Interview January 2018: 10 Questions with I. Page

 

Ian Page: Official Sites
Ian Page Site: Ian Page & Classical Opera / The Mozartists
Ian Page: Ian Page (Twitter)
Ian Page: CO & The Mozartists (Twitter)
Ian Page: CO & The Mozartists (Facebook)
Ian Page: CO & The Mozartists (YouTube)
Ian Page: CO & The Mozartists (Season 2017/2018)

Ian Page: CD Albums
Ian Page: Mozart: Il Sogno di Scipione
Ian Page: Mozart: Haydn, Beethoven: Perfido!
Ian Page: Mozart: Zaide

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1. In 2017/2018 you are celebrating the 20th Anniversary of Classical Opera, that, with its period-instrument orchestra under your direction as conductor, has gained the status of one of the major international leading exponents not only of the music of Mozart but also of his many contemporaries (i.e. Gluck, J.C.Bach, T.Arne, N.Jommelli and many others), thanks to a series of highly critically acclaimed live concerts and CD recordings. In 1997 you have founded Classical Opera, then in 2017 you have launched The Mozartists… Can you tell us about the story behind the birth and the many years of activity of Classical Opera? When did you encounter the music of Mozart for the first time and when did you decide to found Classical Opera and why? What have been the major challenges and the major accomplishments, you experienced during these 20 years? And what about The Mozartists?

It’s been a wonderful journey, although in many ways I’m always too close to it to be able to see the growth and evolution from a proper perspective.

In my late teens the music of Mozart occupied an increasingly important place in my heart – the piano concertos were my initial way in – and when I was at University at York (my degree was actually in English Literature), Roger Norrington came to conduct Beethoven’s Eroica symphony with the chamber orchestra there. It was completely revelatory for me, and I soon started supplementing by listening habits with period-instrument recordings of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven.

I was bowled over by how fresh, vibrant and surprising this core repertoire sounded with these instruments…

…The music suddenly seemed to make so much more sense; it was like scraping the veneer off an old painting by a great master and discovering that the original colours were so much brighter and more compelling.

By this stage I was in London studying as a postgraduate at the Royal Academy of Music, and there I met David Syrus, who was for many years Head of Music at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden (he only retired from the position last year). Like many other students before and since, I was fired by David’s musicianship, wisdom and supreme decency and generosity as a human being, and opera seemed to represent the ideal fusion of my twin loves of music and literature.

One thing led to another, and I naturally gravitated more and more towards Mozart’s operas…
…After the RAM I joined the music staff at Scottish Opera, where I worked with the Handel specialist Nick McGegan on a new production of La clemenza di Tito, and this again proved a revelatory experience. I was astonished by how wide the gulf generally was between a good and a bad performance of works like Tito or Idomeneo, and the following year Nick asked me to assist him at the uniquely beautiful and evocative rococo theatre in Drottningholm, Sweden. I was also now working at Glyndebourne, and specialising increasingly in Mozart. This was still limited to the big four or five operas, but I was becoming more and more interested in where Mozart’s operatic style and personality grew from. This was the seed for starting Classical Opera; I was struck by the dichotomy between Mozart being arguably the most highly regarded composer in the history of opera and yet only about a quarter of his operas holding a place in the repertoire of the world’s opera houses. There was no sudden light-bulb moment, but it gradually became important to me to try to set up a company that could do for Mozart what the Royal Shakespeare Company does for Shakespeare.

Over the years our brief, and my interests and ambitions for the company, have evolved, influenced partly by my growing fascination with placing Mozart’s music in context and partly by the feeling that there should be no limit to the repertoire we explore, having invested so much in assembling a wonderful team of musicians and establishing a shared philosophy and approach to performing the music of the 18th century. The name Classical Opera has increasingly felt limiting to this evolution, and earlier this year we launched The Mozartists as a vehicle for our expanding concert work.

Over our first 20 years our repertoire has already ranged from cantatas by Handel and Pergolesi to symphonies by Beethoven and Schubert, but Mozart – and his operas in particular – has always been our starting point. This new name allows us greater freedom and flexibility in our programming, while hopefully also causing less confusion among promoters and audiences. The important step for me was the recognition that we’re not exclusively an opera company, and so long as Mozart remains central to our repertoire and mission, there’s no reason why we can’t also explore Handel and Beethoven and even beyond.

20th Birthday Concert – 9 October 2017

2. In October 2017 you have released the CD recording Il Sogno di Scipione by Mozart, an opera composed in Salzburg in 1771, when Mozart was only 15 years old. You have studied and conducted Mozart’s early works, especially operas, for a long time: what’s your general impression on this incredible work by a young genius of 15 years old? Which parts of Il Sogno di Scipione impressed you most? In June 2018 you are going to conduct Mozart’s first full-length opera La finta semplice (1768), marking so another 250th anniversary. La finta semplice was written in 1768, in difficult conditions, and Il Sogno di Scipione in 1771, after Mozart’s formative experience in Italy: what’s the technical difference between the two works, in your opinion? Il Sogno di Scipione is part of your project The Complete Mozart Operas, which started in 2012: at which point of your Mozartian operatic parcours are you now and what for the future?

The parallel with Shakespeare is a significant one.

Both Mozart and Shakespeare wrote some works that are less good than others, but even in the least good ones they will suddenly do something – tap a depth of beauty, wisdom or truth – that no one else could have thought of.

Il sogno di Scipione is an interesting case in point. It’s not one of his most challenging or accomplished works – indeed it’s the first release in our ongoing complete Mozart Opera cycle that we recorded without having previously performed the work in the theatre or the concert hall – but it still has touches, details, sleights of hand, that none of his contemporaries could have thought of…

… There’s an accompanied recitative near the end in which Scipio awakens from his dream. As he stirs the sound-world suddenly changes and the strings play two bars that instantly transport the listener to a magical, elevated place.

Il sogno di Scipione

The more familiar I become with Mozart’s early operas the more aware I become that what he was extraordinary at is matching the scale and ambition of each work to the level and expectation of the commission. Works commissioned to celebrate royal weddings were virtuosic but emotionally shallow, and works written for young or amateur performers were charming but technically undemanding, while he was able to throw the kitchen sink at major commissions such as Mitridate and Lucio Silla, in the knowledge that he was writing for some of the top singers and players of the day.

Il sogno di Scipione was commissioned as a dutiful and obsequious act of homage to the Archbishop of Salzburg, so it had a specific function whose message would only be muddied by a complex plot. In truth, the piece has virtually no plot whatsoever, and this had been one of my reasons for not having performed it before. During rehearsals for the recording, though, the moment we accepted the lack of plot and started to explore the way the score underpins and enhances the philosophical nature of the libretto, we found that the music suddenly lifted off the page, and it was wonderful to see how much our singers and players started to appreciate and enjoy the piece.

La finta semplice was composed for Vienna’s leading opera buffa singers, although in the end it was never performed there, and Goldoni’s libretto is genuinely comic, so the twelve-year-old Mozart gave it his best shot. In keeping with the styles of the day, the arias are substantially shorter than opera seria ones, but the music is astonishingly skilful and successful, and the chain-finales already anticipate the celebrated Da Ponte operas…

La Finta Semplice Trailer – 6 & 8 June 2018

… At the conclusion there is even a poignant pre-echo of Le nozze di Figaro, as Giacinta begs forgiveness from her brothers for her impish trickery. With Rosina’s Senti l’eco and Amoretti, too, time suddenly seems to stand still and the comedy is briefly suspended in a vision of genuine sincerity, compassion and vulnerability.

The next release (the seventh) in our ongoing complete Mozart cycle will be of Bastien und Bastienne, which we are coupling with the early dramatic cantata Grabmusik. These two works, both completed before Mozart even reached his teens, will be released in autumn 2018, and again reflect Mozart’s skill at matching his music to the scale of the commission. Bastien und Bastienne was the only one of Mozart’s operas to be conceived for performance in a private house rather than a theatre or opera house, but its bucolic charm and simplicity are beguiling.

Grabmusik, meanwhile, was allegedly the result of a test set by the distrusting Archbishop of Salzburg, who had the young composer confined to solitary confinement while he set the text, to prove that he was not receiving help from his father or any other elders. The result is one of Mozart’s least known works, but it contains music of incredible emotional range, that must have quashed any doubters for good!

