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Steeve Chwojko

About Steeve Chwojko

http://artamica.com

Posts by Steeve Chwojko:

Raphael: the Mozart of art?

Raphael and Mozart – the best, or the most average?

In writing the title, I feel as though I shall soon be hauled in front of the inquisition. Here then is my defense.

It is a natural tendency to take general assertions as gospel truths. Why do you vote for a particular party? Why do you attend a particular church? For many, the answer is ‘Because I always have.’ That may sound damning; but it is not. To have ‘always done’ something is not necessarily bad; on the contrary, repetition of an act is fundamental to our lives. I drink two cups of coffee every morning, I check the weather predictions before work, I pick up my knife in my right hand and my fork in my left. Life is hugely repetitive.

There is an extension to this fact, an induction if you will, that is relevant to the Arts. General assertions commonly govern what we think we should think about Art. Do you think Picasso is the greatest painter of the 20th century? Do you think Dickens is the greatest (English language) writer of the 19th? Do you think Bach is the greatest composer of the 18th? Do you think Bernini is the greatest sculptor of the 17th?

I shall not give my answers to those questions! Another time, perhaps. But instead I shall cite a single example in one domain. Leonardo da Vinci’s La Gioconda is not the greatest portrait ever painted. Its fame comes from the fact that it was (fortuitously) the property of a French king, and it was stolen and lost for a couple of years. That famous smile is not enigmatic – it was created with a technique, well-known at the time, that creates an image, ill-defined enough to be open to almost any interpretation. Maybe her husband has just said that he would make supper? She knows what a catastrophe that could be, but she does not want to show her thoughts…

I shall show you a much better portrait. You will disagree – you will even tell me that Rembrandt captured the human condition so much better. But Raphael Sanzio da Urbino created one of the most perfect facial images, an image where enigma and condition have no relevance:  this is perfection in art.

SIstine_Madonna
The Sistine Madonna

Before extrapolating from that thesis, I want to turn my attention to Mozart.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart showed, from the youngest age, an extraordinary facility both in the performance of music and in its composition. He could give concerts on the fortepiano from the age of six; he composed his first opera at age eleven. One of his most famous pieces is the so-called Eine Kleine Nachtmusik:

Written when Mozart was 31, it was not published until some forty years after his death, but soon became one of his most popular works. It was composed at the height of what became known as the ‘classical’ period of music, and exemplifies that style: clear melodic lines, fundamental harmonies based on acoustic principals, balanced orchestration. His works are usually cited as the embodiment of perfection in music.

Perfection is a strange thing. It is generally considered an ultimate goal, something we should all strive for, and as such Raphael and Mozart represent the pinnacle of their Art. But perfection is an artistic cul-de-sac. You have reached the top of the mountain; where do you go from there? There is only one solution: break the mold. Beethoven (fifteen years younger than Mozart) did this, and brilliantly showed what imperfect music would sound like:

Beethoven: Grosse Fuge, op.133

Beethoven was a surpassing genius in music, and he created a whole new world of sound. What of other composers, less gifted than him? For many, the answer was to follow Mozart, to take the characteristics of his music and apply them to their own creations. The result was a wealth of music that has the outward structure of his composition, but lacks the spark of his genius. This becomes a kind of norm, an average that everyone could use.

This is the case with Raphael also: you cannot surpass perfection, and so if you equal his achievement, you are doing no more than copying him. To do that successfully you would need his genius! His impact on the world of art was therefore to create a norm on which others could build.

So – was their Art average? It showed a typical, or common, framework which was a yardstick for others to build on. That became the average structure; but what they themselves built on the structure was genius; it was perfection.

*       *       *

Afterthought

With some exceptions, I do not like the music of Mozart. I am human; while I might enjoy perfection in the next life, my current one is imbued with the imperfections of human existence. I love those ‘imperfections’ in the music of Beethoven, and I am fascinated by the music of our era:

Boulez: Le marteau sans maître

You may wonder what I can see in that ‘music’ that rivets my attention. So perhaps that should be the topic of my next blog on music…

Can flowers be evoked in music?

Can flowers be evoked in music?

This question came up in a presentation on Flowers in Art, and the response gives a far-reaching insight into the nature of music.

The answer is simple: no, they cannot. But I want to explore a little deeper and talk about what it means to evoke something in music.

