Category Archives: music

“Greatest Hits of the Second Viennese School”

Posted on Apr 5, 2010 | Leave a comment

Recently I came across this. It’s . . . Well, what it says. A spoof advert for atonal music. Much of the humour comes from picking out entirely the wrong feature of a musical passage for comment—e.g. commenting on the tunefulness of a passage which consists entirely of harmony and orchestral colour, or the tenderness of . . . Watch it and see.

As a violinist, I particularly like “the virtuoso violin writing of Alban’s Violin Concerto In case you don’t know, the concerto starts with the soloist playing the four open strings. (By the way, you can see someone performing the concerto here. Oddly, the vibrato in the audio seems not to match his hand movements in the video.)

Actually the video is rather unfair to Schoenberg. And I quite like atonal music. So, here to redress the balance is a more serious one: an interview with Schoenberg about his paintings and his music, recorded in 1949.

Follow the “related video” links for more material, both serious and otherwise.

The urge returns

Posted on Dec 10, 2009 | 3 comments

No appetite

Some readers will know that I started this blog quite soon after my father died in June 2008. I had been using Twitter to keep friends informed about the progress first of his health, and then of our funeral plans, and after a while I felt the need to start a proper blog.

I think every bereavement is different and each person is affected by it differently. In my case, my energy for playing music was greatly reduced; it simply felt like emotionally the wrong activity. I dropped out of a number of concerts, reduced the number of amateur orchestras I was playing in, abandoned some violin lessons I had been having, and took a break from my usual amount of playing.

The feeling when I tried to play was that the playing was trying to use the same mental and emotional resources which were being used on adjusting after the bereavement. So the energy wasn’t really there, and any energy that was there was needed for that.

As the months passed, I gradually felt able to do more playing, but its nature was basically to agree to play in something, then do the minimum practice required to play adequately. Nothing that involved pushing myself to practise hard.

A dream

Just over a week ago, something happened. I had a dream, in which a number of us were at some kind of party at the house of my violin teacher (who I also know through orchestra). Maybe it was an after-concert party or something. In the dream, it got to about 5 am (it was a good party!) and the teacher said “Tim, do you fancy a violin lesson? … I could do one at 8 o’clock today if you like”. I said that the idea of having one soon sounded quite good, but that I really thought it was time for me to think about going home and getting some sleep rather than staying up even longer in order to have a lesson.

Next day, back in the real world, it got to about 9:30 pm and I felt a strong urge to practise my violin. Well not exactly an urge—more a hunger or a need. A need which had probably been brewing for a while, but which I’d not really been aware of until it came out in the dream.

Hungry again

So I got my violin out. For about an hour, I practised some Sevcik exercises then a Rode study, quite intensely. Then I got out the Bach Chaconne—which I’d worked on before my father died but not played since—and played through it to see how much of it I still knew. (Answer: I still know most of it, but it’s not as fluent and there are places where I now stumble which were fine before.)

Yesterday and today, I again had the desire to practise, and did about 1½ hours each time. And last Tuesday, playing for a Messiah concert, I found myself talking to one of my fellow players about what aspects of technique I’d like to work on if I book a lesson or two.

Is the energy beginning to return? Maybe. It’s about 18 months since I last felt this way, so I think it may well be a good sign. Will I book a lesson? Maybe. I’ve already got as far as texting the teacher to ask what she charges these days.

3 Comments

Posted in music, psychology

Tagged bereavement, dreams, music, practice, psychology, violin

Some John Cage anecdotes

Posted on Jul 19, 2009 | Leave a comment

The avant-garde composer John Cage is, of course, best known for his “silent piece”, 4’33”. This involves collecting together some musicians and an audience, and requiring them to sit in “silence”, hearing nothing but ambient sounds, for four time periods (“movements”) totalling four minutes and thirty-three seconds.

A performance at the Barbican, part of which I saw on TV, made it clear that this is more than just some kind of stunt. The audience was large; one does not usually have the experience of being with such a large number of people in such focused silence for so long. The silence was intense, even experienced second hand through the broadcast. And it’s more than twice as long, for example, as the two minute silence we observe on Remembrance Day.

I’m not concerned about whether 4’33” is music or not: the important thing is the experience, not what label we give it. Maybe really it’s theatre. Maybe it’s something else.

It seems everyone has heard of 4’33’.

But maybe less people are aware of John Cage’s writings. Like his music, they too are idiosyncratic. They include a Lecture on Nothing which is really a kind of meditation leading into periods of extended silence. The one I want to give a sample of here, though, is called Indeterminacy. In it, he took up a friend’s suggestion of giving a lecture consisting entirely of stories. He gave the lecture at least twice: a 30 minute version and (with different stories) a 60 minute version.

The catch was that in delivery, each story had to last exactly one minute. But they were of quite wiidely varying lengths, so he had to speak very slowly in telling some of them, and very quickly for others.

