Listening Log №21 – György Ligeti – Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet (1968)

This blog entry will continue with the studies on polyphony, however tis will be the beginning of a short series on recommended pieces demonstrating contemporary takes on polyphony. For this first entry I listened to the first piece from the work Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet by Hungarian-Austrian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006).

Ligeti is a composer closely associated with avant-garde explorations in composition and form. His compositions often feature extensive use of electronics, closed tonal clusters, ambiguous sonority, and a concern for the interaction of sound in the environment.

György Ligeti (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Ten Pieces for Wind Quintet is roughly organized into ensemble pieces (odd numbered) and solo pieces (even numbered). The main focus of this listening entry is on the first of these ten pieces (Molto Sostenuto e Calmo), which is an ensemble piece, where no discernible focus falls on any one voice within the quintet. The instrumentation is as follows:

Alto Flute in G
English Horn
Clarinet in Bb
French Horn in F
Bassoon

The piece has two distinct sections and these sections are not so much distinguishable due to a thematic change, but rather, there’s a distinct jump in register and a modulation in texture and dynamics. In the first section, the instruments move and change in ways that are not immediately apparent, there doesn’t seem to be any vertical coordination between the changes in notes from the instruments. The effect is that there seems to be a stumbling movement that is passed on horizontally from one instrument to the next. If this is combined with the staggered changes in dynamics, blunt crescendo/decrescendo pairs, then there is a feeling of constant falling experienced (I’m stretching it, but kind of like a Shepherd tone of sorts).

Excerpt from *Molto Sostenuto e Calmo* showing the staggered entrances and overlapping dynamic changes.

I’m very interested by this type of polyphonic writing now that I’ve had some more exposure to it. This particular piece subverts a lot of the traditions in polyphonic writing that I know of, yet it manages to allude to idea of staggered voice entries in traditional polyphony. I would imagine it would be interesting to analyze the intervalic movement of each voice and see if this is a patterned feature of the piece, but at first listen the implied movement of the piece, even if very slow and ambiguous, was a main focal point for my attention.

Listening Log №20 – Thomas Tallis – Spem in Alium [Motet] (1570)

I couldn’t write a blog series on polyphony without dedicating at least one blog post to Thomas Tallis and his famous 40-part motet titled Spem in Alium (Hope in No Other), so this will cover some ground towards this giant of English renaissance music.

Thomas Tallis (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) was an English composer of the Renaissance period, and perhaps one of the greatest exponents of the English tradition of sacred choral music. Tallis composed Spem in Alium in or around 1570, likely inspired by a number of other equally ambitious works for multiple voices, or perhaps as a compositional challenge for himself. Spem in Alium owes part of its reputation to the monumental task of writing a piece that interweaves forty individual voices (eight five-part choirs, for a total of forty voices). Traditionally polyphonic vocal music would have been written for five voices, with further voices added to enrich the polyphonic texture of a composition, so it seems likely that Spem in Alium would have been composed to push the complexity of the style to new heights.

There is a lot that has been written about this piece already, and one of the most fascinating to me is the importance that the idea of space and cardinality play within the piece. It seems that the listener is not required to listen to individual voices and to try and make sense of a single moving line, it would be nearly impossible to do that even when only half of the choir is singing. Rather, the listener is invited to allow the ear to be guided by the movement of the sound itself, rather than by the movements of the voices up and down the register.

A performance of Spem in Alium might typically be performed “in the round” with the audience in the centre, which would create the spatial illusion of the music moving around the choir in different sections. Having even numbers (eight choirs, forty musicians) allows for a sense of cardinality to develop within the music where we can divide the choir into two halves, four quarters, and eight eights and to use this as a mechanism to preserve a balance in the music. This is obviously not a hard rule, as there are significant overlaps and transition moments between choirs, but it can be conceived in this way. I haven’t heard this piece performed live, but I find that listening to it with a score can be a close approximation if care is taken to visualize the layout of a performance and identify the position of each of the choirs within that layout. It can’t beat the real experience, but it does help.