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Ian Page’s
THE COMPLETE MOZART’S OPERAS – CD Series (2011-2017)
& Other Albums
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• Mozart: Il sogno di Scipione
• Perfido! Vocal Works by Haydn, Mozart & Beethoven
• Mozart: Zaide

• Handel: Where’re You Walk
• Mozart: Il Re Pastore
• Mozart: Mitridate, re di Ponto

• Mozart: Die Schuldigkeit des Ersten Gebots
• Mozart: Apollo et Hyacinthus
• Gluck: Blessed Spirit

• Arne: Artaxerxes
• A-Z Mozart Opera

3. In 2015 with your Classical Opera you have launched another special type of concerts, synchronically featuring works by Mozart and by his major contemporaries during the same musical season: MOZART 250, which, through its concerts and its retrospective Series, chronologically follows an ideal 250th anniversary line in the annual footsteps of Mozart’s life from 1765/2015 (Mozart’s childhood visit to London) to 1791/2041. What led you to create such special annual series of musical events? Beside Mozart’s La finta semplice, in 2018 you’ll present Haydn’s Applausus, his Symphony No. 26 Lamentatione and other works by him and music by J.C.Bach, Jommelli, Hasse and Vanhal: what about your interest in the music by this group of composers and, in particular, in the music by Haydn?

Again, I can’t remember the exact moment I had the idea, but it seems to incorporate several of the things that are important to me. I’ve always been fascinated by what music Mozart heard and was influenced by, and which of his fellow composers he admired (he was famously dismissive of most of them!).

I also found myself being increasingly frustrated by reviewers and commentators judging Mozart’s early works in comparison with the masterpieces he was writing twenty years later rather than with the other music being written and performed at the same time.

Even when I first set up Classical Opera it seemed obvious that if we learnt to perform works like La finta semplice and Mitridate well then that would beneficially inform our performances of the great masterpieces of his maturity, and with MOZART 250 it’s proved really useful to be able to place Mozart’s works alongside works being written in the same year by other composers. Even those pieces which Mozart would almost certainly not have heard throw light on the gradual evolution of musical style during his lifetime, and of course the works that he did know are of even greater interest.

We’ve already featured over thirty composers in the first three years of MOZART 250, and our 2015 mini-festival exploring the music being performed in London during Mozart’s childhood stay there featured several composers that not even I had heard of before – people like Mattia Vento, Davide Perez, George Rush and William Bates.

We’ll be releasing a 2-CD set of highlights from these concerts in May 2018.

If everything goes according to plan MOZART 250 will generally form approximately half of our live projects each year between now and 2041.

Every January we present a retrospective concert offering an overview of the musical year 250 years previously. Our 1768 survey, which takes place at Wigmore Hall on 23 January, will include symphonies by Haydn and Vanhal, a flute concerto by Johann Christian Bach, played by our principal flautist Katy Bircher, and arias from Jommelli’s Fetonte, Hasse’s Piramo e Tisbe, Haydn’s Lo speziale and Mozart’s La finta semplice, all sung by the young Swiss-Belgian soprano Chiara Skerath, making her UK début. Devising these programmes is very labour-intensive but I really enjoy the process, and it always throws up some fascinating discoveries.

Of course there are some years when Mozart was extremely prolific and others when he wrote very little, but even the least productive years provide opportunities to dig a little deeper into other more obscure repertoire…

…  1766 (2016), for example, was a relatively thin year on paper, but it enabled us to present the UK première of Jommelli’s Il Vologeso, which proved to be a great success. As we enter the fourth year of MOZART 250 a consistent pattern is starting to take shape, with Haydn unsurprisingly emerging as the leading light alongside the young Mozart.

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And about Haydn,…

… just consider that, beside Applausus and his symphony No. 26 for this season, I’m on a mission to champion all the symphonies without a nickname, because they tend to be overlooked in favour of those with nicknames, and among those nos. 47, 80 and 99 are particular favourites.

Haydn 2009 Celebrations

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Ian Page’s MOZART 250 – The Journey of a Lifetime
Complete Concerts Series (2015-2018)
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• Mozart 250: Year 1768-2018
• Mozart 250: Year 1767-2017
• Mozart 250: Year 1766-2016
• Mozart 250: Year 1765-2015

4. You have worked at Glyndebourne and Drottningholm, experiencing, in this way, peculiar conditions of opera performance, a few of them, certainly typical of the 18th century (the Drottningholm Theatre, for example): how such experiences enriched your vision of the 18th century music? You have worked also with Sir Charles Mackerras, Sir Alexander Gibson, Ivor Bolton, Nicholas McGegan, Mark Wigglesworth: how did they contribute to your growth as a musician, as a conductor and as an artist? You work with many marvellous, also young, artists and professionals year after year: do you want to remember someone in particular and some anecdotes? And as an entrepreneur, what have been your major challenges and what your advice and tips for those who’d like to launch their careers in the world of classical music as entrepreneurs?

When I assisted Nic McGegan at Drottningholm we were working on a production of Una cosa rara by Martin y Soler, and it was fascinating to work on such a typical 18th-century opera there.
After a few weeks in a rehearsal studio in Stockholm it seemed like a distinctly average piece with a fairly ordinary cast, but as soon as rehearsals moved into the Drottningholm theatre the piece, and the singers, suddenly sounded a million dollars!

That was a really formative experience for me; it made me realise that there are so many 18th-century works that need the right tender, loving care to flourish, and that they really start to make sense when you can recreate the conditions for which they were originally conceived.

Glyndebourne was also a wonderful place to work, and it was there that I first met and worked with Sir Charles Mackerras. I worked on all three of the Mozart/Da Ponte operas there, and as assistant conductor I had musical responsibility for luxuriously extensive understudy rehearsals, which provided me with the opportunity to work with some of the leading young singers in the country. I subsequently assisted Mackerras on his recording of Idomeneo, and he followed the development of Classical Opera with a keen interest, always generous with his advice and encouragement. Along with Stanley Sadie and Christopher Raeburn – two other great people, great minds and great Mozartians – he was the most influential mentor for me in the early years of the company.

I worked with the other three conductors you mention on rather different repertoire – Puccini, Britten and Stravinsky – but I learnt a huge amount from all of them. Sir Alex was particularly warm and inspirational, and I continue to hold Mark Wigglesworth up as a role model for his fierce musical intelligence and the depth of his thinking and preparation.

Then there are the conductors and other musicians from whom I’ve learnt so much from watching them perform or listening to their recordings. We should always retain an overriding sense of modesty and humility, but at the same time it’s really important in refining our own thoughts and interpretations to analyse what we particularly like or dislike about other performers and performances.

When I started Classical Opera we quickly gained a reputation for our work in identifying and nurturing top-quality young singers. This was partly due to the fact that we couldn’t afford more established artists, but it’s also true that this repertoire particularly suits young voices.

Young singers also tend to be more open to the style of detailed, explorative rehearsals that I prefer, and what I find particularly satisfying now is that when singers who worked with us at the start of their careers come back after a gap of several years, we already have a shared language which comes back in a matter of minutes, as with all good friendships.

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It took me rather longer to work out and identify the sort of players that I most enjoyed working with, but now that we have established such a strong and loyal sense of ensemble I’m continually inspired and fed by the players with whom I work.

It takes a certain type of open spirit, and intellectual rigour, to tame and master these wonderful old instruments, and building an ensemble isn’t just about finding the best players but also about instilling the right shared values, goals and reasons for doing what we do.

 

5. Your favourite work by Mozart and your favourite work by J. Haydn.

Oh dear, these answers will probably change on a daily basis!

For Mozart it would probably have to be one of the operas or one of the piano concertos.

The C minor Mass would also be a contender, probably more so than the Requiem, and a recent addition to the short-list would be the Sinfonia Concertante K.364, which I conducted for the first time three months ago. But how to whittle it down to one? The old cliché is probably right, that my favourite Mozart opera is the one I’m working on at the time, but this week, and off the top of my head because I know the question will get harder the more I think about it, my short-list would be Idomeneo, Così fan tutte, Die Zauberflöte and the Piano Concerto No. 24 in C minor. And if I had to name one – today, and without questioning why on earth Figaro and Don Giovanni aren’t on my shortlist – I’ll say Così fan tutte. It’s such a profound, complex and modern score, and is still widely misunderstood and under-appreciated.

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Haydn is hardly any easier.