But—and here’s the point—many of the stories are very entertaining and well told. And having written ninety anecdotes for the two versions of the lecture, John Cage didn’t stop there. He continued writing them as he thought of them. In his collection of writings Silence, stories that aren’t included in the printed version of the lecture are as he says “scattered through the book, playing the same function that odd bits of information play at the end of columns in a small-town newspaper”, so every so often you’ll find an anecdote instead of blank section of a page.

Here are several of my favourites. The first concerns Xenia, who was his wife for about ten years:

Xenia never wanted a party to end. Once, in Seattle, when the party we were at was folding, she invited those who were still awake, some of whom we’d only met that evening, to come over to our house. Thus it was that about 3:00 A.M. an Irish tenor was singing loudly in our living room. Morris Graves, who had a suite down the hall, entered ours without knocking, wearing an old-fashioned nightshirt and carrying an elaborately made wooden birdcage, the bottom of which had been removed. Making straight for the tenor, Graves placed the birdcage over his head, said nothing, and left the room. The effect was that of snuffing out a candle. Shortly, Xenia and I were alone.

An unintended consequence of his interest in wild fungi:

When Vera Williams first noticed that I was interested in wild mushrooms, she told her children not to touch any of them because they were all deadly poisonous. A few days later she bought a steak at Martino’s and decided to serve it smothered with mushrooms. When she started to cook the mushrooms, the children all stopped whatever they were doing and watched her attentively. When she served dinner, they all burst into tears.

Hearing a lecture without absorbing it:

I went to hear Krishnamurti speak. He was lecturing on how to hear a lecture. He said, “You must pay full attention to what is being said and you can’t do that if you take notes.” The lady on my right was taking notes. The man on her right nudged her and said, “Don’t you hear what he’s saying? You’re not supposed to take notes.” She then read what she had written and said, “That’s right. I have it written down right here in my notes.”

These can be found on pages 271, 95 and 269 respectively of John Cage, Silence, Marion Boyars, 1978 (reprinted several times since).

Addendum

In this clip you can hear part of Indeterminacy, as delivered by John Cage. Many thanks to Nanette Nielsen for the link. (Note that this features a different set of anecdotes from the ones above—and they’re every bit as worth hearing.)

Unconscious musical memory

Posted on Jun 28, 2009 | 6 comments

There’s a weekly programme on BBC Radio 3 called Discovering Music. It involves a studio, an orchestra, an audience, a presenter, and a piece of music. The presenter talks in depth about the piece and how it works, illustrated with extracts played by the orchestra. Finally, after the talk is finished, there is a full performance of the piece discussed.

Today, the programme startled me with a phenomenon which seems to happen quite regularly, so I thought I’d blog about it. It’s about time I wrote something about music.

I spent the afternoon upstairs, NOT listening to any music but preferring silence and space. When it came to teatime, I went downstairs, where the radio was on, playing what I thought was some quite unfamiliar music. I didn’t pay any attention to the music, since I still wanted quiet. By the time I got to the radio, ready to turn it off, the music had changed to speech. I wasn’t listening to that either, but a “tune”—well, a snatch of Violin 2 orchestral part of something—was going through my head. Some symphony I’d played in years ago. Maybe ten years, maybe more.

Then I heard the word “Prokofiev”, and thought “Oh! Well I think this tune in my head IS Prokofiev! I wonder . . . ” and started listening to the radio instead of turning it off. After about half a minute, the radio presenter stopped talking so the orchestra could play their next extract. What they then played was almost exactly what had been in my head: the same tune, but from a different part of the movement. What was in my head was in fact part of Prokofiev’s 5th symphony, and it they happened to be discussing it on Discovering Music.

The point is that I didn’t think I knew what the tune in my head was, if you’d said “Sing a bit of Prokofiev 5!” I wouldn’t have had a chance, and if you’d said “Sing another part of the music that’s just been playing!” I wouldn’t have been able to do that either—but nevertheless, the right tune presented itself.

The next extract they played was from the last movement. That hadn’t been in my head, but my instant reaction to it was “Oh, good grief, I remember how fiendishly difficult that was!”, together with a vague feeling that I needed to go and practise that passage some more.

A few other fragmented memories of the piece surfaced: handwritten music on large, rather yellow paper; inaccurately-spaced leger lines, so that notes which at first sight appeared to go up or down actually went down or up; and a bizarre situation at one point where a correctly written pair of notes actually moved in the opposite direction to the way they looked. There were a few bars’ rest between them, and I can’t remember the precise notes, but it was similar to this: play a B sharp, then after the rest, start again on a C flat, which looks higher but is actually a semitone lower. Or it might have been a B-double-flat going up to an A sharp. Something along those lines.