Sound can induce memories of sight, touch, smell, and taste. However, these other senses are not linked to sound by intrinsic value but by association, a kind of Pavlovian response to a stimulus.

If you eat popcorn while listening to a symphony, the sound of the symphony may conjure a taste of popcorn. Thus, the sound invokes the flavour. This is entirely personal, an individual response to a sensation, and is not inherent in the music.

Some associations may seem innate, and I shall give two sound examples to illustrate this. Listen to these extracts before you read on, and note the feelings that they invoke:

Ex.1

Ex.2

You may have noticed that these examples did not start with the ‘famous’ part of the melody! But you recognize the ‘Funeral March’ by Frédéric Chopin and the Wedding March by Felix Mendelssohn. Why is one piece funerial, while the other is matrimonial? The answer is on two levels.

First, it is by social association: the pieces were played for occasions that fixed in our minds their suitability. The one is slow and sad; the other, happy, uplifting.

The second answer is more subtle and delves deeper: western music has two modes, major and minor, and the musical evolution of the past seven hundred years has given us the sense that major is happy, minor is sad (there are good acoustic reasons for this evolution, but they go beyond the scope of this blog).

But these are only two possible emotions; what of the others? Can music express disgust? Embarrasment? Sympathy? Shame? Note that I have chosen carefully, because I do not think that it is in music to stir those sentiments. Other emotions are open for debate (but not here!): amusement, confusion, pride, and more.

I shall give an illustration of just one other emotion: relief. It is fundamental to all western music and is independent of happiness or sadness. Here is an example, a musical build-up where I have removed the resolution:
Ex.3

A musician might scream in frustration at the missing climax! Here is what it should sound like:
Ex.4

You see that music can invoke a certain range of emotions, but it cannot invoke anything physical: a pool of water, a bridge, a cloud…or a flower. All other Arts can do this: anything connected with language can describe the physical world, and anything with a visual component (dance, painting, architecture, and so forth) can show it. Music can arguably take real-world sounds and evoke something concrete. Here is an example; what do you think this is ?! :
Ex.5

(Based on ‘Othello’ by Rossini).

Without language to give a hint, the relationship music-animal (or flower) relies on the suggestion of the composer. Here are two final examples. First Prokofiev’s depiction of a cat, in ‘Peter and the Wolf’:
Ex.6

Or…was that the music for the duck?!

And to bring us right back to flowers, here is the famous ‘Flower duet’, so-called because Princess Lakmé and her servant go to the river to gather flowers:
Ex.7

No hint of floral perfume here! The crucial point is that the libretto talks about gathering flowers. The music is simply beautiful sound.

It would be interesting now to talk about Indian music (Carnatic and Hindustani), and Chinese music. Maybe for another blog!

By the way, the piece based on Rossini is known as the ‘Cat Duet’. Obviously…

Books

What is Literature?

It is curious that a given art form seems simple to define until you try to define it. It then starts to dissolve into grey areas, ambiguities, contradictions… Sometimes there is a word, added to the description of the art form, that appears to limit the field: for example, the word ‘visual’ in the term visual arts. Nice and unambiguous: literature is not visual art.

Or is it? What of a poem, printed in the middle of a page? Is that in any way different from the same poem printed to the left or right of the page? Printed to the left, many cultures would take it as a standard position for the words, a familiar starting point for the reader, as if it were a novel. Printed to the right would give pause to that same reader; what is the significance of the uncommon position? Printing it in the middle gives space around the poem, as if it were floating off the page. One step further is to give the poem dimension by designing it in the area of the page:

It could be argued that the visuality of the layout adds nothing to the sense of the words. This however would be to ignore two essential points in the design: the writing moves down the page, as an owl might drop from the sky; and the space between the lines evokes the silence of which the poem speaks.

Thus sound poetry breaks the barrier between literature and music, and often removes sense completely. Here is an example, a single line from a poem by the french poet Michel Couturier:

qui a été l’été était

which translates to ‘the one who has been the summer was’. This literal translation loses the principle motivation behind the composition of the line, the insistent repetition of the sound ‘eh’, and a good translator would look, not for the literal sense of the words, but for an equivalent insistence in the new language:

What some are the sun of summer was

What I have written here may seem to imply that the sound of verbalized literature has only a marginal importance, and is largely limited to sound poetry. Not so. Sound is an integral part of written literature, and has caused the development of several literary devices – alliteration, rhyme, malapropism, and many more. This is largely why translation is such a difficult task. To capture the sense, that is one thing – to capture the sonority, ah, there’s the problem!

