It's about time I tried to squeeze one of these out.
Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, (Songs on the Death of Children), have to be the apotheosis of a certain conception of Romanticism in music; there's probably nothing out there more bleak, more morose, more histrionic, perhaps no more extreme example of the quintessentially romantic intertwining of natural phenomena and emotional states. But at the same time, it is also one of the first proper stirrings of musical modernism, with its introduction of the stripped down chamber orchestra at the very height of the trend towards musical gigantism, and its frequently barren, wandering counterpoint laying the seeds of the second Viennese school's sound world and texture.
Composed between 1901-04, there are five songs in the cycle, settings of poems by Friedrich Rückert, on the death of his own child. The one that I have transcribed here is the first, "Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgeh'n", with the text as follows:
Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgehn,
Als sei kein Unglück die Nacht geschehn!
Das Unglück geschah nur mir allein!
Die Sonne, sie scheinet allgemein!
Du mußt nicht die Nacht in dir verschränken,
Mußt sie ins ew'ge Licht versenken!
Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt!
Heil sei dem Freudenlicht der Welt!
Which translates as:
Now the sun will rise as brightly as if no misfortune had occurred in the night. The misfortune has fallen on me alone. The sun - it shines for everyone.
You must not keep the night inside you; you must immerse it in eternal light. A little light has been extinguished in my household; Light of joy in the world, be welcome.
The music itself is of remarkable contrast, beginning with a weightless counterpoint in diminished harmony, before chromatic rises and falls lead to an emphatic D minor. There are the usual Mahlerian major to minor modulations, and a more lush, textured section with a typically romantic arpeggiated harp part. The climax is a tempestuous passage which slips sideways between chords before dropping back with resignation into the main theme.
Transcribing it for the guitar is both simple and bloody difficult. The fact that the piece is in D minor means that it's well suited to the instrument's own sonority, and didn't require transposing. However, in order for the piece to make sense on its own, and also perhaps to abstract it a little from its more 19th century connections, I have also decided to render the vocal line as part of the transcription. In the more spartan passages this is not really a problem, but in the more complex section this adds a whole extra voice on what is already quite a tricky passage, with at least three independent voices requiring expression. You can hear that it's not exactly easy to achieve, although as usual a more skilled player than I could probably get more out of it. As with many transcriptions there are points that require artificial harmonics, in this piece more so than usual, and getting the guitar to do justice to the dynamic range of the piece is not easy either. That said, I'm quite pleased that it has been possible to play the piece without chopping huge amounts of sound from it, so it's at least a small success.
As you can imagine, the undecided straddling of the romantic and modernist views of the world appeals to me greatly, so I hope you find that I haven't butchered it too much.
Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,
Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben,
Sie hat so lange von mir nichts vernommen,
Sie mag wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben.
Es ist mir auch gar nichts daran gelegen,
Ob sie mich für gestorben hält,
Ich kann auch gar nichts sagen dagegen,
Denn wirklich bin ich gestorben der Welt.
Ich bin gestorben dem Weltgewimmel,
Und ruh' in einem stillen Gebiet.
Ich leb' allein in mir und meinem Himmel,
In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied.
I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!
It is of no consequence to me
Whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.
I am dead to the world's tumult,
And I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love and in my song!
The text is your typical world-weary romanticism, but you might notice that the music is very much the prototype for the far more famous 'Adagietto' from Mahler's 5th symphony, and it's generally thought that this lied is very much inspired by Mahler's burgeoning romance with Alma Schindler.
The transcription is not just of the accompaniment, but includes and attempts to render the vocal line in a prominent manner. The performance is admittedly rather sketchy, with great hesitation: this is basically a result of my haste in recording the piece, meaning that the fingerings (some of which are really rather awkward) have not been properly worked out.
I hope this pleases at least one person out there.