I find this happens quite a lot: maybe I’m talking to someone, a composer’s name or a piece of music is mentioned, and shortly afterwards I realise that music by that composer, or an extract from the piece mentioned, is going through my head. Often if you asked me to consciously remember how the piece goes, or to think of a tune by that composer, I wouldn’t be able to. Or if you asked me what a particular piece of music was, I wouldn’t know. But it seems there is a part of my brain which does know, and gently presents it to me almost without my noticing.

A related phenomenon happens when I’ve been rehearsing a particular piece at orchestra, then find that what’s going through my head isn’t what I was rehearsing, but tunes from another work by the same composer.

I’m quite tired at the moment and don’t have the energy to start getting all analytical about this, or even all editorial about it, so I’ll just present it to you as it is. I’d be really interested, though, to hear whether other people have similar experiences of “uncoonsiously remembering” things which you thought you didn’t know, or unexpectedly remembering little details about a piece of music. So if you’ve read this far, feel free to comment! 😉

6 Comments

Posted in music, psychology

Tagged connections, memory, music, orchestras, Prokofiev, psychology, Radio 3

Some thoughts on hearing

Posted on Mar 23, 2009 | Leave a comment

The difficulty

Of course, as at that concert, it was hard to judge my playing volume. That’s not at all surprising. But also, it was much more difficult to play in tune, which led to some thoughts about how I normally do this.

Obviously if you can’t hear another instrument you can’t play yours in tune with it. But that wasn’t the difficulty; I could hear the other instruments, but couldn’t easily make the fine adjustments needed to home in on the required pitch to blend with them. I’m not sure whether the problem was that I was hearing my violin from a distance, out of the “wrong” ear, or whether it goes further and the lack of binaural hearing was the obstacle.

I don’t believe that merely hearing how far your pitch goes up or down will guarantee that you’re in tune with other instruments. For one thing, for mathematical reasons, the required pitch of a note can vary according to context, and there’s a continual conflict between the pitches which provide smooth melodies and those which provide clean harmony. (The theoretical difference can be quite large: a fifth of a semitone or even more.)

How do you tune your instrument at the start of the rehearsal? Ideally, like this: the oboe plays an A; you play an A on your instrument, quietly enough to hear the oboe you’re tuning to, and you adjust the pitch until the sound of your instrument blends in with that of the oboe.

Hearing, blending and intonation

If two notes which are nearly but not quite in tune with each other are played together, one hears beats: pulsations in the volume of the sound. This is because the sound waves from the two instruments get in and out of synch with each other. When they’re in synch, the sound is louder; when they’re out of synch, they cancel out and the sound is quieter. The more nearly in tune the two are, the slower the beats; when they’re completely in tune, the beats disappear.

What I mean by “blending with the oboe” is that you can’t hear any beats between your instrument and the oboe. Furthermore, at least with a violin, if you play it very quietly, you can no longer tell which is you and which is the oboe; your sound disappears into that of the oboe.

On tuning at the start of the rehearsal, it was clear that I couldn’t judge this blending very easily. I had, however, tuned carefully to an electronic tuner which indicates the pitch visually. Why couldn’t I hear it? Partly, I think, because I could hear everyone else tuning just as loudly as myself; but maybe also because of another phenomenon I’ve noticed, also to do with beats.

It’s well known in acoustics that if two pure notes are played simultaneously, a third one can be heard along with the other two. For example, an A at 440 Hz played with an E at 660 Hz will produce an A an octave down, at 220 Hz. Its frequency is the difference between the two being played, and it’s the result of the beats I was talking about earlier. They simply happen fast enough to become a musical note themselves.

When playing two notes at once (unaccompanied) on a violin, I can normally hear these “difference notes” surprisingly loudly. Some people have trouble hearing them at all; I think that’s probably because they’re listening in the wrong place. I realised this several years ago. The third note doesn’t sound as though it’s coming from the violin. It sounds as though it’s coming from just inside the ear. Which is, in fact, where it’s generated. And I experience a feeling of actual vibration in the ear. That’s where you have to listen for it.

How do you tell whether your tuning is blending with the other instruments around you? Again, it seems to me, by hearing beats, though you might not be conscious that that’s what you’re doing. The feeling of shrill dissonance when a note is horribly out of tune is actually the feeling of hearing beats at a particularly unpleasant speed.

I think what was missing, with my blocked ear, was the sense of sounds interacting in my ear. Instead of feeling pressure vibrations, I simply have a sensation of slight pressure from the blockage.

So my scientifically untested hypothesis is that playing in tune in an orchestra depends not just on hearing pitches from a distance, but also on the physical sensations occurring in the ear as the different sounds arrive and interact.

And I might not have realised that without a blocked ear! But now I’ve realised, I’m looking forward to having normal hearing again.

Category Archives: music

“Greatest Hits of the Second Viennese School”