As I’ve already said previously, I’m on a mission to champion all the symphonies without a nickname, because they tend to be overlooked in favour of those with nicknames, and among those nos. 47, 80 and 99 are particular favourites. Today’s podium places, though, would be occupied by:
3. String Quartet in F major, Op. 77, no. 2.
2. Piano Sonata No. 52 in E flat major
1. Symphony No. 44 in E minor, Trauer

6. Do you have in mind the name of some neglected composer of the 18th century you’d like to see re-evaluated?

You mean apart from Mozart?…

… I’m only joking, but I do love the line of Peter Schickele, who, when asked which composer he considered to be the most underrated, replied: «Mozart – since the highest rave is a gross understatement».

Gluck CO’s Blessed Spirit at Gramophone Critics Choice December 2010

Apart from Mozart, there is still valuable work to be done in increasing appreciation of Gluck (especially his pre-Orfeo operas) and Johann Christian Bach, but of the more forgotten names there are five that stand out for me: Beck, Jommelli, Kraus, Traetta and Vanhal.

7. Name a neglected piece of music of the 18th century you’d like to see performed in concert with more frequency.

I have quite a lot of these, including several by the composers I’ve just mentioned.

They’re not confined to lesser known composers either; in March we’re performing Haydn’s Applausus cantata, which doesn’t seem to have been presented in London for many years. I’m in a very fortunate position, because when I do come across a neglected work that I really rate I can often incorporate it into our programming.

For this question, though, I’m actually going to choose a work by Mozart – his concert aria Ah, lo previdi, K.272…

Perfido!

… Mozart’s concert arias in general don’t get as much exposure as they deserve, and I’ve never understood why this should be…

… Maybe promoters just don’t think of singers to fill their concerto slot. Whatever the reasons for their relative neglect, Mozart’s concert arias contain some of his best music, and the more extended ones are like concentrated mini-operas in their own right.

Ah, lo previdi is certainly one of these, a scena lasting over twelve minutes and incorporating two fiercely dramatic recitatives – the second one in particular contains some astonishing harmonic shifts and moments of exquisite, tender vulnerability – and two arias, the second of which incorporates a beautiful oboe solo.

Mozart clearly held the work in high regard, subsequently urging his beloved Aloysia Weber to learn it and «to put yourself in all seriousness into Andromeda’s situation and position», and the celebrated Mozart biographer Alfred Einstein wrote that Mozart «almost never wrote anything more ambitious, or containing stronger dramatic feeling».

We are including this piece in Perfido!, our recent recording of Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven concert arias with Sophie Bevan, and I was delighted how many of the reviews singled it out for praise.

8. Have you read a particular book on Mozart Era you consider important for the comprehension of the music of this period?

I’m very grateful for the opportunity that this question gives me to acknowledge some of the books I couldn’t do without!

With Mozart of course we are lucky in that we have a very substantial series of Mozart family letters that have survived, and Otto Deutsch’s collection of Mozart documents is similarly indispensable, so these are the two bibles.

Too many modern biographies intercede with their author’s own attempts to formulate a particular theory or new angle, but a glorious exception is Stanley Sadie’s Mozart: the early years. This was intended as the first of a two-part biography, but Stanley sadly died before he could write the second book. For a clear, authoritative and insightful overview of Mozart’s life and works up until 1781, though, this is the book to have.

Scarcely a month goes past without me referring to two other fabulous books: The Compleat Mozart (don’t be put off by the title), edited by Neal Zaslaw, is a wonderful compendium of Mozart’s complete works, and Peter Clive’s Mozart and his Circle contains invaluable biographical entries on all the important people in Mozart’s life.

Zaslaw’s benchmark book on Mozart’s Symphonies is also outstanding, and for Mozart’s operas I still don’t think that anyone has rivalled William Mann’s The Operas of Mozart, first published in 1977, which has the huge advantage of devoting a whole chapter to each of the pre-Idomeneo operas, rather than merging them into a token single-chapter appraisal.

My final top recommendation would be John A. Rice’s Mozart on the Stage, which has fascinating information and insights on how Mozart’s operas would have been composed, rehearsed and staged.

9. Name a movie or a documentary that can improve the comprehension of the music of this period.

Like the play, the film of Amadeus has plenty of critics, but despite its faults it does recreate the spirit of Mozart’s Vienna (despite being filmed in Prague!), and the flights of fancy about how some of Mozart’s compositions came into being are captivating and imaginative, if spurious. I also find Farinelli exciting for its evocation of 18th-century theatres and opera performances.

In terms of documentaries, Phil Grabsky’s excellent In Search of… series has incorporated full length films devoted to Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven, but I have a hazy memory of a wonderful series of TV programmes on these composers (and Schubert) from the 1980s…

… It was presented by Bamber Gascoigne and had Stanley Sadie as musical consultant, and I think it was called Man and Music. I’ve no idea whether these programmes are available anywhere now, but I’d love to know if they are, if only to see if they’re as good as I remember…

10. Do you think there’s a special place to be visited that proved crucial to the evolution of the 18th century music?

I’m not sure I can think of anywhere about which I could make such an expansive claim, but the Drottningholm Slottsteater is my own personal First Choice.

I’m a big fan of Stockholm and its people, and the story behind the theatre’s preservation is such a fortuitous and romantic one. It’s an amazingly beautiful place and setting, too, but more than anything it’s the ambience inside the theatre itself which is truly magical. It feels as close to time travel as I’m ever likely to get!

Thank you very much for having taken the time to answer our questions!

Thank you!

Copyright © 2018 MozartCircle. All rights reserved. MozartCircle exclusive property. 
Iconography is in public domain or in fair use.

Interview/Essay February 2017: 10 Questions with Edward Green

 
Edward Green: Official Links
Edward Green Official Site: Edward Green
Edward Green: Edward Green at Academia
Edward Green: Edward Green at LinkedIn
Edward Green: Edward Green (Manhattan School of Music – New York)
Edward Green: Edward Green (Aesthetic Realism Foundation)
Edward Green: Haydn Book edited by Edward Green (Journal of Musicological Research – Routledge)
Edward Green: Duke Ellington Book edited by Edward Green (Cambridge University Press)
Edward Green: Edward Green’s Concertino (Grammy Award Nominated)
Edward Green: Edward Green’s Trumpet Concerto
Edward Green: Edward Green’s Quartet for Guitars

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AN INTERVIEW/ESSAY WITH SCHOLAR & COMPOSER EDWARD GREEN

CONTENTS
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Question No. 1   (Read or Choose a Chapter)
Incipit
The Aesthetic Method, Beauty and Musicology
Music and Justice to Reality
About Eli Siegel
I Learn About Harmony
Aesthetic Realism and Music Education
The Aesthetic Realism Foundation

Question No. 2   (Read or Choose a Chapter)
Incipit
The Ethical Significance of Musical Technique
A Call for Papers for Haydn: The Online Journal
Clearing Up a Possible Confusion

Question No. 3   (Read or Choose a Chapter)
Incipit
Attwood and Chromaticism

Question No. 4   (Read or Choose a Chapter)
Incipit
Haydn’s Path to Chromatic Completion

Question No. 5   (Read or Choose a Chapter)
Incipit
Duke Ellington
Haydn, Mozart, and My Own Work as Composer

Question No. 6   (Read or Choose a Chapter)
Incipit
An Aria I Love by Haydn

Question No. 7   (Read)

Question No. 8   (Read or Choose a Chapter)
Incipit
Martha Baird

Question No. 9   (Read)

Question No. 10  (Read)
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1. You have been a champion of an important new approach to Musicology and to the understanding and teaching Music History: Aesthetic Realism. Clearly, it has profoundly informed your scholarly activity, including as to the Classical Era. Can you tell us more about this, including about your studies with its founder, the eminent American poet and scholar Eli Siegel?

Thank you for asking. Let me begin by saying that I see Eli Siegel’s definition of beauty as the greatest philosophic and cultural achievement of the 20th century. «All beauty,» he explained, «is a making one of opposites, and the making one of opposites is what we are going after in ourselves.» This definition gives what the centuries have searched for: the explanation of what beauty is in all the arts. It shows the true relation of Art and Life. It also makes possible something completely new in music education: a way for people to learn technically from the music we care for how to have lives that are good.

