beethoven’s Op. 130 quartet - I. Adagio ma non troppo. Allegro. November 15, 2006
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a commentWell, we in the Arnica Quartet got through our first late Beethoven quartet together Sunday afternoon. With a piece of the size and complexity of the Op. 130, it would stand to reason that there would be places that we’d like to have done better, but on the whole, it was a reading that we were quite happy with given that it was our first performance of it in public.
It always amazes me how much of a journey these Beethoven quartets are - even the Op. 18. With Haydn or Mozart you get varying amounts of humor and profundity, but everything is “just so” (with the more than occasional joke from Haydn) and there is not so much the idea of transcendent human experience being manifested through the music. With Beethoven, you get the idea that there is a genius mind struggling mightily with itself and its mode of expression. No form can hold it - even if that is what must been done for the time being. If Mahler and Sibelius were correct in their assertion that a symphony must be a world unto itself, surely Beethoven must have felt that his quartets were much the same - but more concentrated, the distilled essence of an entire world in four movements and four players.
With the Op. 130, Beethoven breaks away from the standard four-movement “mini-symphony” form and explodes the form into six and even seven movements (Op. 131), more in the mode of a suite of movements than the expected “outer movements in sonata-allegro form, with the requisite minuet/trio and adagio inner movements”. Joseph Kerman writes in his monumental and seminal study of the Beethoven quartets that the late quartets become much more about dissociation - the fragmentation of the formal rhetoric which binds earlier compositions together. It’s as if he has finally tired of wedging novel new ideas into old, shop-worn formal constructs. This is readily apparent in the sprawling first movement of the Op. 130. It begins with a slow, spare, unison figure that’s nearly as much a cadence as a melody [1], which is interrupted several times by a scurrying motif of sixteenth notes and a fanfare motif [2]. What do these disparate figures have to do with each other? Beethoven seems not to need a relationship (at least at the beginning of the movement) and it is this sharp, wrenching contrast between the adagio and allegro aspects of the movement that really set this movement apart from anything that Beethoven has written for the string quartet up to this point. The development section [3], such as it is, is short and sublime. The sighing figure from the first phrase of the opening adagio becomes a softly rocking accompaniment to the three-note fanfare motif and a soaring melodic fragment - each passed between the first violin and cello. Like a vision of the immortal beloved, the mirage fades after a quick dip into the minor key and the increasingly violent tumult of sixteenth notes returns us back to the recapitulation.
This is such an amazing movement - I wonder what the poor quartet that gave the premiere must have thought as they worked their way through this one (I’ll find out and report here later)! It IS held together by a very coherent logic of motivic development and key relationships, but we don’t really sense that as listeners. Instead, we feel the clashes of the seemingly disparate elements that dominate the exposition and recapitulation and the idyllic warmth and calm of the development. This is also quite a departure from the “rule” of sonata-allegro form. The development is often the place where most of the action takes place, and Beethoven turns this on its head and makes it a refuge from the storms of the rest of the movement.
mozart in the laboratory? November 10, 2006
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a commentGod, I love Wikipedia! Found this tidbit in the entry for Bill Nye: The Science Guy (after spotting him on a tv show (NUMB3RS) this evening):
On Friday, February 3, 2006, Nye was married to Blair Tindall.[4] Tindall and Nye had been engaged for five months. The pair exchanged watches instead of rings “as a symbol,” Nye explained, “of man’s reckoning with time”.[5] Tindall is the author of Mozart in the Jungle and she is a former concert oboist. The two exchanged vows at Richard Saul Wurman’s The Entertainment Gathering 2006 conference where Nye spoke. They were married by the Rev. Rick Warren, pastor and author of The Purpose Driven Life. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, accompanied by MIT Media Lab professor Michael Hawley on the piano, performed a wedding march. The engagement was announced by Nye, while appearing on the December 19, 2005 episode of talk show The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson.