There are several striking sections in the piece that come as a shock every time I listen to this, as with every listen my ear goes somewhere else and loses track of where the choir is. There are least three distinct, jarring, and I would say violent stops where none of the choirs sing for a handful of pulses. These come at intervals of roughly every passing third of the piece. The resulting silence, after these continuous waves of sound, is very startling. In particular, after the last pause, there is a sudden and unexpected change in tonality from the preceding C Major to A major, in a weak beat of the bar. Though I struggle to anticipate it with every listen, and I know it’s coming, it’s always such a pleasant and eye opening change.

I can’t imagine what performing or conducting this piece must be like. I would imagine sectionals are being arranged so that each choir can function individually before being brought together. Furthermore, since the audience has trouble discerning the different voices, I would imagine performers might be taking their cues from singers around them, which can be tricky if the choirs are trading sections in the music but are not adjacent to each other physically in the performance space.

References: 
1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Tallis

Recording:
Tallis, T., Choir of the King's College, Cambridge. (1992) "Spem in Alium" Tallis: Spem in Alium. London: Decca.

Listening Log №19 – Astor Piazzolla – Four, for Tango (1988)

This entry is dedicated to a late composition for string quartet by the Argentine composer Astor Piazzolla (1912-1992) titled Four, for Tango. Piazzolla’s main body of work has been consistently very popular in Europe and has been extensively covered, so I decided to pick this particular composition to demonstrate the synthesis of the composer’s various influences and to explore some of the polyphonic possibilities of writing for small ensembles.

Astor Piazzolla was a leading compositional figure of Argentine music in the 20th century: he transformed traditional tango music with an obsessive mixture of influences ranging from baroque counterpoint, to extended improvisational passages, as well as exploring the various developing rhythmic and tonal capabilities of his contemporaries. Throughout his musical development he retained a strong personal identity with tango music which won him both praise and intense criticism, internationally and domestically (respectively).

Four for Tango was written for the Kronos Quartet in 1988, late into Piazzolla’s career and combines numerous stylistic elements that define his trajectory. Two of the most evident signatures are the use of the rhythmic grouping 3-3-2 and the extended technique of using the body of the instrument as a percussion box. The use of 3-3-2 has been a recurring signature of Piazzolla’s rhythmic approach:

Furthermore, extended percussion techniques are meticulously notated and explained in detail:

The piece retains a very violent and driving pace throughout and holds a very minor and chromatic tonality. With Piazzolla you can get romantic melodies with Stravinsky-like intense rhythmic puzzles, and this piece definitely falls in the later. There is a very strong emphasis on the cello and the viola, these are instruments that often carry the melody in their low strings, but high in the instruments range, which gives the melody a very thick and warm sound. The violins have a major role in providing the whip and drum-like percussion strikes that punctuate the piece throughout.

I thoroughly enjoyed this piece, and having listened to a lot of Piazzolla’s music over the years, it’s always very refreshing to find new works written, and in particular those composed specifically for ensembles outside of his tango ensembles.

References

Recording: 
Piazzolla, A., Kronos Quartet, (1988). 'Four, for Tango' Winter was Hard. New York: Nonesuch Records. [online]

Sheet music:
Piazzolla, A. 1989. Four, for Tango. Paris: Henry Lemoine. [online]

Listening Log №18 – William Byrd – ‘Tristitia et anxietas – Sed tu Domine’ [Motet] (1580)

This is my first look at polyphonic choral music and I’ve listened to William Byrd’s highly emotive sacred motet Tristitia et Anxietas (Sadness and Anxiety), first composed in 1580.

William Byrd (1539-1623) is arguably one of the most well known and well regarded of English composers from the Renaissance. Byrd lived during a period of major political and religious tension in England and drew much inspiration from his life as a devout catholic living under a reformed protestant monarchy. Byrd was responsible for the development and transformation of the musical traditions of Britain, and his output of nearly 500 published works contributed massively to the further growth of these traditions.

William Byrd (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Tristitia is a motet, a type of polyphonic choral work, written for five voices (ATTBB) and mosts performances last around 10m30s.