SO the last month was quite a strange one, all told. Inamongst all the shocking banalities that were the sum of my life and yet couldn't possibly be of any interest to you, I did manage to see two different performances of Mahler's 9th Symphony in the space of a week. The first was at the Royal Festival Hall, the London Philharmonic conducted by Christoph Eschenbach, preceded by Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Overall it was very good, although the sound was somewhat lacking in the hall - none of the crescendi ever actually made that much of an impact. Eschenbach handled the irony and grotesqueness of the two inner movements well, with the percussion in the Landler occasionally giving the impression of rimshots accentuating sick jokes, and the Rondo-Burlesque blasting along at a thoroughly sarcastic pace. Unfortunately however, I really didn't get the way Eschenbach handled the finale. The best recordings I've heard of the movement have always been determined, and in fact rather consistent in tempo; there always seems to be a sense of drive about them. But the way Eschenbach repeatedly brought the movement to a near halt, a near silent halt at that, meant that the performance required a blasting insistence from the three climaxes that was just not forthcoming, losing much of the movement's power in the process. And by the time the final pages arrived, it was almost as it had bottomed out too early, leaving Eschenbach a little bit lost in a sea of uncontrolled coughing, as we waited for his hands to drop into the silence.
Gergiev, at the Barbican with the LSO a week later was very different, if a little more conventional. The first half was Shostakovitch's Cello Concerto No.2, a piece I didn't know, but which was an inspired choice, with its sarcastic almost-disco moments inamongst the gloom complementing the Mahler's self-undermining nature excellently. For the Mahler, the sound was far better than at the Royal Festival Hall, the orchestra sounding far more full, the strings very much in the soft and silky mode, the climaxes packing real punch. But compared to the Eschenbach, the two ironic inner movements were played less for laughs and more for angularity, which I felt to be a flaw. Mostly this approach backfired, although a moment near the end of the Rondo-Burlesque - when Mahler gives us a melody on which the sugar has been laid so thickly it's almost sickening - came as such a shock out of the brutal rush Gergiev was in that myself and my companion both nearly burst into fits of laughter. For the finale, Gergiev played it exactly as it should be played, with the almost Beckettian insistence of the writing totally apparent, and the three major climaxes really leaving you exhausted. Eventually, after the final attempt of vitality to assert itself fails and the music drifts off towards nothingness, the quoted melody from the Kindertotenlieder in the last few bars made my hair stand on end, as it bloody well should do. Not exactly a ground breaking performance, but it's one of the finest works in all of music so if it's done well then there's really not much better to be had, period.
Mahler 9 Finale (excerpt) by entschwindet und vergeht Afterwards, I made this arrangement of the first 18 bars of the finale. It's not very appropriate to the character of the music, but I felt compelled to do it, so there.
One thing I can't quite understand about the ruling class is their attitude to culture. Seeing that they are generally very well educated, and seeing the reputation that high art and culture has, you would imagine that they would supportive of the arts. But no, like everything else that elevates us above germs, they find it superfluous to the demands of extracting profit.
So we have a long slow war of attrition waged against the BBC, among the most symbolic organisations in the world, which produces programmes such as 'Discovering Music', quite simply one of the most lovely things this island produces. This is a programme which is accessible but not patronising, which explores great art-music in detail, tying together the old problem of emotional and social impact with technical construction and execution, and is endlessly fascinating to boot. That our ruling class would want to destroy this in favour of private broadcasters who would never, ever commission something quite so informative and enriching, highlights the inherent contradictions of conservatism better than almost anything. Fuck them.
Here's some quotes from the programme, which are, let's face it, total E&V fodder...
The most famous chord progression in the history of music
Keeps fulfilment at bay
World of unfulfilled longing and endless desire
As we suddenly become aware of sexual attraction and painful desire
The most poignant interrupted cadence of all
We feel the music has come alive after the disjointed and lonely opening but it has only come alive to experience further heartache and unfulfilment.
But the harmony, like our unconscious lives, is never truly at rest. The structural goals in Tristan are moments of unfulfilment, disorientation and frustration of varying intensities.
We might think that at last the music is about to achieve emotional fulfulment. Longing and denial, both musically and psychologically, will be a thing of the past.
One of the mightiest climaxes in all music, a revelation of pre-Freudian psychology in which climactic achievement is merely an illusion.
In spite of the spiritual and erotic adventures, the striving and longing, we're back where we started.
From agony and unfulfilled desire in life, to mystical union in death.
This is orchestral genius at work.
This music still speaks to us today with a power that is hard to resist.
Wagner now begins to build his final overwhelming climax, striving for mystic union in death.
Only a compositional giant could have sustained such a span, and kept alive without monotony this world of agony and unfulfilled desire. This was a work that revolutionised the composition of music.
