George Gershwin – { feuilleton }

In which orchestral conductor Simon Rattle explores a century of music in much the same way that Robert Hughes explored a century of art in The Shock of the New. Or almost… It’s unfair to compare this more modest TV series to a landmark which was shot on film and with a budget large enough to allow Hughes to present his art history from locations all around the world.

If you’ve ever felt in need of an intelligent introduction to the challenges of orchestral music then Leaving Home is the ideal guide. The series was broadcast by Channel 4 (UK) in 1996, a time when the channel still was still devoting a considerable portion of its programming to the arts. Simon Rattle was a wise choice as a presenter, being a conductor with a less intimidating demeanour than some, as well as a proselytising nature. His intention here was to dispel the difficulty which many people still feel when faced with atonal compositions (twelve-tone music, aleatory music, serialism) by explaining how these musical forms evolved and why they’re not so difficult at all once you appreciate the reasoning behind them and the context out of which they emerged. Music is a curious medium in this respect. Where other art forms can start to feel distinctly old-fashioned and even thoroughly antiquated once a few decades have elapsed, there’s a lot of European music which is well over a hundred years old yet can still challenge and disturb an audience today if that audience is unprepared. Rattle’s explanations parallel The Shock of the New by dividing a century of artistic evolution into distinct modes or themes. The structure of the series and the music under discussion is as follows:

Programme 1: Dancing on a Volcano
Wagner, Prelude to Tristan and Isolde
Schoenberg, Transfigured Night
Mahler, Symphony no. 7
Strauss, Elektra
Schoenberg, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16, nos. 1 and 2
Webern, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 10, nos. 3, 4 and 5
Berg, Violin Concerto

Programme 2: Rhythm
Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring
Varèse, Ionisation
Mahler, “Abschied” from Das Lied von der Erde
Ligeti, Atmosphères
Reich, Music for Pieces of Wood
Nancarrow, Piano Roll no. 21
Boulez, Rituel in Memoriam Bruno Maderna
Messiaen, Turangalîla Symphony

Programme 3: Colour
Debussy, Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune
Stravinsky, The Firebird
Ravel, Daphnis et Chloé
Debussy, Jeux
Schoenberg, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 16, no. 3 “Farben”
Boulez, Notations
Messiaen, Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum
Takemitsu, Dream/Window

Programme 4: Three Journeys through Dark Landscapes
Bartók, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle
Bartók, Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta
Bartók, The Miraculous Mandarin
Bartók, Concerto for Orchestra
Shostakovich, Symphony no. 4
Shostakovich, Symphony no. 5
Shostakovich, Symphony no. 14
Lutosławski, Concerto for Orchestra
Lutosławski, Venetian Games
Lutosławski, Symphony no. 3

Programme 5: The American Way
Gershwin, Rhapsody in Blue
Ives, Decoration Day
Carter, A Celebration of Some 100 x 150 Notes
Copland, Appalachian Spring
Weill, “Lonely House” from Street Scene
Bernstein, “Symphonic Dances” from West Side Story
Cage, Sonatas and Interludes
Cage, First Construction in Metal
Feldman, Madame Press Died Last Week at 90
Riley, In C
Adams, Harmonium

Programme 6: After the Wake
Strauss, “Im Abendrot” from Four Last Songs
Schoenberg, A Survivor from Warsaw
Boulez, Le marteau sans maître
Webern, Five Orchestral Pieces, op. 10, no. 4
Stockhausen, Gruppen
Britten, Serenade for tenor, horn and strings
Stravinsky, Agon

Programme 7: Threads
Berio, Laborintus II
Henze, Symphony no. 8
Gubaidulina, Zeitgestalten
Kurtág, Grabstein für Stefan
Birtwistle, Ritual Fragment
Turnage, Drowned Out
Knussen, Flourish with Fireworks