The composition uses a number of recurring motives to bring in different voices and different sections of the text. The first of these motives, a rising and descending semitone in the word Tri-sti-(ti)-a, is one of the first indications of a melancholic and sorrowful tone of the piece. This semitone motif is used very effectively by Byrd in the introduction of voices which imitate each other. For example, the initial cadence suggests a Phrygian tonality in the first three measures, however, the introduction of the upper voices following the semi-tone motif take on a different meaning when the movement in the lower voices changes. From this change we have the appearance of suspensions in the polyphony formed.

The text itself is used to provide emotional peaks for the composition. In contrast to the text of musical rounds and catches, where the interplay between repeating and overlapping lines of text is used for “poetic” effect, the text here takes on a different function. While going into the significance of each line of the text is beyond the scope of this post, there is a very interesting emotional peak in the piece which stood out to me the most:

Væ mihi, quia peccavi

Woe is me, for I have sinned.

When the piece arrives at this text, towards the end of the first part of the piece, the simple motif presented in the alto voices open up to some of the most interesting harmony of the whole piece. The harmony implied in the section modulates on subsequent repetitions and contains clashing accidentals which lead to an ambiguous tonal direction for the listener. Furthermore, all voices are singing in the upper range or their individual registers; the work itself does not grow louder by the intentional action of the singers, but the overall intensity of the piece grows naturally with the singers reaching higher in pitch.

References: 
1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Byrd

Recording:
Stile Antico (2019). "Tristitia et Anxietas" In a Strange Land. Arles: Harmonia Mundi Musique:

Listening Log №17 – John Church – ‘Poor Owen’ [Round/Canon] (17th c.)

Continuing with the series of posts dedicated to musical rounds, this next one is a round that had interesting chromaticism used for great mood-setting given the subject matter.

There isn’t a lot of biographical information about composer, John Church (1675-1741). It is believed he was born in Windsor, but not much else can be found about him. The few known works attributed to him vary in content from secular canons (such as Poor Owen), to political and provoking works (such as The Sham Monarch of Spain), and various spiritual choral works.

Poor Owen (also published as Poor Tabby²) is a canon written for three voices in a minor tonality (C minor, below). The canon is secular in lyrical content, although it is not clear if Church wrote the lyrics along with the music. The round starts with a descending chromatic line which creates an interesting sombre start to the piece. When the second and third voices join, then the harmony begins to develop further forming a type of V7-i in Bb minor, and then arriving back into Abm briefly only to resolve Db major. The composer does not shy away from using tritone intervals in passing to create tension. Lyrically, for example, Swan’s Wine’s ends up overlapping to “swine” just when the dissonance between the Eb and A natural pass by each other.

Poor Owen, for a while did lie, despised by all that walked by, Often they were heard to cry, “Swan’s wine’s dry,” One standing by said, “Let’s try,” then one and all went to Cobweb Hall. Where they drank their wine in bowls to gratify their thirsty souls.

The project To Your Rude Health by the Iuchair Ensemble and the University of Glasgow have compiled this and many other rounds catches on their website. The following score below is the transcription of Poor Owen:

poor-wen

I tried playing the three voices on the piano to get a feel for the movement and the different harmonies that emerge from the composition. The composition really comes alive in the polyphony generated by the round and it was a good exercise for sight reading and look at voice leading.

References: 
1. To Your Rude Health. [online] Available at: https://www.toyourrudehealth.arts.gla.ac.uk/ [Accessed 2021].

‌2. Rimbault, E. (1865). The rounds, catches, and canons of England : a collection of specimens of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, adapted to modern use. London: Cramer, Wood, & Co.
 

Recording:
The Merry Companions (2011). Poor Owen. Virginia: Sono Luminus.

Listening Log №16 – Tania León – Indígena (1991)

Taking a break from bawdy musical rounds, for this week’s blog I listened with fascination to Tania Leon’s piece Indígena. It was exciting listening to an unknown composer, equally this piece has an excited feel to it. While it starts almost cartoonishly, the piece takes a more serious and urgent feel.

Tania León (b. 1943, Havana) is a Cuban-American composer, conductor, and pianist who has composed a large variety of works including operas, dances and ballets, orchestral works, as well as instrumental pieces for ensembles and soloists. León had originally studied and prepared for a career as a concert pianist, however after moving from Havana to New York City she found an opportunity to work as a composer an arranger and developed her her style and language while immersed in the cultural hot-spot of New York’s music and dance scenes.