Literature is therefore dependent on writing; may have a visual aspect; and may have a sound aspect. Can there be literature without writing? Yes, although anything unwritten – stories, poems, songs, invocations,… – is in a category of traditions rather than one of literature (there is a wonderful science fiction story that shows a society where the only literature is oral: read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451).

I have managed to get right through this blog without answering the question I posed in the title. I could say, glibly, that the intent was to show that the question is unanswerable (which is probably true), but it would be more accurate to say that I want to leave the stage ready for act II, a follow-up or a follow-on that someone else will write. Use the comment form below and send your refutation or confirmation of the ideas here!

 

 

score_1

What is Music?

Music for some, noise for others – what is it that categorizes a set of complex vibrations as one or the other?

We often characterize classical western music under the headings pitch, rhythm, dynamic, and timbre. Pitch and rhythm are almost universals, although the weighting between the two can be different. Here are two examples where pitch is unnecessary:

Jaw harp, India; Australian Didgeridoo

We find this predominance of rhythm over pitch very occasionally in classical western music. Here is a notable example, in Steve Reich’s music:

Music for pieces of wood - Steve Reich

The opposite, a predominance of pitch over rhythm, is moderately common in western classical music as a slow fioritura, but it is always used as a momentary break in an otherwise rhythmically defined passage. Here is one example, a non-metred measure from the violin concerto by Beethoven:

Ludwig van Beethoven Violin Concerto

What of the other two, dynamic and timbre? Before the time of J. S. Bach, dynamics were not an issue – you played loudly or softly, and it was obvious which one you did! Bach introduced the ‘echo effect’, where the same music was played, first loudly, then softly:

Johann Sebastian Bach：Preludio, Partita No.3 in E

But the real innovation for dynamics was the crescendo (getting louder). It was an innovation of classical music than caught on immediately and became, in romantic music, almost as important as pitch and rhythm. Gioacchino Rossini was so fond of this device that his use of it became termed the \’Rossini Crescendo\’:

Gioacchino Rossini: Barber of Seville, overture

(an even longer example is the first four minutes of Richard Wagner\’s opera Das Rheingold. The longest example in western classical music is Maurice Ravel\’s Boléro).

Even on the scale of a few seconds, the effect of a crescendo can be electrifying. Compare the opening of Grieg’s piano concerto, first with the crescendo he wrote into the score, and then without it:

Edvard Grieg: Piano Concerto

Timbre is the fourth category, and like dynamic it is usually not integral to the music. A piano could play three different pieces, and although the timbre is the same it would be clear that distinct pieces are being played. But what if we hear a piece on voice, then on piano, then orchestra? Can you tell that it is the same piece? Listen to this:

Three different timbres

Timbre makes no difference! Beethoven is Beethoven even on a tin whistle…

There are of course other criteria by which music could be classified – contour, form, density, key structure, and so on. But what about noise? In reverse order, the timbre of a hiss may distinguish its origin, but it remains a hiss (surf on the seashore; a boiling kettle; a cat; the wind in the grass). Is there a crescendo in noise? Yes, and it gives specific information, just like the crescendo in music (the approaching storm; a plane receding into the distance; the ebb and flow of the waves). Noise usually does not have rhythm, or repeated patterns in time, and this is a big distinction between music and noise. think of the percussion section of an orchestra: noise in the service of music! In classical western music it is used to mark an accent, or to mark the rhythm:

Maurice Ravel: Boléro

The biggest distinction is in the arrangement of pitch. ‘Arrangement’ is the exact word here: music is an arrangement of pitches so precise that they are called ‘notes,’ and those notes are organized into groupings that relate the notes to each other in logical ways. Noise does not have this framework. I must be very precise in how I state this: notes and their relational framework are not music; they are one of the ingredients that we use to make music. I could for example take those notes in a seemingly random order and throw them together. Would this make music? Listen:

Random notes - or mathematical precision?

Was that music? Well, contrary to what you might think, maybe it was… But that must be the subject of the next blog.