For example, take what might be the most famous music from the Classical Era: the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. It is passionate, yet controlled. There is a torrent of energy joined to notes which hold firm. It has enormous abandon, yet at the very same time it is so precise. Isn’t this what we are hoping for? Don’t we want the equivalent of this in our lives? As Eli Siegel said in a 1951 lecture: «There is not one thing music does which does not say something about how a person should organize himself, too».

The Aesthetic Method, Beauty and Musicology

The logic of Aesthetic Realism about the relation of Art and Life thrills me, and has thrilled me since I first met it decades ago. I was 14, and read Eli Siegel’s The Aesthetic Method in Self-Conflict, a chapter from his larger work Self and World, which is published by Definition Press. I remember, in my teenage enthusiasm, saying right after I read it: «This explains everything!». Well, here I am, a bit more than 50 years later, and with a great deal more scholarly and artistic experience… and while likely I’d use different words to express my opinion, I have that opinion more firmly than ever: there is no book greater than Self and World if one wants to see what the human self truly is; nor any work which explains more deeply the meaning of art.

I’ll quote a passage from The Aesthetic Method which I love: «Beauty has not been respected sufficiently. The word beauty, even today, has a delicate, frail ring to it. If you talk about beauty, you are regarded by many as not being tough-minded. This should stop. Beauty has to be seen as complete logic, good sense carried further than usual: resplendent sanity».

This is so important. For example, a person can feel that when they are tender, yielding they are not the same person as when they are tough and assertive. Literally, we can seem to ourselves and others like two different people. A person can likewise feel that to be exact and logical, he has to keep his emotions out of it. Or to have a passionate time, he has to put his critical intellect aside.

These divisions gives us pain. But the setting off of one opposite against another, and at the expense of the other, is exactly what art never does. For example, in Mozart’s 40th Symphony, assertion and yielding, exactitude and passionate intensity, are beautifully together. Art, I learned from Aesthetic Realism, embodies the integrity and good sense we want; it is «resplendent sanity».

Music and Justice to Reality

Another core principle of Aesthetic Realism is: «The world, art, and self explain each other: each is the aesthetic oneness of opposites». We come from the world; its substance is our substance. Because of this, I learned, we need to do all we can to like the world in order to like ourselves. Eli Siegel’s grand principle provides the logic for this: it shows the unbreakable connection between who we are, what the world is, and the beauty of art.

It is also crucial for our happiness to study what Aesthetic Realism explains, for the first time, is the unconscious ethical debate which goes on in everyone: Is it better to respect the world and other people, or to look down on them and feel superior through having contempt for them? «There is a disposition in every person,» wrote Eli Siegel, «to think we will be for ourselves by making less of the outside world.» And he wrote: «The greatest danger for a person is to have contempt for the world and what is in it, despite its aesthetic structure».

Contempt weakens our minds; it stops us from finding value where it authentically can be found. Music stands for the principle of respect, and is a constant criticism of the contemptuous way of mind.

For example, when a person has contempt, he asserts himself at the expense of other people and the world. This doesn’t happens in successful music. A good composer takes the diversity of sound, the diversity of instruments, and gives it form. Nothing is diminished: every note helps every other note in a melody; every movement helps every other movement in a symphony. Difference is cared for, not scorned. And this is equally true – is it ever! – for the art of performance and improvisation: you express your own part, your own voice, your own very personal feeling, and simultaneously you blend with, fit in with, every other part and are moved by the feelings of the other musicians around you.

This is the ethical message music has. It is a message very much needed now – in my own country, and across the world.

In my opinion, Aesthetic Realism provides Musicology with something it never had before: a methodology completely free of cultural bias and limitation. That is because it is a way of seeing music which begins in a bedrock manner, with what is logically prior to any individual culture. That bedrock – the oneness of opposites – is the permanent metaphysics of the world. Motion and rest; diversity and unity; separation and junction: these are aspects of what reality always is. Every culture is based on, and also illustrates, the great fact that reality itself has an aesthetic structure. So does every instance of music.

An essay on this subject which I co-authored with the noted anthropologist Arnold Perey is Aesthetic Realism: A New Foundation for Interdisciplinary Musicology, which was presented at the 2004 conference of the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music: edgreenmusic.org/1-ESCOM.htm. We show that whatever its genre, or century of its origin, or the society which gave it birth, music always attempts to answer humanity’s deepest need: to like the world on an honest basis by seeing its aesthetic structure. As a musicologist – let alone as a composer – my gratitude to Eli Siegel for showing this is enormous.

About Eli Siegel

I studied with Eli Siegel from 1974 to 1978, attending Aesthetic Realism classes he taught in New York City. It was right after I had completed my undergraduate studies in music and philosophy at Oberlin College. It was the honor of my life that he accepted me as a student. He had greatness in three fields. He was great as an artist, a scholar, and in terms of human kindness. In the hundreds of classes I attended which he taught, there was consistent intellectual honesty, beauty in his words, and the never-failing presence of good will.

He was born in 1902, and lived to 1978. He founded Aesthetic Realism in 1942. A compact biographical sketch which I wrote of him, which was originally a Google Knol, can be found at: aestheticrealism.org/knol-on-eli-siegel/. I’ll mention just one fact, here: in 1925 he won the poetry prize of The Nation for his Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana. I love this poem, and I’d like to quote some lines. The idea, so central to Aesthetic Realism, that everyone’s deepest desire is to like the world through knowing it, is already here in embryo – and given beautiful poetic music:

«The world is waiting to be known; Earth, what it has in it! The past is in it;

All words, feelings, movements, words, bodies, clothes, girls, trees, stones,

things of beauty, books, desires are in it; and all are to be known;

Afternoons have to do with the whole world;

And the beauty of mind, feeling knowingly the world!»

Wrote William Carlos Williams: «I say definitely that that single poem, out of a thousand others written in the past quarter century, secures our place in the cultural world». Williams wrote that in 1951; when Hot Afternoons appeared as the title poem of a volume of Eli Siegel’s poetry in 1957, that volume was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

I Learn About Harmony

I said earlier that when I studied with Eli Siegel, every class was beautiful: there was a depth of human kindness simultaneous with scholarly precision. I can give an example. It was a class in 1975, which I remember with large gratitude. In it, I learned how – without my having known it – I had a way of seeing people which interfered with my expression as a composer. I was not yet 24. And my way of seeing music and my family was unfortunately representative of many young musicians.

Though I had studied hard in ear-training classes to listen to music well, I had made up my mind that there was nothing of any importance I could hear from my parents. This, I learned, was contempt and it was against art.

In this class, he asked me:
«Do you think the way you see your parents is good for music, or not good, or is there no relation?»
EG: I don’t see a relation.
ES: Do you think that music is an attempt to take different things and show that they can work together?
EG: Yes.
ES: Do you feel if you could say, «I like the way I see my parents,» you will be in harmony with yourself more than if you say, «I don’t want to think about them?»
EG: Yes, I see that.
ES: And if you show a lessening of harmony in one field, do you think it has some relation to a lessening of harmony in other fields?
EG: It must.
ES: You don’t want to think about your parents because you think it will interfere with your comfort. But the whole history of music is to get to something uncomfortable and show that there is something harmonious there – and particularly modern music. One we decide to be contemptuous of anything it can work even in a field where we think we are fervent. So, would you say that when you dismiss the reality which is your parents you are caring for the reality music tries to describe?
EG: No.
ES: As soon as you insult any reality, you insult reality as such; and reality as such is what you want to see as an artist.

Aesthetic Realism and Music Education

What a wonderful, grand education I was getting in the relation of art and life! Also in the essentials of harmony: the fact that when harmony is successful, it is a oneness of difference and sameness, disagreement and agreement – of sounds which discomfort us and sounds which soothe. Of course, I had had years of technical study in harmony before this 1975 lesson. But never once in my classes at Oberlin, or in any textbook I ever read later, was the subject of harmony actually, pointedly made useful to my life. Up to that moment, it might as well have been abstract sonic engineering – and I am afraid it is still largely taught this way.

Because of my Aesthetic Realism education, I’m able to ask students questions in the classroom that relate the technical, even mathematical details of music to the immediate, pressing questions they face in their lives: about their parents, about love, even about how to like a world that has so much economic and political injustice in it.

Consider the subject of dissonance. Why, in music, is a well-placed dissonance such a welcome thing? It has to do with life: we need to oppose complacency in ourselves, and perhaps in others – and to do so with good will. Criticism that is kind is against a person and for that person at the same time. We question someone, even sharply, with the hope to respect that person more: to encourage him or her to be in a fuller, richer, more exact relation to the world.