Bill Nye and Blair Tindall ended their marriage seven weeks after the conference ceremony. An invalid marriage license and “too much too soon” were cited as the reasons for the split. Blair Tindall announced this publicly on the LA radio show, The David Lawrence Show (July 2006).
digital scholarship November 10, 2006
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a commentI was randomly surfing around the Web last night and happened upon a couple great resources: first is the Library on Congress’ Internet Resources for Music, Theater and Dance. It is a page designed primarily for researchers looking for in-depth information that can be found in the major repositories of musical manuscripts and primary sources. From this list I found the Loeb Music Library at Harvard College Library. They happen to have a few gems of manuscripts and first editions - including Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute, and a rare first edition printing of Mozart’s Opus X Quartets (the set of six dedicated to Joseph Haydn) - all of which you can view on your computer screen in minute detail.
The Library of Congress also has a pretty extensive digital collection, especially concerning American music.
[click on images below to view full-size versions.]
Aaron Copland composing in the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, September 1942.
Letter from Aaron Copland to Leonard Bernstein.
Sketches for Appalachian Spring ballet.
arnica quartet hits blogosphere November 9, 2006
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a commentWe got a nice mention from Oregonian classical music critic David Stabler in his blog today - it was a nice surprise! Also of interest, Norman Lebrecht, the non-enfant terrible of music pseudo-journalism (imagine that Rupert Murdoch decided to start a fine arts spin-off to the Fox News Channel - shudder) decided to weigh in with his opinions on the state of classical music blogging. Evidently the standards to which he holds us humble bloggers are greater than those to which he himself is held. Ah, well.
bedside reading list November 7, 2006
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, 1 comment so farNot that it matters all that much, but here’s what’s been keeping me up late at night (I’m an inveterate late-night reader, much to my own chagrin).
Blood Brothers is a gripping account of Time journalist Michael Weisskopf losing his hand to a grenade in Iraq and his recuperation and rehabilitation at Ward 57 at Walter Reed Army Medical Center (the ward where all military amputees are sent). It is essential reading on account of the reminder it gives us about the sacrifices that our men and women in uniform are making on our behalf. People for and against the war will find much to think about in this book.
How can you resist? It’s Alton Brown, for God’s sake! And it comes with pig, cow, lamb and chicken parts refrigerator magnets - how cool is that! This is one of those cookbooks that will spend as much time at your bedside table as on the kitchen counter.
We all know way too much about Steve Jobs, but I knew next to nothing about the tech-wiz co-founder of Apple Computer, Steve Wozniak. Once you get past the gee-whiz style of prose, it’s an engrossing read, and it’s truly stunning to read of his accomplishments. What a mind!
arnicaquartet.com is live (sort of) November 6, 2006
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a comment
Hi there - just a shameless plug for the Website for my quartet - arnicaquartet.com. It’s just a splash page right now, but there is a handy form to sign up for our mailing list. You’ll get the first news on our concerts, repertoire and other stuff. There might even be a quartet blog, but I’ve got enough to do as it is on the blogging front. In 90 minutes I’ll be WagneRing - wish me luck!
the wagner conundrum November 5, 2006
Posted by Charles Noble in : the orchestra world, add a comment
Photo courtesy Wikipedia
Tomorrow we start rehearsals on a very busy program - the first half is Haydn’s Symphony No. 37 and the rarely heard Hindemith Violin Concerto (with the always stunning and insightful Leila Josefowicz). The second half is a distillation of the orchestral music from the final opera of Richard Wagner’s titanic four-part operatic cycle Der Ring des Nibelungen - Götterdämerung.
Aside from the plethora of knotty notes that Wagner presents us string players, he also presents me with a moral dilemma. I always seem to have trouble reconciling the enormity of the beauty and craftsmanship of his music with the enormity of his bigotry and hatred towards the Jews. Add to this the near worship that he later was subjected to by Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and it’s a witches brew of moral ambiguity (at the very least) that is hard to get one’s head around.