I mean, there is an interesting argument to be had regarding the final chords of Tristan. It's quite easy (and actually quite correct) to identify the B major at the very climax as a kind of false unity, as posited by fascism. I mean, every time I listen to it, it sends shivers up and down my spine, I become liquid of limb and prone to swooning, but I know at the same time that it is a bare-faced metaphysical lie. This is why Mahler will always be an improvement on Wagner - listen to the disintegration at the end of the Adagio from Mahler 9, and you hear the unfulfilling disintegration of self-hood that is almost a perfect companion to the voice in Beckett's 'Malone Dies' - ever obsessed with an end that cannot be experienced from within the self that is utterly focussed upon it. Although Wagner is correct about desire, he is wrong about the Will.
Here's a few things that I have been listening to lately. You might enjoy them too. Marcus Fjellstrom the disjointed by miasmah This guy is an excellent composer of original haunted compositions.
Some haunted disco. This, to me, feels like a cross between Decasia and a Burial record.
A little recording I made recently, with some shockingly anachronistic rubato.
The Fall - Hit the North
This has been a recent favourite after hours in our flat.
Fennesz - Before I Leave
An old favourite of mine.
Thomas Hampson / Leonard Bernstein / Wiener Philharmoniker, Mahler : "Ich bin der welt abhanden gekommen."
Oh! This is so unbelievably lush.
Moseivitch plays Wagner/Liszt
Crackle!
Rudge plays Wagner/Liszt
Crackle!
Salem - King Night
This is what the 'hip cats' are listening to. Personally I reckon this is the only really good track off the album. Disregarding all else, I like the histrionic quality it has.
Kristen Flagstadt - Wagner : Im Treibhaus
Another pinnacle performance, this is most notable for its very slow tempo.
So, I really haven't written anything of length for a long time on here. This is puzzling, and of course disconcerting. I started writing something about Chris Petit's incredible 'Content', but it stalled. It's a film which you really ought to see, if you're the sort of person who might hang around here on this blog. It is a work firmly located within the 'Architectural Melancholy' mode, experimental and haunting. I let out a sigh when reading the description of Petit as a "lugubrious aesthete fixated with the increasing intangibility of a post-industrial world" in Owen's Icon review, it seemed so tailor made to the E&V sensibility. If I can drag my fingers to the keys properly, then I'll write up the full length thing, which was to be about investigating Petit (and Ian Penman, who collaborates in 'Content') attitude to the spectrality and loneliness of the internet, the yawning absence of a true modernity, and the troubling form of the distribution sheds. In the manuscript wot I just wrote, I touch upon the distribution sheds in terms of their resemblance to hi-tech architecture, but I never really investigate further. But if I'm serious about an 'ugly functionalism', or the 'fantastic dreariness' of Cedric Price, then I'll need to tease out some kind of meaning from these objects.
I haven't been writing quite so much outside of the blog either, although at the moment I'm fairly busy with a few interviews and even a forthcoming cross-european visit to write about a new building, which is either a work of solutionist charlatanry or perhaps the first time someone's done something new with the housing estate in a long time. There might be a few more public appearances and drips & drabs of teaching, which I'll tell you about in due course. And, if you need someone to write, I can wrote proper good word.
But I have actually been reading a lot - blogs even. My Google Reader list has been getting quite large, and actually quite depressing. Day after day certain websites throw another twenty or so press releases out into the world, a seemingly endless stream of quite-ok work, which you either like or you don't, before promptly forgetting about it seconds later. I remember the thrill of the very early days of file sharing (Napster, Audiogalaxy, that kind of thing) where two regimes of cultural accumulation overlapped for a while - the genuine joy of finding something rare, something you might have heard about but never been able to find, and the sudden abundance of anything and everything. Nowadays of course the very notion of rare culture is disappearing. We might call it democratic, but there is of course a deadening of mystery that comes from this accessibility. If we know anything about desire it is that its easy and immediate satisfaction is not particularly healthy. Or maybe I'm just losing my edge. I've also been reading more novels recently. After going through the ordeal that was 'The Kindly Ones' I'm currently reading Lanark, which has managed already to be very moving. It's such a strange feeling to be reading about Glasgow from the perspective of an exile, albeit one only six hours away by train, but today it was so very very strange to be reading Gray's quasi-autobiographical description of attending the Glasgow School of Art. Although he's describing the '50s, it didn't stop floods and floods of my own memories hammering down on me like the storm that was battering my train carriage as I read.
