music is fully tonal. 

Anecdote: At a Mu Phi meeting one of the members played a piece by Froberger. At the end another member said, "Interesting chord progressions." They would be interesting because they weren't chord progressions at all. Though he was after Dowland, Froberger was still pre-tonal. It is tonality that creates the idea of a chord progression. Froberger just wrote triads that didn't go in any particular order except at the end.

Dowland spent time in Italy, and once the idea of tonality had taken root in Italy, it quickly spread to all of Europe. Arcangelo Corelli was the first Italian to immerse himself in the idea. With their dominant position in music at that time, the Italians carried the concept everywhere. By 1700 everything was tonal and pretty much still is today. Bach's understanding of tonality as reflected in his music may have been the most sophisticated of his era, as is the case with most features of his style.

This idea swept Europe entirely without the benefit of a theoretical explanation. Composers of the Baroque understood harmony as it was outlined in the figured bass, but clearly chordal function and not the bass note creates the sensation of gravity toward a single note. It wasn't until Rameau in the 18th century invented the fundamental bass concept that we understood how tonality actually works. Or at least were able to explain it to our verbal brain.  This idea of Rameau's, after a lot of tweaking, is what is taught in theory class.  (Later came Schenker, whom we will ignore.)

Theory is basically just verbal explanations for musical concepts.  The musical concepts do not actually require any verbal explanation. The brain forms its own explanation, and this explanation is not expressed in words.

The thing we are trying to communicate here is that the idea of tonality was created in the minds of people who were creating and hearing music. It existed for 100 years entirely without the benefit of a theoretical explanation.

I suppose I'm a radical. I kind of think you must create the music in my brain using nothing but the sound of notes in the air, and that it doesn't matter how you explain it on paper. Music never becomes words.  Teach me how to understand your music with the music itself, and my brain will do the rest.

Theory is lots of fun but basically irrelevant.  I think it's relevant to training musicians.  It helps you think about things you wouldn't necessarily have thought of without it. The problem comes when you get so caught up in it you start to think it actually explains music.  It doesn't.  Your brain does that.

Carry on.
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Yawn

I am still enjoying browsing through English, French, German and Italian Techniques of Singing by Richard Miller. He doesn't talk about the Russian school because that isn't part of his experience, a perfectly valid reason.

I was preparing to argue about constantly citing Manuel Garcia II about the lowered larynx--he was against--because, well, wasn't he a bit early for that? Isn't lowered larynx more a feature of late Verdi, verismo and Wagner? How could he...? Then it turns out he lived for 101 years, until 1906. On my side of the argument is that his treatises date from the 1840s, before singing with a lowered larynx became so popular. When I even think about singing, my throat opens and my larynx goes DOWN. Because that's how I was taught. I was probably taught in the Italian technique. When I go to Italy, I hear lowered larynx all over the place. No one says that's what they're doing, but nevertheless it is.

Here in Sacramento we have two prominent voice teachers. One teaches all her students to sing with a lowered larynx, and the other likes the larynx raised. No one just lets it float around in the throat. Sigh. Mr. Miller pretends that that's what everyone does. Mind you, absolutely no one overtly discusses larynx position. It's always inferred by other instructions. In my training it was called a "low yawn." Yawning makes the larynx go down.

Yawn. I meant that talking about technique is boring and sleep inducing. Actually it's rather fascinating, and what makes it fascinating is that there is no apparent correlation between what voice teachers say and what they want you to do.  They just suddenly say, "That's it!"

I like the book. Who would have guessed that the English were trying to eliminate upper partials? Or that Placido Domingo would probably have remained a baritone if he had studied in France? I guess you have to have been through the wringer of being forced to read technique books to even know what he's talking about.

English, French, etc.

I have been leafing through English, French, German and Italian Techniques of Singing by Richard Miller and am reminded of the days when I poured over anatomical drawings and sonograms in the name of learning how to teach singing.  I have long thought that this was all bogus, and now it occurs to me why this might be.  No one bothers to connect it back to anything observable.  OK, this is what all these machines are telling me.  Now what out in reality does it relate to?

If I am discussing styles of singing in different voice schools, the bare minimum is to cite actual singers, singers available on commercial recordings, who sing that way. No one wants to name names.

A voice teacher's life consists of sitting at the piano with the student standing where the teacher can see them, listening to the sounds the student makes, watching what their body is doing, and instructing them how to change this to achieve a better result. What can I observe from my chair that is going to help me in this task? I'm not going to crunch them through machines to see how fast their vibrato is. I have to figure out all on my own what their problems are and how to fix them. No. These kinds of books serve to allow one academic to impress another academic and have little if anything to do with actual singing. I teach through my eyes and ears and ability to explain what I want. I need it to connect back to that before I will think it's useful.

Of course, when I was actually teaching, my students were usually totally off, and it was not at all difficult to think of things to change without getting too deep into the minutia of vocal technique. One sang into his nose. He was a professional singer, so how he got that far is anyone's guess. I tried to explain that the objective was to resonate in the mouth. This was amazingly hard to communicate, but eventually he got it.