If you go along with the posit “hate the sin, not the sinner”, it would be safe enough to say “hate Wagner, but not his music”. That’s all fine and good, but then you’ve got to deal with the aspect of the composer’s personal life and how much you allow that to color the music that you listen to. It’s hard not to think of Mozart’s impending death when you hear his Requiem, or to realize the depths of Brahms’ love for his recently departed mother when you listen to Ein Deutsches Requiem. There has been a controversy raging ever since the publication of Shostakovich/Volkov’s Testimony [Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitri Shostakovich] about what role politics played in Shostakovich’s music, and indeed what role Shostakovich himself played in Soviet political intrigue. It’s easy to get caught up in the KGB, and knocks on the door and flowers at Auschwitz when you listen to nearly any of his string quartets - but does that serve the music, or the other way around?
I guess I’ll take the safe path, and get lost in the sheer beauty of the score, but afterwards be mindful of the man who was Richard Wagner, and the dangerous path that he trod. Perhaps I’ll also ponder how his situation is really a microcosm of the situation that mankind finds itself in: namely that we do many terrible things out of ignorance and fear, but in our best moments we transcend our humanity through our artistic creations. That’s why we continue to make art in all of its many and delightful forms, and why people come to enjoy it: it makes us better than ourselves.
On the iPod:
shooting musicians November 1, 2006
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a commentYou might not know that I’m a pretty avid amateur photographer in what spare time I do have. What I most enjoy is doing portraits of local musicians. Here are some examples of my recent work:
Tessa Brinckman, Cary Lewis and Dorothy Lewis - November 2006
Linda Campos - September 2006
Shin-young Kwon - April 2006
Paloma Griffin - April 2006
Una O’Riordan - November 2005
Heather Blackburn - April 2005
A Death in the Family November 1, 2006
Posted by Charles Noble in : Uncategorized, add a commentToday my wife and I went up to Puyallup, Washington (my hometown, a bedroom community to Tacoma and Seattle) to attend a reception in honor of my high school orchestra conductor, maker of my first viola, and my first viola teacher: William D. Watson. He passed away on October 27th. It was not a shock, as he’d been in fragile health for the past year or so, but even so, I always expected Mr. Watson (as I always called him) to be around - he was an institution in my life and in the lives of many others.
He was often noted for his wry sense of humor and his passion for both performing and attending concerts. He was a great educator in both his role as an orchestral conductor and as a private teacher. I think that I learned a lot about developing a sense of fairness and justice in the music business from him. I will miss him dearly.
Here is the published obituary:
William Dean Watson, 78, of Puyallup, died October 27,
2006. The only child of Willis and Nellie Watson, Bill was born March
11, 1928 in Centralia, Washington. He graduated from Centralia High
School in 1946, and from Centralia Junior College and the University of
Washington with a degree in Violin Performance. After serving two years
in the Army, he returned to the University and completed a degree in
Music Education. In 1955, he met and married his wife, Nancy. He also
began his 30-year career as an orchestra teacher in Hoquiam,
Washington. He moved to Longview in 1959 and to Puyallup in 1969. To
celebrate his retirement from teaching in 1985, Bill and Nancy took
their first trip to Europe. Bill became a full-time string instrument
maker after retiring from teaching, crafting over 250 instruments. Bill
remained an active musician throughout his life, performing in
professional and community orchestras and chamber groups. Known for his
wry sense of humor, he always enjoyed a good book, a good concert or a
good game of pinochle. Survivors include his wife, Nancy; sons Michael,
Mark and his fiancee Christina Barath; daughters Tamara and her husband
Parker Dalberg, Sharon, Julie and her husband Philip Lucich; a cousin,
Lois Clark of Seattle; grandchildren, Emily and Aaron Lucich and Andrea
Watson; brothers-in-law, John Damitio of Arizona and Murray Damitio of
California. Viewing will be held Monday, October 30 from 4-8 p.m. at
Powers Funeral Home, Puyallup. There will be a reception Wednesday,
November 1, from 3-5 p.m. at the family home. In lieu of flowers,
donations may be made to the American Heart Association or the American
Cancer Society.
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