Music is another thing that has been keeping me from writing here recently, although a wounded index finger had put a stop to that for a while. You might have had a listen to my Wagner / Iron & Glass thing the other day, and most of what I've been playing has been along those lines, although it has been a mixed bag. I'll probably start trying to record more of these pieces, if only to document the quite possibly 100+ nearly-finished arrangements that I've got sitting around. I suspect that most of the people who read my architecture stuff aren't particularly interested in German Late Romantic music being played badly on an instrument to which it is not suited, but those are the perils of the self-published internet after all. Which brings me to...
I must say that I nearly jumped out of my skin when heard about this record, and came minutes away from getting it on vinyl, despite not being a DJ, or having a turntable in my room. I'm not a huge fan of Matthew Herbert, although I appreciate his conceptual approach to music making. I generally find some of his dance/pop music to be a little bit twee at times in its mannered funkiness. But an album, part of Deutsche Grammophon's Recomposed series, that digitally re-imagines Mahler's Tenth Symphony? Mein Gott! It's almost as if they had made it just for me! So: what is it? It's basically a recording of the Adagio first movement of the tenth symphony, acoustically situated. The only aspect of it that is recorded anew is at the beginning, which features the opening melody played on a single viola, apparently at the composer's graveside. Over the course of the next forty minutes or so, recordings of the piece are played into various acoustic settings - notably the inside a coffin and behind the curtain at a crematorium. All of the conceptual re-recordings in some way relate to Mahler's death-fixation, which is an over-stressed theme, but did of course exist. Each re-recording changes the acoustic qualities of the record, sometimes sounding tinny, occasionally as if it's underwater. You can sometimes hear vehicles and animals in the distance. In this sense it relates strongly to Gavin Bryar's "The Sinking of the Titanic", which conceptually recreates various acoustic properties derived from the story of the Titanic and the performance of 'Nearer My God to Thee' which supposedly continued as the band sank with the ship. Unfortunately some of the Herbert recording works well, while some of it doesn't. When the piece has the high frequencies lopped-off, and one can hear the sounds of rain, it's a successful example of some of the things that I try to achieve when I write music. But when Herbert takes the gigantic 9-note chord from late in the movement, his way of destroying seems underwhelming; a throbbing noise over a rat-a-tat-tat rhythm that fails to live up to the expanded palette that Herbert seems so keen to achieve. It also seems strange that Herbert has steered clear of hauntological territory here; he's surely not unaware of that now rather distended genre, which at its best in, say, Philip Jeck, is some of the most conceptually interesting and yet also gut-wrenchingly moving music of the last decade, but that also has the capacity to lapse into the decay-chic Wagner of Indignant Senility. But Bryars, who worked with Jeck on the most recent recording of 'Sinking of the Titanic' seems to have appreciated the resonances of crackle, of decayed media, of haunted sounds, while Herbert's is remarkably clean, mannered. It just seems that a lot more could have been done with this record - they should have gotten me to do it!
I didn't get a chance to go the Wire's Hauntology Salon a few weeks ago, but I recently listened to the recording of the event from the Wire's website. I was struck by something that Adam Harper said, which was along the lines of "'Indignant Senility's Wagner project is the furthest back that Hauntology has gone". Now, personally I don't think the Indignant Senility record is particularly good, as it brings absolutely nothing to the table that isn't already done better in the Caretaker, and acts as a continuation of the reduction of the interesting aspects of hauntology into a kit of aesthetic parts. This is despite Harper's protestations regarding the 'utopian' aspects of Wagner, which I'm not buying, especially after having just read Adorno's book on Mahler. Adorno's ideas about the inclusive nature of Mahler's sound world are a lot more suitable to Harper's notions of sonic collage, which he points out in Charles Ives, than the doubtless universes of Wagner. Hauntology, when it is interesting, is defined by weakness, a quality almost completely absent in Wagner but continually present in Mahler. While in hauntological music this weakness is often manifested in crackle, dust etc, in the pre-recording music of Mahler it is manifested not only by the use of common tunes inamongst his high art, but also in a continual refusal to make a definitive statement; his pieces are often arguments with themselves, making doubt into a creative force.
Anyway, I was digging around my hard drive today and I found the above piece, which surely must be the earliest hauntological source, unless somebody wants to do Palestrina or John Dowland... It's based on a fragment of Bach's Komm Süßer Tod, (Come, Sweet Death) which is also the source for Knut Nysted's utterly amazing 'Immortal Bach', which I've written about before, and is a lot more interesting than my simple and derivative sketch.