The pice I chose for this blog entry is titled Indígena, and it was composed by León in 1991. The piece is written for a custom ensemble of thirteen musicians, including woodwinds, strings, piano, and a single percussionist.

This blog post will focus on some impressions on the listening experience of the piece rather than a detailed analysis. For a detailed analysis of Indígena, as well as a detailed biography and comprehensive review of León’s compositional output and style see Spinazzola (2006).

The first impressions of the piece is that there is a lot going on in all aspects of the written work. The piece begins with a flurry of features, with nearly all instruments having a dedicated passage of solo time with abrupt interruptions. A wide range of what might be called “extended techniques” are present for nearly all instruments, and these are used to a great extent to communicate the programatic nature of the work: what we’re a hearing are chaotic conversations in a busy communal environment.

Rhythmic patterns play a very prominent role in this piece. We hear heavily accented, angular jumps across many of the instrument groups which create a strong rhythmic focus on these passages, even if the harmonic intentions remain ambiguous. Furthermore, the B section of the piece contains unison rhythmic patterns across most of the woodwinds and strings, which serve as a sort of clave for the featured piano solo.

This is a very interesting piece by a composer who has been able to effectively pack a myriad of technique and resources into this composition, but all exclusively at the service of the composition itself. I cannot recommend Spinazzola’s (2006) analysis of this work enough which, although some of the harmonic technical analysis went into very academic detail, it breaks down many of the intentions of the composer in both style and technique.

References: 
1. Spinazzola, James, "An introduction to the music of Tania León and a conductor's analysis of Indígena" (2006). LSU Doctoral
Dissertations. 
https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/3326

Recording:
León, T., Continuum, The Western Wind. Indígena. New York: Anthology of Recorded Music. 2007.

Listening Log №14 – Orlando Gibbons – The Silver Swan [Round] (1612)

I finished the course section of melody with some delays, but I really enjoyed the variety of music I looked at in the listening log, so I will continue to mix it up with pieces outside of the particular course material I’m working on. However, this is the first of a few posts to follow focused on Rounds, Descants, and Polyphony.

Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625)¹ was a renowned English composer and organist of the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries. His collection of works titled The First Set of Madrigals and Motets, published in 1612 and containing the famous madrigal The Silver Swan, was well regarded in its day and had wide print and distribution runs. The Silver Swan‘s lyrics are not known to have been composed by Gibbons himself, but they deal with the idea of a swan’s song, which is only heard once and just before death.

The silver Swan, who, living, had no Note, when Death approached, unlocked her silent throat. Leaning her breast against the reedy shore, thus sang her first and last, and sang no more: "Farewell, all joys! O Death, come close mine eyes! More Geese than Swans now live, more Fools than Wise."

The piece The Silver Swan was not intended by Gibbons to be sung as a musical round, however the recording below by the King’s Singers shows how the melody can be adapted for this format. This particular round has three cycles:

The harmony is in the D Aeolian or natural minor mode, with allowance for a V7 modulation away from the mode to resolve back to D minor. The cycles come in on the 8th and 16th measures, and interestingly the ending of the phrases (on the words throat, more, and wise) are generally sang in unison, but the paths to arrive at this note from the different voices is unique to their own phrase.

References: 
1. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Orlando-Gibbons

Recording: 
Gibbons, O., The King's Singers. 2012. "The Silver Swan" Royal Rhymes and Rounds. Middlesex: Signum Records

Gibbons, O., The King's Singers. 2012. "The Silver Swan (Round)" Royal Rhymes and Rounds. Middlesex: Signum Records

Listening Log №13 – Carla Bley – ‘And Now, the Queen’ and ‘Violin’ (1976)

This listening log is dedicated to two miniatures written in 1976 by American composer Carla Bley. I had wanted to do something that would, at least loosely, belong in the cabinet of “jazz compositions” and picking something from the vast output from Carla Bley seemed like a really good starting point. These two compositions are quite different from other pieces that I’ve looked at so far, in particular while they are notated for piano, they have been variously reworked for different instrumentations at the discretion of the performer.