Now, a good non-chord tone does the same thing! – it questions the sounds around it so that they can be more vibrantly connected to what came before and what will come after. Think, for example, of the third measure of the Molto Allegro of the Overture to Don Giovanni and that marvelous D# in the key of D major. Perfectly beautiful, and perfectly dissonant! And it certainly helps everything around it.

People interested in this may enjoy an article I wrote in 2011 for the Hellenic Journal of Music, Education, and Culture, Harmony and the Oneness of Opposites: Teaching Music Theory through Aesthetic Realism.
hejmec.eu/journal/index.php/HeJMEC/article/view/10/17

I’d also like to mention another publication in that journal: an interview I gave in 2015 with the renowned flutist Barbara Allen. In a vivid, thoroughly engaging way, she says things about music education, instrumental education, and life itself which every musician should know. Along with the singer Anne Fielding, who is an Obie Award-winning actor, we teach a class at the Aesthetic Realism Foundation titled The Opposites in Music. We’ve been doing so since 1980. Here’s the URL to the interview with Barbara Allen: hejmec.eu/journal/index.php/HeJMEC/article/view/55/51.

The Aesthetic Realism Foundation

There’s a great deal more to say about the value of Aesthetic Realism, including how it sees science. All the sciences show that reality has an aesthetic structure: that it is the oneness of opposites. One of Eli Siegel’s major books, not yet published, is titled The Aesthetic Nature of the World – and it shows the underlying kinship of the sciences and the arts.

Though Eli Siegel died in 1978, his work has been carried forward by Ellen Reiss, the Aesthetic Realism Chairman of Education, and the faculty of the Foundation. Its website is aestheticrealism.org/ You can find writings there not only by Siegel but also by teachers and scholars in a wide range of disciplines who base their work on his great philosophy. I study in classes Ellen Reiss teaches; they are profound in their scholarship, beauty, and ethics. She is a true poet; in my opinion, she is without peer in the world today as a critic of that art. She also lectures on a large range of other subjects, including history and contemporary happenings. As a teacher myself, I’m inspired by her example. I’ve also benefitted personally many times in her classes.

I’ll mention an instance: some years back, in a class she taught, she dealt with the meaning of melody in music and its relation to two of the largest ethical matters in life: integrity and sincerity. It was a discussion in which I learned about my own attitude as a composer towards melody: how the desire to be impressive, rather than to see what I truly felt, hurt my music. The impact of that class was deeply useful to me as man and musician. In fact, I’ve had the opportunity to talk to many other composers in the years since about what I learned in that class, and they were grateful to Ellen Reiss for having defined the problem so clearly. It is easy – oh, so easy – without realizing it, to go after impressiveness rather than sincerity.

2. Now a question about Haydn. Apparently, he was very jealous of his scores and his methods of harmonic and composition treatment. Your scholarly work, especially regarding his use of the technique of Chromatic Completion has been pioneering, and has unveiled some previously unknown aspects of his Art. Would you explain Chromatic Completion and its place in Haydn’s work? And in a more general way, what are your fundamental conclusions as to Haydn’s place in music history, and the enduring value of his work? In addition, you are on the Editorial Board of Haydn: The Online Journal; what have been the main challenges and goals of this important project?

My largest work concerning chromatic completion is the doctoral thesis I wrote in 2008 for New York University, Chromatic Completion in the Late Vocal Music of Haydn and Mozart: A Technical, Philosophic, and Historical Study.

It’s available through Inter-Library Loan, or from Pro Quest (available here at Pro Quest: search.proquest.com/docview). I’ve also published various articles on the subject; several are online.

Before I point to those articles, let me indicate swiftly what chromatic completion is, and why it matters. We have in western music twelve basic tones: the chromatic aggregate. Seven of these, in any given key, are diatonic. And chromatic completion occurs when – against that diatonic background – a composer gradually unfolds all twelve tones and then brings emphasis to an important structural or emotional moment in the music by having the final tone, the twelfth and completing tone, arrive at just that moment. Often in a vocal composition chromatic completion happens on a dramatically – even theologically – significant word.

In a moment, I’ll give an example from Haydn. But I want to preface the example by saying how important it is, when looking closely at any musical technique, not to separate it from feeling. Technique arises from feeling, I learned from Aesthetic Realism. It is true for chromatic completion: as I show in my thesis, many composers used the technique without being aware, just so, of it. With some however – most notably Haydn and Mozart – it was conscious. But Haydn and Mozart never employed the technique coldly; there was always an expressive reason for it.

Consider Haydn’s Harmoniemesse…

It has a sixteen measure orchestral introduction. The first non-diatonic tone, Gb, appears in measure 5. (We are in the key of Bb major). In measure 10 we hear E natural; in measure 12, Ab and Cb. All that remains to complete the unfolding of the chromatic aggregate is the tone which most plainly contradicts the underlying major key: the flattened third. Where does this Db appear? At the sudden entrance and passionate outburst of the chorus in measure 17 on the words Kyrie eleison… Lord have mercy. It is a moment at once bold and convincing. Chromatic completion helps give that boldness solid logic.

The technique of chromatic completion, I believe, has an ethical source. We all want to have integrity. We want to be complete, to be everything we can be and ought to be. We also need – for our own good opinion of ourselves – to see the world and other people with the fullness they deserve. Chromatic completion arose from this. It is a symbolic, technical expression of something deep in the human mind. It is technique impelled by profound emotion. And it doesn’t just happen in the Classical Era, although that period is where we find it most consciously employed. I have seen instances of chromatic completion in music from Bach to Puccini, from Richard Rodgers to The Beatles.

This likely is the time to mention some of my shorter essays on the topic. For example, Haydn’s Secret Dodecaphonic Art which I wrote in 2009 for the Journal of Music and Meaning, which is based in Denmark:
www.musicandmeaning.net/issues/showArticle.php?artID=8.6.

If you are a subscriber to the journal Haydn, there’s a 2011 article on how chromatic completion is present throughout his late masses – often with stunning technical bravura:
www.rit.edu/affiliate/haydn/technique-chromatic-completion-haydn%E2%80%99s-late-masses.

And If you have access to JSTOR, I wrote at length about the Chaos Prelude in Donald Francis Tovey, Aesthetic Realism, and the Need for a Philosophic Musicology. You’ll find that essay by looking up the Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music Vol. 36, No. 2, pp. 227-248.

The Ethical Significance of Musical Technique

Every year as I study music, I’m seeing more about what impels it. I’m learning new things about how ethics and aesthetics explain each other. You asked about Haydn’s place in music history, and the enduring value of his work. Both are enormous. I don’t want to sum the matter up swiftly, but one thing is very clear: What we find in the motto of the French Revolution, we find technically in Haydn’s music – only decades earlier. It has to do with his beautiful part-writing. He gave each part in an instrumental ensemble a new Liberty. The parts have independence, uniqueness. Unlike what we see in a good deal of earlier 18th-century composition, there is Equality in Haydn’s parts. In his quartets, for example, the first violin is not necessarily always in the lead. Anyone can have the main melody at any moment; there is no fixed or rigid hierarchy. Meanwhile, all the parts gracefully interlock and help each other. So there is also Fraternity – the feeling: «You are different from me, Brother, and you help me!».

This matter of Haydn’s way with part-writing is important aesthetically. It is also important from a strictly historical point-of-view, because it illustrates the ethics that were growing clearer and clearer, more and more insistent, throughout the 18th century: the ethics which would culminate in the 1789 revolution. Mozart learned from Haydn about beautiful part-writing (and much more). So did Beethoven. So, did every sensitive musician of the time and the next generation. The impact of Haydn on Rossini is obvious in his nickname: Il Tedesco. Haydn’s impact on Glinka is unmistakable as well – and I could name many others.

A Call for Papers for Haydn: The Online Journal

As for the Haydn Society of North America, I’m proud to be associated with it. Let me salute Dr. Michael Ruhling, professor at Rochester Institute of Technology.

He was the one who first felt the crying need for a journal having Haydn as its central focus. Ruhling’s hard work, over many years, is what made Haydn, the online journal of the Society, possible.

What is our greatest challenge?

Having the musicological community more widely aware of the Society and its journal. So I’d like to use this interview to encourage more scholars to submit their essays. The editors are always happy to publish solid and adventurous work.