Others simply knew nothing at all and needed to know about breathing and vowels and simple stuff like that. None were in advanced stages of preparing for a classical vocal career. That's the spot where the comments need to get extremely specific. "See. There at 1:22 John Doe is raising his larynx as he was taught in the French school." Without this the information is virtually useless.
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Great Singers

I am currently cataloging my books, 460 and counting, and have come across a wonderful book by Henry Pleasants called The Great Singers. Mine is the paperback edition from 1966, but I see there is a later edition from 1985 that includes Pavarotti.  I don't have the newer edition to compare with mine.  It says it starts with Jenny Lind while mine goes back to the dawn of opera.  Jenny Lind is a little late in the story.

In 1966 Maria Callas and Joan Sutherland had just begun the bel canto revival, so he is basically writing from the perspective of my youth when opera singers followed the verismo / Wagnerian path. Many of my ideas about the development of technique over time derive from this book. He uses sources. Imagine that. This book is highly recommended.
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Roma

I have just finished reading Steven Saylor's historical novel Roma. If your loves include Rome as mine do, you might consider reading it. It's very pleasing.
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Appreciation

I came to Rossini late in life. I had seen Barbiere and Cenerentola, of course, and even The Italian Girl in Algiers, but they made no great impression. It seemed like singing just to show off, something that has never moved me.

I was most impressed when Caballé and Horne came to San Francisco to present Semiramide. Only the absurd costumes blunted the full effect.

Then came the passionate explosion of Bartoli's Rossini Heroines. My enthusiasm knew no bounds. She was 26 and had already recorded two Rossini albums. What sets this album apart is the stylistic perfection and maturity in one so young. I wondered how to account for this, and found the answer in the book Divas and Scholars. The album represents the joining of two musical minds: Cecilia Bartoli and Philip Gossett.

His influence can also be heard in Joyce DiDonato's recent Colbran album. I know that he also advises Juan Diego Florez.

Now this glorious Armida traces its stylistic sophistication back to him. All who would be Rossini singers make the pilgrimage to Chicago. Or perhaps to Rome, since he teaches there, too.

These singers, young and more established, come to the music with such incredible self-confidence. They come to the music with their individual personalities not only intact but enhanced and established through the individuality of their ornamentation. Each is true to himself and to Rossini.

I am starting to wonder what more wonderful thing could happen than the revival of interest in Rossini, especially serious Rossini. There can never be too much Rossini.

Dr. Gossett's life in music is an extraordinary one and certainly extends beyond notes on the page to living music. I want to express my gratitude.

More than you wanted to know about harpsichord technique

I decided to review Harpsichord Technique -- a guide to expressivity by Nancy Metzger. She quotes all the masters who have previously written on the subject--François Couperin, Arnolt Schlick, Girolamo Diruta, Jean-Philippe Rameau, etc.

She recommends something she calls the super legato. From my days as a recorder of midi music I know that the legato is achieved by allowing a note to extend the entire time until the next note starts. With a super legato there is an additional bit of overlap. The two styles produce different effects. To get two of the same note you must release the first before the second begins, so super legato is not possible. In midi this is simple to achieve, but by a live player it takes practice holding the fingers down.

How interesting. More so than organs or pianos there is a lot of difference between one harpsichord and another. It can vary how far the key goes down before the plucker encounters the string. It can vary how hard you push to get the string to pluck. It takes practice with the particular harpsichord to achieve perfection here. I have also been told you should replace all the pluckers at once so there will be consistency in how hard you push from one key to another.

She explains how to get the super legato and provides exercises.

Since the volume doesn't vary on a harpsichord, you are stuck varying the length of the notes relative to one another to get any kind of expression.

She discusses style brisé -- broken chord arpeggiation. This should involve some holding down of the keys -- rather like imitating a sustain pedal, which doesn't exist on the harpsichord.

The short version of this long book is that expression on the harpsichord derives primarily through manipulation of the spaces between the notes. You will be playing primarily music written for the harpsichord, and the composer will have been aware of how this was done.

A modern professional harpsichordist will be required to realize from a figured bass where these expressivity principles will be used in notes of the keyboardist's own invention.

It's a clear and fascinating book.

Why am I writing about this? I believe articulation to be a vital part of expressivity in singing, too, but in a far more complex and subtle way than for a keyboardist. Few singers have any awareness at all of how this features in their own singing. The widest variety in the use of articulation in singing by a wide margin is, of course, to be found in the singing of Cecilia Bartoli. I get the feeling she isn't hanging out with us.
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Lehmann's Books

Lotte Lehmann (1888 – 1976) wrote a number of books on the subject of Lieder interpretation, an art in which she was for many the undisputed master. I remember several books sitting on my school library's shelves. In my collection is only Eighteen Song Cycles, a volume the covers all the important German cycles, or at least those she might have been expected to sing. Mahler's Kindertotenlieder does not appear.