One of the most common textures in piano music is a slow right hand part with a quicker left hand part, often outlining a self-similar arpeggio whose consistency ties the piece together logically, and whose variation helps to emphasise the harmony of the piece. When arranging piano music of this character for the guitar, there are a few very common problems that occur. I'd like to have a wee look at them, using bars 18-19 of Chopin's Prelude No.3 in G as the basis. Example 1 This is the original music written as a guitar part (on one stave and written an octave above natural) We're in the sub-dominant region at this point, and in a few bars we'll prepare for and move onto the last cadence. At the moment though, it looks pretty non-sensical when written out this way, we'd need a lot of extra guitar and a few new hands to play it.
Example 2 Often the first step in arranging piano for the guitar is to move one of the hands a whole octave. Depending on whether you're transposing (we're not here), it's usually pretty obvious which hand to move, one usually drops the right hand, but that lowering is somewhat offset by the brighter tone of the guitar. Often various sections of a piece will have to remain and others moved up or down, and that presents its own set of problems. Another thing that is usually helpful is to get rid of doubles, which we've done here, as the low E is not a significant voice in the piece. The problem is; the low C in what was the left hand part is still a major third below the low E of the guitar. We'll have to do something about that. (ps - the overlapping of the G in the right hand melody with the A and G at the top of the left hand melody is a crack one has to smooth over in performance).
Example 3 Leopold Godowsky's arrangements of Chopin for the left hand only have been invaluable in suggesting ways in which the character of a piece can be preserved even while condensing it drastically. A technique that he is often forced to use is to eliminate the first note of the left hand part, before jumping down to continue the lower melody (see his version of etude 6, op.10). I've also seen Mahler use this left hand rest in arrangements of his own pieces for piano. If you do utilise this approach, the next problem is that you then have a melody whose lowest note is the fifth of the chord, and we don't want this to sound like a 6-4 chord. One advantage is that left hand parts like this are often spread out in the lower register, meaning that you can replace a melody such as C₂,G₂,C₃,G₃... with rest,C₃,E₃,G3... with only a small change in the character of the melody. In this case that isn't possible, so...
Example 4 We reinstate the root, but an octave above. This might be better, but in my opinion this is a rather ugly solution, with the low G still being conspicuous after the root.
Example 5 This is my preferred solution to this particular problem, a quasi-turnaround of a B after the root, creating a more sinuous melodic effect in keeping with the curvaceous feel of the piece. The G at the end of the bar is retained to create a stronger dominant effect.
It was with no small pleasure that I slid Schönberg's Structural Functions of Harmony onto the shelf alongside Cage's Silence, especially as they fit beside each other so snugly. We're not anti-Cage by any means, but there's something infinitely cloying about his quasi-naiveté, the innumerable anecdotes about mushrooms, and of course the incessant eulogisation (which is of course ironic, considering that's partly the genesis of his rebellion against Schönberg). I suppose also that one needn't be forced to choose - Schönberg represents the ultimate in mastery, demanding of the complete assimilation of the Classical tradition before smashing it up, and Cage is the epitome of aleatoric submissiveness (although of course this angle drifts a little close to a certain diet-buddhism of which Cage is so guilty).
Anyway, it's worth noting that as far back as the 1890's Mahler, Schönberg's greatest inspiration, specified that a five minute silence be observed between the first two movements of his second symphony. All he needed to come up with that idea was an insatiable thanatological obsession, rather than consultations of an ancient text on divination.
This is Mahler playing his own Das Himmlische Leben, recorded onto piano roll. Lo and behold, it's the source of Susumu Yokota's Card Nation:
ps- The phrase 'insatiable thanatological obsession' has just struck me as a bit stupid. Surely a thanotological obsession is the only obsession guaranteed to not be insatiable?
At the other end of the spectrum, this is rather impressive. Fischer-Dieskau manages to achieve the haunted look rather well, and there's an intriguing patina caused by the sound clipping at the top. The recording of Kathleen Ferrier singing the Kindertotenlieder is rather bloody special too. I bought the piano & voice edition recently with a view to arranging the whole cycle, perhaps even then becoming the first complete think, pig! lieder project but the sheet music is now 'entschwindet und vergeht' itself, which is a great shame.