“Leaving home” in Rattle’s explanation is a phrase that refers to music leaving behind the rules and harmonic bases of the previous centuries. It also refers to various forms of exile and social change, departures from earlier orthodoxies. Much of the music explored here was created in years and nations beset by wars and revolutions, and, as Rattle notes, art created under such conditions can’t help but reflect its time. I have the book of the series by Michael Hall which is very good in its own way, filled with a more detailed history and musicology, as well as many photographs and paintings relevant to the compositions. What the book lacks is the music itself, and this is the real strength of the TV series. Rattle spends each programme either sitting at a piano or conducting the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra who play extracts of all the pieces under discussion. Rattle is a proficient pianist which that means in the first couple of programmes he’s able to physically emphasise some of his talking points, in particular those instances when a composer deliberately deviates from expectation. Watching an orchestra perform a composition you’ve just heard described is much more effective than listening to a recording, especially when we reach the 1950s with extracts from a performance of Stockhausen’s Gruppen.

Continue reading “Leaving Home: Orchestral Music in the 20th Century”

The first pressing of Switched-On Bach with a cover showing a Bach-alike confounded/dismayed by the sounds issuing from the machine behind him. The cover was soon swapped for the one below.

After mentioning the proliferation of Switched-On… synthesizer albums in the previous post, curiosity impelled me to see how many of these things were out there. A lot more than I expected is the answer, almost enough to make this cul-de-sac of novelty exploitation into a sub-genre of its own. As mentioned earlier, it was the huge success of Switched-On Bach (1968) by Wendy Carlos that began the trend. The album had a rare crossover appeal so that it could be sold to classical listeners as well as to a younger audience interested in electronic sounds, those for whom the words “switched on” echoed the druggy/erotic intersection of “turned on”. Carlos had an advantage over other musicians thanks to a long association with Robert Moog which meant she had a head start in exploring the recording potential of the new Moog synthesizer and innovations like Moog’s touch-sensitive keyboard. In 1968 few people could afford a Moog system; those who could usually needed to hire technicians like Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause to help them operate the thing. For a brief while it was enough to simply use the instrument to make strange noises, hence Mick Jagger’s droning score for Kenneth Anger’s Invocation of my Demon Brother (1969), and George Harrison’s preposterous Electronic Sound (1969), 44 minutes of very amateurish Moog-doodling. Switched-On Bach sounds a little primitive today—it sounds primitive next to its follow-up albums, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer (1969) and Switched-On Bach II (1973)—but Carlos and collaborators Rachel Elkind and Benjamin Folkman spent much more time refining their recording techniques than the knob-twiddling horde who rushed to capitalise on their success.

The rules of the Switched-On… idiom are as follows: a title that begins with the words “Switched-On”, obviously, although there’s a subset of the form in which an album may have a different title while a subtitle mentions something about “switched-on recordings”; the music must be cover versions of familiar songs or compositions, originality here is surplus to requirements; and it’s not essential but the cover art often alludes in some way to synthesizer technology and/or “the future”, with the latter represented by Space Age typefaces such as Amelia, Computer, Countdown or Data 70. I’ve not heard many of these albums, and I’m fairly certain that I don’t want to hear most of them, but I’ve heard enough Carlos cash-ins to know that the cover designs are often the best thing about them. The remastered CDs that Wendy Carlos released in the 1990s feature additional tracks that give some idea of the amount of work involved in the creation of each album. The early cash-ins, by contrast, tend to avoid time-consuming multi-track composition in favour of using a synthesizer as though it’s merely an expensive keyboard. The success of these albums musically may be gauged by the lack of reissues. They may be of interest to the so-bad-it’s-good “Incredibly Strange Music” crowd but I prefer to spend my time listening to other things. Beware.

Switched-On Rock (1969) by The Moog Machine.

Switched-On Bacharach (1969) by Christopher Scott.

Switched-Off Bach (1969) by Various Artists.

CBS exploits the success of the electronic album by packaging a collection of earlier non-electronic recordings.

Continue reading “Switched-On… hits and misses”