She moves on to cover a few French cycles, including Berlioz' Les nuits d'été and Ravel's Shéhérazade. She includes both piano cycles and orchestra cycles.

Her books fell out of favor, were considered far too specific in their directions. She talks about where your eyes should be directed, e.g.

I took classes in Lieder interpretation at IU and felt that the more specific the discussion the more helpful it was to the singer. Lehmann's best words may lie at the beginning:

"First and foremost I want to say that this book will fail in its purpose, if the young singers, for whom I am writing it, should consider my conceptions as something final and try to imitate them instead of developing their own interpretations which should spring with originality and vitality from within themselves.

"What I want to try to explain here is not any final interpretation, but an approach which may be an aid towards the development of your individual conceptions. I want to point a way which might lead from the lack of understanding of those singers, who seem to consider only voice quality and smooth technique, to the boundless world of expression. And it will be seen that there is not just one, but an infinitely varied pattern of ways, which lead to this goal. Only he who seeks it with his whole heart will find his own approach to interpretation."

I couldn't agree more. Perhaps her books still sit on a library shelf somewhere. See if you can find them.

This is a funny comment I know, but here goes--I think perhaps the stricture against imitation does not really apply to Italian opera. Your heart must still be fully engaged, but the proper style can only be achieved through imitation.

This is the only film of Lehmann singing during her active career. She was 60.

Musicophelia

Musicophelia by Oliver Sacks is a physician's perspective on music and the brain, organized by his experience of departures from the normal. We may better understand our more average selves by understanding those of us whose minds are not like us.

He makes an excellent case for the primacy of music in human evolution. Music is the glue of the human community, giving us the evolutionary advantage of groups. Other species do not experience music which fills a large part of our brains.

I like a book where one can generalize from specific cases.

There is a story of a man with no memory at all, a man who when he closes his eyes and opens them again has forgotten all of his life before. In spite of this he could still play the piano and organ and conduct. Someone would need to bring him to the rehearsal and set the correct score on the stand.

This story reminded me of a conclusion I made about driving a car early in my experience of it. My subconscious was an excellent driver. I could day dream away and it would carefully signal, stop at stop signs and lights, avoid other cars, even shift gears all on its own. There was only one thing it couldn't do--remember where we were going. I could get myself home without thinking, but any new destination required attention. I ended up in some strange places. I digress.

Sacks tells how the ears reclaim parts of the brain unused by the blind.

He describes the therapeutic effect of music on those with Parkinsons.

He has described people dreaming about music, including an anecdote about Berlioz composing a symphony in a dream, as I once recall doing. Mine was remarkable, perhaps somewhere between Tchaikovsky and Brahms, but disappeared when I awoke.

For many the favorite story is of the man who became a musician after being struck by lightning.

It gives perhaps a better idea of how musical we are than more technical brain mapping writing. In many ways we are music.

The section on music and emotion is perhaps a bit cursory. Whole books have been written on this subject alone, and it probably has not yet been adequately described. He describes an emotionless man who nevertheless sang Irish songs with emotion. I think I would have described him as performing the Irish songs in the appropriate style. The music and the phrasing are one. If you have learned a song with a certain style, then that style is one with the music, and when you performed it, it would sound emotional. Only classical musicians with their brains chained to pages of written notes, notes entirely devoid of emotion, could imagine the two things to be separate. A full description of the relationship between emotion and music has not yet been written.

He needs to incorporate the idea of phrasing into his conceptual framework to carefully distinguish it from emotion. The musician phrases. The listener feels. Of course, the musician is a listener to himself.
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Brain Overdose

Brain science is one of the more fascinating areas of current scientific research, and This is Your Brain on Music is an interesting window into current work. I was interested to read about the role of personal taste--if you love the music you are hearing, more of your brain becomes active.

I think that if one is purporting to study "music," more cultures are necessary. How about testing a few Indonesians? Or have societies not exposed to the commercial product disappeared from the earth? I read today in The Economist that the music industry is in free fall with no bottom in sight, so perhaps this state of affairs is about to change.

I agree completely with his general attitude that it is departure from expectations that produce the most sublime expression. Did I not say so here (one of my favorite postings)? However, a fully quantized (completely rhythmically regularized) midi file--the state of most midi files you will find on line--is not completely unmusical. Some may even imagine midi files are inherently this way. Rhythmical variation doesn't explain as much as Levitin wishes it did.

The most emotionally expressive musicians in any genre are the ones that sell. According to Levitin, expertise in anything requires 10k hours of practice. I liked it that he points out that music schools don't cover emotional expression. It is vital for an aspiring performer to get through his 10k hours as quickly and meaningfully as possible. You can't just add expression on later. Try to find a teacher who wants expression because it is in the individual lessons that true music is made.

Levitin is trying to have fun and doesn't try to be a textbook. He gives you the idea of it but not the true understanding. If you're not wanting to work too hard, this may be the book for you. I am not the target audience.

Toward the end he talks about how many times rock stars get laid, another of his 10k figures. I don't need to know this.