The URL to the Society is:
www.haydnsocietyofnorthamerica.org/

The URL to the journal is:
www.rit.edu/affiliate/haydn/

Clearing Up a Possible Confusion

There is something I now realize I should have mentioned as I answered your first question. Some people reading this interview might wonder, «Haven’t I heard of Aesthetic Realism» before, but wasn’t it from a very different perspective? The answer may very well be, Yes. Eli Siegel founded Aesthetic Realism in 1942, and for decades he alone used that philosophic terminology. It was very clear to the academic, cultural, educational world that the phrase stood for his thought. In recent years, however, a number of writers have begun using these words in a very different manner: to headline their own academic work. Their aesthetic and intellectual premises, however, are entirely different. To be blunt: this appropriation of the words Aesthetic Realism, in my opinion, is scholarly theft, and it has made for unnecessary confusion.

I published a short piece on this matter in the October, 2005 issue of the British Journal of Aesthetics: A Note on Two Conceptions of Aesthetic Realism.

I wish I could say that the situation has changed, but unfortunately that is not the case. Over the nearly 75 years since Eli Siegel began teaching his grand and revolutionary philosophy, people have felt the power, truth, and value of his ideas. Another aspect of the theft of Aesthetic Realism is this: rather than acknowledge the source, various people used these ideas as if they were their own. This use without acknowledgement greatly accelerated after the publication in 1955 of Eli Siegel’s Is Beauty the Making One of Opposites? in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Were this a different kind of interview, I could give many examples. It is very shameful. That it has also happened in the field of Musicology, I particularly abhor.

3. Now, let’s turn to Mozart as a Teacher of Composition. It is a subject full of mystery, yet one which has engaged people since the 18th century. What can such a genius teach to others? And how? Your own writings on this matter are very original. How would you summarize your conclusions as to his pedagogical methods, especially in composition?

I’m glad you asked me just to summarize, because the richness of this matter could easily make for hours of discussion.

Essentially, I believe that a close investigation of the Ployer and Attwood notebooks prove that Mozart taught chromatic completion to these students. Consciously taught them. I also show in my dissertation that not only are the portions of the Requiem Mozart himself composed based on this technique, but likewise the parts Süssmayr worked on after Mozart’s death. I see no way to account for this other than to say that Mozart explained the technique to Süssmayr.

We can also see the presence of chromatic completion years later, sometimes decades later, in Attwood’s music and Süssmayr’s.

For example, Attwood’s The Prisoner – a musical romance which premiered at the Haymarket Theatre in 1792. Or his Verse Anthem Teach Me, O Lord from 1797. Another example, from 1814, would be his O God, Who By The Leading Of A Star a Collect for Epiphany.

For Süssmayr, I’ll give just one example: his 1792 Ave verum corpus. Interestingly, it illustrates the technique in a way that differs from Mozart’s own celebrated 1791 setting.

Süssmayr, Ave verum corpus
Live 2003, Coro e Orch. Wiener Hofmusikkapelle, Muti



By means of chromatic completion, emphasis is brought to different words, and this may point to a difference of feeling in the two composers: a different perspective about life, the world, and God.

Attwood and Chromaticism

Looking at the Attwood notebooks (see the NMA complete edition: Mozart/Attwood Notebooks): it is striking how Mozart wanted his student to be aware of the full world of chromaticism as rapidly as possible.

There are two introductory pages of scale studies – straight-forward and rather dry. But then Mozart plunges immediately into the subject of chromatic harmony. On the very first page of the exercises in harmonization which he presents to Attwood, there are three short progressions. The first requires only a single accidental. The second uses three. The final example makes use of all twelve tones. From then on, nearly every exercise makes use of all twelve tones. Many – not all – are clear examples of chromatic completion.

Interestingly enough, it is only after many pages of chromatic harmony that Mozart turns to diatonicism. This pedagogical order – chromatic first, then diatonic – is the reverse of what one would expect. The diatonic portion of the notebook is also the section where Mozart teaches Attwood species counterpoint.

Outside the writings of Vogler, nowhere else among Mozart’s contemporaries do we see a teacher of composition placing such an emphasis upon chromaticism. Even so, Mozart is unique: he teaches chromatic completion, which is something that can’t be found in Vogler.

To relish chromaticism is one thing; Vogler had that relish, and he encouraged others to have it through his writings. But it is quite another thing to give to this world of rich and subtle tonal diversity, a clear structural design.

That is what chromatic completion does: the unfolding of the 12 tones is felt as a single arc of sound. Its point of completion matters, emotionally and dramatically. There is, in effect, a trajectory towards it. And without going into detail, let me add that chromatic completion is not only evident in the Ployer notebooks, it is also prominently employed by Mozart in the piano concerti he wrote for her.

4. Since you mentioned G.J. Vogler, you are one of the very few scholars who has systematically studied the theories concerning chromaticism of that most mysterious Abbé, and how these theories affected the work of Mozart, and through Mozart, Haydn. What did you discover?

Well, I spent over fifty pages on this matter in my dissertation. It was, in fact, the concluding chapter. I hope people who want a detailed answer to your question will look there. Meanwhile, I’ll try to say something useful here.

Vogler was the first theorist to posit the independent reality of the chromatic scale; even to suggest its primacy. Before him, it was seen simply as a set of inflections to an underlying diatonic scale.
Paula Tedesco writes valuably about all this in her essay Forward-Looking Retrospection: Enharmonicism in the Classical Era, in vol. 19 of The Journal of Musicology.

It wasn’t so much Vogler’s compositions which inspired Mozart, because, as is well-known, he spoke in a very slighting way about Vogler’s creative gifts. So slighting that Leopold Mozart chastised his son, saying there was much Wolfgang could learn from Vogler. The fact that Vogler would later become the teacher of both von Weber and Meyerbeer supports Leopold.

Even so, the encounter Mozart had with Vogler in Mannheim in the winter of 1777-1778 was a turning point in his musical life. In those weeks, and the months immediately following, Mozart tried to come to grips, in a creative manner, with Vogler’s theories.

He began to write composition after composition in which chromatic completion was present. This was not true before the Mannheim experience. Nor would Mozart, having once added the technique to his compositional palette, ever forsake it.

Haydn’s Path to Chromatic Completion

Haydn’s path was different. While Mozart was ablaze in the late 1770s and early 1780s with the systematic use of aggregate completion, Haydn in those years appears to have shown only intermittent interest in the technique.

Then, suddenly, it’s very different, and chromatic completion becomes a constant, central feature of his music.

When did that happen?

In the years of his close friendship with Mozart: the mid and late 1780s. The implication is that Mozart’s enthusiasm for chromatic completion helped to spur Haydn’s.

This, of course, is speculation – informed speculation, I trust, but speculation, still.

There’s no direct documentation to support it, other than the scores of these two great composers, and the chronological hints they offer. Yet since we have strong evidence that Mozart taught the technique to his students, it is more than likely he also spoke to Haydn about it at that time.

5. Switching perspectives: We know that many jazz musicians have been magnetically attracted by the music of J.S.Bach, and also by other great classical masters of Europe, including Mozart. Thanks to your long experience as a teacher not only of the European classics, but also of jazz – and, in particular, your well-known studies in the music of Duke Ellington – can you tell us what, in your view, are the profoundest links between the classical music of Europe and jazz? Where and how, for example, do Haydn and Mozart relate to Ellington? And since you are also a concert composer, can you tell us how you feel, in your own creative work, you’ve been indebted, and grateful, to Haydn and Mozart?

The deepest relation between European classical music and jazz is the one I pointed to earlier: as we listen to instances of music from around the world – from many centuries and from divergent cultures – no matter how different these musical examples sound one from the other, they all arise from the same inevitable and beautiful impulsion: to put opposites together.

There are many opposites I could talk about, but let’s start with freedom and order.

A large reason people love jazz has to do with this. In jazz, there’s often a solid groove simultaneous with the unexpected twists and turns of inspired improvisation. Do we also experience order and freedom, stability and surprise, in the best examples of music from the Classical Era? We sure do!

The technique is different, but the emotional impact is akin.

And since you asked about Bach, I’ve often used his Passacaglia in C minor as a way of showing jazz majors how close his way of creating variations over a repeating bass is to certain effects in the music of Miles Davis. But that’s just one example; there is so much in Bach that is near to jazz – including the unprepared use of flattened 7th blues tones, as, for example, in Bourrée II of the A minor English Suite.
Another strong connection between jazz and the music of the Classical Era is that they each deal, in their own way, with the world as rough and smooth. We hear these opposites in the timbres of jazz as well as in its blues-drenched harmony.