Carla Bley (photograph by Philippe Taka)

Carla Bley (b. 1936) is an American composer, arranger, pianist, and conductor who has been active since the mid-1950s. Bley’s compositions have covered a vast amount of styles, from the avant-garde to gospel/Americana, and these have been performed and recorded by some of the leading musicians and ensembles in jazz. Her musical output is quite vast and varied, but it includes full composition and arrangements for big-band groups and orchestras as well as compositions that provide a framework for improvisation. The two short pieces that form the basis of this blog fall into the latter category: two unusual miniatures that encourage improvisation and development from the performer. Nothing more than a melody lead-sheet, no chords, and not always time.

And Now, the Queen

Surprisingly, this might be the more tonal of the two pieces in this entry. The lead sheet below contains one main thematic idea, which is not developed any further. Some form of a Gbmaj7 tonality is implied, but there’s a lack of context here; furthermore, the sections between the theme statements seem out of place (tonally) from the main theme.

The piece has time signature changes in every measure (5/4, 7/4, 6/4, 5/4), though I have seen this written as a continuous bar without lines or divisions. The reason why there are time signatures in this piece remains a mystery to me, as it does not appear to make a difference whether anyone is counting or not. Curiously, the gaps that are reserved for the drums to fill in are notated as both written notes and marked with annotations.

In the recording above a more detailed analysis could be done of the improvisation and how it relates (or departs from) the originally composed idea, but that is not the point of this log post.

Violin

Probably inspired by free-jazz, Violin has little harmonic context for which to guide improvisation around the main idea of the song. The improviser has to extract information, in whatever format possible, from what is exposed and craft from that come-what-may. The lack of a clear harmonic direction in the piece below (no chords, no leading tones, no progressions/cadences, etc.) calls for the prominence of perhaps a melodic idea, or exposing and minimal rhythmic development. In the recording below the trio plays with fragments of the written music while improvising before re-stating the theme (all in under 3 minutes).

Aside from the music itself, I like the way the piece below is notated. There is no time signature, there are no bar lines, and there are thick horizontal lines to indicate the duration of longer held notes . The piece says rubato, which implies that the held notes could be an unspecified length of time, interrupted only by the perceived end of the line. Similarly, vertical lines are added for notes that are to be played together, similar to what many pianists do to aid in hand combinations.

Recordings: 
Bley, C., Bley, P. 1965. "And Now, the Queen" Alone Again. New York: Improvising Artists. [online]
Bley, C., Bley, P. 1965. "Violin" Closer. New York: ESP Disk. [online]

Sheet music:
Bley, C. 1976. And Now the Queen [Online]
Bley, C. 1976. Violin. [online]

Listening Log №12 – Willson Osborne – Rhapsody for Bassoon (1952)

For the final short entry dedicated to solo woodwind compositions I listened to Willson Osborne’s Rhapsody for Bassoon from around 1952. Willson Osborne (1906-1979) was an American composer which, by all accounts I could find, remains little known outside of this work for solo bassoon, which is a cornerstone of the solo repertoire for the instrument.

The piece which concerns this log entry is the Rhapsody, originally written for solo bassoon and later adapted for clarinet and bass clarinet. This piece remains very popular in the solo bassoon repertoire and and numerous recordings have been done for both clarinet and bass clarinet also.

The Rhapsody is meant to be highly expressive in the way that is performed. There are long legato passages throughout and rarely any (if any) stand-alone notes, accents, sudden changes in dynamic, or short attacks. The composer has annotated nearly every measure with some kind of precise indication concerning tempo or expressive remark. Often, the instructions from the composer appear mid phrase, as if having a conductor in front of you while reading the score:

Sample from the score, showing Osborne’s frequent and meticulous indications

I haven’t found too much written about some of the expressive indications from the composer. I think for a piece like this the choice of scales and tonality seem, to me, to be less interesting than the structure and the expressive capabilities/expectations of the piece. The composer has marked meticulous instructions and a lot of time could be spent analyzing the way that these relate to the corresponding phrases (for example, are there riten. on returns to any tonal centers?)