Haydn doesn’t use harmon-muted trumpets; Mozart doesn’t write 12-bar blues – (though he does have a liking for dissonant cross-relations).

But who can hear the 104th Symphony of Haydn, or the 40th of Mozart, without having a thrilling, satisfying, surprising, and beautiful experience of roughness and smoothness?

Duke Ellington

You asked about Ellington. Thank you! I see him as America’s greatest composer.

 As I say in my Editor’s Introduction to The Cambridge Companion to Duke Ellington:

«a good case can be made that, all in all, Ellington… was the most influential composer of the twentieth century… for jazz, with its various stylistic offspring, has had more impact worldwide than any other form of modern music. And Ellington is acknowledged almost universally as the greatest of all jazz composers».

I’d like to quote a bit more, if I may. Under the heading Ellington and the Opposites I wrote:

«In Ellington’s masterpieces – compositions such as The Mooche, Harlem Air Shaft, East St. Louis Toodle-O, Jack the Bear, and Concerto for Cootie – we meet vibrant energy and deep thoughtfulness, passion, and control. Again and again, his music swings with intensity, yet also with natural ease. Just think, for example, of Cotton Tail. Opposites are convincingly, beautifully together… joined in a way we hope they can be in our own lives.

There are, in Ellington’s finest works, a true composition of roughness and velvet smoothness; a sense of the orderliness of the world and its confusion. Sounds are heavy, yet also winsome in their lightness. Sounds are wide, but also edgy; painfully thrusting, yet also lovely, suffusing, tender. There is surprise after sonic surprise; at the same time, there is the beat and an unshakable continuity of musical design. We hear poise, elegance, sophistication; we are also in the presence of a sincere, primitive wildness that comes straight from the gut.

It is honest, stirring music. Duke Ellington, by putting opposites together, gives us the opportunity to have emotions about the world and the human self that are grand and logical and beautiful. I love him for it.»

If you care for Mozart, Haydn, or any other composer of the Classical Era, you can ask: do I love them for similar reasons?

I think the answer will be, Yes!

In terms of more narrowly defined technical links between jazz and European classical music, let me mention one which I think has gone under-appreciated. It has to do with motivic development, which everyone knows is a central thing in Haydn and Mozart, and also with Schönberg’s concept of Grundgestalt. What is not often realized is how central these principles are in jazz; certainly in Duke Ellington.

In 2008, I published an essay in Jazz Perspectives with the purposefully humorous title: It Don’t Mean a Thing If It Ain’t Got That Grundgestalt! – Ellington from a Motivic Perspective.

Among other things, I show how closely Ellington’s approach to jazz composition parallels Beethoven’s way of writing music – including in the Fifth Symphony. The essay is on my website: www.edgreenmusic.org/Articles/Ellington_Essay.pdf

Haydn, Mozart, and My Own Work as Composer

You also asked about the impact of Haydn and Mozart on my work as a composer. I’ve learned so much from them, I couldn’t possibly say it all. I’ll just point to some major things.

From Haydn, I learned how joyous, humorous, light-hearted, music can be while still maintaining complete seriousness. There’s a wonderful relation in his music of weight and lightness, substance and grace. I suppose the two clearest examples in my own of the Haydnesque would be the finales to my Trumpet Concerto, and Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Strings. You can hear these concerti, if you like, at:
www.edgreenmusic.org/1-compositions-orchestra.htm.

  • www.edgreenmusic.org/1-compositions-orchestra.htm (Trumpet Concerto)
Listen to Edward Green:
       Concerto in C for Trumpet and Orchestra – Finale

  • www.edgreenmusic.org/1-compositions-orchestra.htm (Alto Saxophone Concerto)
Listen to Edward Green:
Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Strings – Finale

From Mozart, I’ve been awed by how simple, clear, straight-forward he is, and yet how subtle. One aspect of this, which has affected me greatly, is his way with rhythm. I can’t think, in fact, of a composer whose underlying rhythmic structures are at once so syncopated and subtle, yet balanced, coherent, and graceful. I’m including Stravinsky when I say this.

Consider his Piano Sonata, K.311. It opens with a seven-bar phrase: 3 + 4. We don’t notice that irregularity at first because the first sub-phrase dovetails with the next in measure 4. As a result, we get a conclusion and a beginning at once. Similar things happen throughout the sonata. Similar things happen everywhere in Mozart.

Another delightful instance of symmetry and asymmetry can be heard in the coda of his Rondo alla Turca. There are 6-bar and 7-bar phrases; some with and some without dove-tailing. Children love this music. I know I did; I remember loving it when I was 10-years old, maybe earlier. Everyone wants to feel secure and yet be delightfully taken by surprise. This music meets those desires.

Another astonishing example of Mozart’s superb way with rhythm is in the Overture to Der Schauspieldirektor. Its opening phrase is 6 measures long. In terms of dynamics, it is divided neatly in half: three bars forte, and then three bars piano. Yet in terms of motivic structure, the same 6 measures are divided not in two parts, but in three: there are three 2-bar phrases. The design is A, B, B’. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen any other composer do just this.

One place where my Mozartean education is easy to hear is the Gigue to Music for Shakespeare, an orchestral suite you can find on the same URL I gave earlier for the concerti. The Gigue is in 11/8 – so while it’s meant to evoke that older style of dance music, it’s clearly modern at the same time. Of course, old and new are opposites everyone is always trying to make sense of: the past and the present.

  • www.edgreenmusic.org/1-compositions-orchestra.htm (Music for Shakespeare)
Listen to Edward Green: Gigue to Music for Shakespeare

But the big thing, in terms of Mozartean impact, is that as the Gigue goes on, the grouping of beats constantly shifts. The Gigue starts with a one-measure phrase organized 2+3+3+3 = 11. The next measure is similarly organized. But the third phrase spills beyond the limits of measure three. That phrase is 2+3+3+3+ 2; adding up to 13 beats. As a result, the fourth phrase is just 9 beats: 3+3+3. In keeping with the opposites, this last phrase is the shortest of all, but it also ends with a fermata – so it’s likewise the longest.

Well, it takes longer to describe all this than actually to hear it! And, I hope, enjoy it.

6. What is your favorite work by Mozart? By Haydn? And can you give some of the technical and aesthetic reasons?

A hard question, because there are so many works I love with all my heart. I can only tell you what first comes to my mind.

For Mozart, it’s the 41st Symphony. It brings together two very different ways – in fact two very contradictory ways – people can be. I see those ways in myself, and often, to be honest, they don’t blend as well as I would like. But in the Jupiter Symphony, they make a one.

Here’s what I mean. The first two measures of the symphony are thrusting, powerful, drum-like. Sudden silences sharply separate musical figures from each other. We seem to be hearing a self which is assertive, decisive, fiercely confident. A self, even, in a military mode – what with that evocation of drums. The dynamic is forte, and the entire orchestra plays in octaves, asserting the tonic again and again.

I’ve got this in me: this assertiveness; this desire to be decisive. Everyone does in his or her own way.

Then, how utterly different the next two measures are! They are quiet. We hear only the strings; moreover, the heaviest of the strings – the contrabass – is absent. Unlike what came before, there are no sharply etched silences here; the music is entirely legato. And in contrast to the open octaves, now we hear rich harmony, softening the atmosphere. The melody in the first violins sighs sweetly in a rising series of appoggiaturas. And this second two-bar phrase ends not on the solid tonic, but on a yearning first inversion dominant seventh chord. A beautiful question seems to hangs in mid-air.

What a contrast!

And in the hands of a lesser composer, what a chance for incoherence. It’s the kind of thing, in fact, Mozart made fun of in Ein musikalischer Spass: music which has all kinds of contrasts, but no real coherence.
The wonderful thing about the opening of the Jupiter Symphony is that both from a technical and an ethical point-of-view Mozart sees the relation between these two ever-so-different ways of mind. The forceful self and the tender, gentle self, the decisive self and the yearning, questioning self, are working as one.

How does Mozart do this? Through an implied beat which we hear all the way through these four measures. It is made up of a dotted quarter followed by an eighth. Drum that pattern out as you listen; the dotted rhythm connects everything. We feel through this background rhythm that as contradictory as these states of mind are, they belong together and help each other.

«Every person,» Eli Siegel once said, «is always trying to put together opposites in himself.» Mozart illustrates this – and how beautifully!

An Aria I Love by Haydn

For Haydn, let me say that the aria Mit Würd und Hoheit angetan from Die Schöpfung has been a favorite of mine for decades. I first met it when my High School Chorus in Jericho, Long Island did selections from the oratorio. The aria celebrates marriage as the completion of one self by another self.

It begins in a very masculine manner as the archangel Uriel (who is singing) describes Adam. The rhythms are sharp, and the music, over-all, is forceful. Then, as Uriel tells of the arrival of Eve, the aria shifts to a more feminine mode: more flowing, sweet, graceful. The contrast couldn’t be clearer, yet it’s all one continuous melody, and the progression seems natural and inevitable. We feel Adam is completed by Eve – a musical expression of the success of love.

Aesthetic Realism defines love as Proud Need; we hear that in Haydn’s music.

I’m very grateful, too, to say that my own happy marriage was made possible through studying Aesthetic Realism and this great definition of love. I am proud to need my wife, Carrie Wilson – glad that she represents the world different from me. Through her encouragement and criticism, I see the world, music, and people better. Carrie is a consultant to women on the faculty of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation, and the instructor of the course The Opposites in Singing: Technique and Feeling. She is also an important critic of the visual arts, and a fine actor and singer.

7. Is there a neglected composer of the 18th century you’d like to see re-evaluated? And – whether by this composer or another – is there a neglected piece of music of the 18th century you’d like to see performed in concert with more frequency?

• J.M.Kraus
I’d start with Joseph Martin Kraus. He’s 1756 to 1792, almost an exact contemporary to Mozart. His symphonies, in particular, are important. I’d like to thank Dr. Bertil van Boer for first drawing my attention to this fine, almost entirely forgotten composer (B. van Boer at Academia).

 
• A.Reicha
Going a bit into the early 19th century, I’d point to Anton Reicha‘s cantata Lenore. It’s hardly ever performed, yet has real emotional and dramatic power. Given Reicha’s teenage friendship with Beethoven in Bonn, and also their relations with Haydn in Vienna, it would be easy to imagine that this 1806 work uses the same text as Beethoven’s 1805 opera carrying the same name. But no: Reicha’s text is the 1773 Sturm-und-Drang ballad of Gottfried August Bürger.

Reicha published, just on the edge of the 18th century (1800) an extraordinary set of Twelve Fugues. Nothing more radical ever happened to fugal form. There are experiments here which seem positively 20th century: a polytonal fugue; a fugue in 5/8. Yet the wonderful thing is not, per se, the astonishing experimentation; it is that these fugues are good, musically. As we know from a good deal of 20th and 21st century contemporary music, there are lots of musical experiments about which that can’t be said. Daring experiments, but dull music.

So along with Kraus, I feel strongly that Reicha is a person who demands to be better known. Not just as a composer; also as arguably the most successful teacher of composition ever. Among his students were Berlioz, Gounod, Liszt (to a degree), and then also Adolph Adam and Caesar Frank. Wow!

• J.J.Rousseau
Finally, a word in support of Rousseau as composer. He’s better than many people have realized. I wrote about that in a piece for Vol. 16 (Winter, 2007) of Ars Lyrica: Reconsidering Rousseau’s Le devin du village—an Opera of Surprising and Valuable Paradox.

As for his impact on musicology, which was considerable, there’s his pioneering work to have Europeans respect music from other continents. I wrote about that in an essay included in Music’s Intellectual History, a 2009 volume of the RILM Perspectives Series, titled The Impact of Rousseau on the Music Histories of Burney and Hawkins.

8. Have you read a particular book on the Mozart Era which you consider particularly important for the comprehension of the music of this period? Feel free to mention more than one!

Here, I have to be very selective, since there are dozens of excellent books on the Classical Era. I have always admired Donald Francis Tovey’s essays on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven. Charles Rosen’s books… The Classical Style and also Sonata Forms – I have learned from deeply. That is true likewise for Leonard Ratner’s Classic Music, as well as his book on the Beethoven String Quartets. Kerman’s book on the quartets is also excellent. I care very much, too, for Julian Rushton‘s fictionalized, but lovingly rendered portrait, Coffee with Mozart (J.Rushton at Academia).

Wye Allanbrook’s Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart made everyone take fresh notice of the importance of dance rhythms. Robert Hatten‘s books (R.Hatten at Academia) are very valuable in understanding the hermeneutics of the period, as is Robert Gjerdingen‘s A Classic Turn of Phrase (now available also at Gjerdingen’s Academia Site: e-book A Classic Turn of Phrase). Of course, to study Haydn is also to read H.C. Robbins Landon. His books are still the foundation for Haydn research.

Another work I love – though this brings us more into the early 19th century – is Rudolph Reti’s Thematic Patterns in Sonatas of Beethoven. You asked earlier about the relation of jazz and the music of European classicism; Reti’s book provides a solid methodology relating composition and improvisation, seeing them as aspects of a single creative drive. This makes it invaluable to anyone who is interested in seeing the common thread between these two very different kinds of music. Reti’s book, as you likely know, bases itself on Schönberg’s idea of the Grundgestalt… and I’ve already indicated how important I think that concept is.
I’m sure I should be mentioning other people. That I haven’t is not, in any way, meant as a slight. There just isn’t time. And – of course – it’s crucial that scholars dig into the theoretical texts of the time by Koch, Riepel, Vogler, and others.

Martha Baird

The single writing which has most deeply affected how I see the Classical Era is Martha Baird’s essay Some Opposites in Mozart, Con Amore. In it, among other things, she shows how important it was to Mozart – as a man as well as composer – to make a one of anger and sweetness, force and tenderness. She illustrates this through his Symphony #32, Belmonte’s O, wie ängstlich and Osmin’s Solche hergelaufne Laffen. She also writes in that essay about the Fifth Violin Concerto – the Concerto that has the famous Turkish interruption of its Tempo di Menuetto finale.

I spoke earlier about the fierceness and tenderness, the assertiveness and sweetness of the Jupiter Symphony. I’m sure it was the impact of Martha Baird’s essay that made it possible for me to see something of what Mozart accomplished there, and its deep human significance – including personally for myself.

Martha Baird was the wife of Eli Siegel, and a scholar with original insight on many aspects of music. I love, for example, her papers on Verdi’s Aida, and on the perennial philosophic question of the relation of Absolute and Programmatic music. This was titled What Is Music About? During the years I studied with Eli Siegel, I likewise studied with her, and I cherish it. Never did a critic write about music with such a combination of ease, naturalness, and solid intellectual rigor.

  
9. And is there a movie or a documentary film which you feel can likewise benefit people in the comprehension of this music?

After my enthusiastic listing of many authors whose work I value as to the Classical Era, I don’t want to seem ungenerous and chary as I answer this question. But, largely, I’ve been disappointed in the movies and documentaries I’ve seen.

Two which I’ve felt were useful as introductions to Beethoven when I taught non-music-majors were the BBC biography of the composer, and also Michael Tilson Thomas’ engaging film on the Eroica – though, at times, it is a bit idiosyncratic.

I would love to see a full-length film on the life of Haydn, or Mozart, or Beethoven that does them justice – as men and as artists. To my knowledge, none have yet appeared.

10. Finally, is there a special place you think scholars of the Classical Era, and lovers of its music, ought to visit to gain crucial insight into the evolution of the musical 18th century?

Certainly, as cities, Vienna and Paris are the most important. When it comes to libraries, I’d have to say the great Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris. But speaking personally, nothing did more to sharpen my sense of the 18th century as a whole and its music than visiting Versailles and Schönbrunn.

There’s such splendor there, but then you realize the horrific cost of that splendor – the evil of aristocracy which made it possible. All that wealth for the benefit of a very small group of people: wealth gotten by grinding millions of others in awful poverty!

Walking through those palaces, I had a vivid, gut-grabbing sense of why the 18th century led inevitably to the French Revolution.

If we want to have the Classical Era truly in our minds, nothing is more important than understanding the forces – intellectual, political, economic, and ethical – which led to the great event of 1789.

Thank you for these questions. It was a pleasure to try to answer them.

Thank you very much for having taken the time to answer our questions!

Thank you!

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