I listened to this piece a number of times and it grew on me, as I wasn’t too interested in it to begin with. I can imagine this is an amazing piece for a woodwind player to showcase the full expressive potential of the instrument and the performer would benefit tremendously from tackling a piece like this.

Recording: 
Osborne, W., Lamb, C., LeClair, J., Feldman, J. 2019. "Rhapsody for Solo Bassoon" Judith LeClair Plays Schumann, Osbourne, Telemann, Reynolds, Weber and Ravel . Middlesex: Signum Records. [online]

Sheet music:
Osborne, W. 1958. Rhapsody for Clarinet (B-flat). New York: C.F. Peters Corporation. [online]

Listening Log №11 – Kaija Saariaho – Asteroid 4179, Toutatis (2005)

I’m going to take a break before finishing the assigned series on solo woodwinds from the previous few entries to focus the next few posts on some works from composers I’ve been into recently, outside of the course assignments and just in my general listening. Furthermore, the recent list of assigned compositions for woodwind were completely lacking in any female composers (something which became very evident when I compiled all the portraits I’ve been posting with the entries!). I will keep this in mind by varying more the styles, genres, geographies, periods, instrumentation, etc. to hopefully keep this interesting and fresh for anyone who might read it.

Having said, this log entry features Kaija Saariaho (b. 1952), a contemporary composer from Finland associated with the spectralist movement. Saariaho has been an active explorer in combining electronic and acoustic sound sources for ensembles of varying sizes and instrumentation¹.

The piece for this entry is a short orchestral piece from 2005 titled Asteroid 4179, Toutatis composed in 2005 by Saariaho and inspired by the potentially hazardous asteroid of the same name. The work was comissioned by the Berliner Philharmoniker for a project surrounding a release of Gustav Holst’s The Planets. The composition lasts between 3.5 to 4 minutes and is composed for a large orchestral ensemble. Saariaho was inspired by the unusual tumbling rotation of the asteroid which would mean that the path of any objects viewed from the asteroid would not repeat.

Right off the bat, I will admit that while this piece makes for an intense and engaging listening experience, this is a challenging piece to write about. The piece begins with very soft and sparse instrumentation, with the celesta and woodwinds providing the first hints of movement above a soft pad of strings and percussion. The melodic movement starts to tumble and tangle within itself as the woodwinds, harps, and celesta begin to come in with unrelated clashing melodies. Beneath them the brass enters into the first of a few different climaxes of the piece.

The next section of the piece is dominated by ostinato (obstinate, repeating) patterns in the strings and brass. This might be a cheeky nod to The Planets, it’s hard to tell. The next section has some really interesting notation for the way in which the strings are instructed to enter and exit in a staggered fashion. A really interesting effect is created by these staggered entries set only a beat appart at times, even within sections I have become really interested in meticulous notation choices by composers such as what is shown below:

There are some very intense and unpredictable peaks of energy in the piece. These peaks are brought on by a sudden crescendo from the brass and then ease off to a dynamic only slightly higher than in the previous section. In that sense the piece is continually growing in volume but the illusion of growth is tamed by a sudden pull in the dynamics to give ample room for further growth. Having had the score to read with the piece (which the composer has for free in her website²) made for a really engaging listening experience as many of these nuances can be apreciated with more detail.

On a side note, I find it fantastic and a bit funny that this piece was commissioned from Saariaho to go along with another release of The Planets. In contrast to Holst’s highly personal and jovial view on astrology, listening to Asteroid 4179 brings up a desolate version of outer space, far more consonant with our often-hard-to-swallow lonely existence. I’m not sure how well the different styles in this record fit, I’m also curious to hear how someone who is keen to buy another recording of The Planets would feel about these additions, but it’s interesting to see how the way we musicalize the cosmos has evolved over the years.

References: 
1. https://saariaho.org/biography/
2. https://saariaho.org/works/asteroid-4179-toutatis/

Recording: 
Saariaho, K., Rattle, S., Berliner Philharmoniker. 2006. Holst: The Planets. Berlin: EMI. [online]

Sheet music:
Saariaho, K. 2005. Asteroid 4179 - Toutatis. New York: Chester Music. [online]

Franco Giovanetti

Trying to resist the temptation to make this website look like it was made in 1998.

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