Vaughan Williams's Veranda

Started by karlhenning, April 12, 2007, 06:03:44 AM

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scarpia

Quote from: lukeottevanger on September 07, 2008, 09:35:06 AM
    * Michael Tippett: Symphony no. 4

(I'm not sure that Tippett specifies wind machine, though - IIRC it's just 'breathing noises' that are called for - which results in an unfortunate tendency for the piece to sound like an obscene phone call)

Yes, I had a recording of that piece, probably Hickox.  That is the reason that in a collection with hundreds of composers represented I don't have a single recording of a piece by Tippett.  (Symphony for large orchestra a breathalyzer test.)  Imbecile.


PerfectWagnerite

Quote from: M forever on September 07, 2008, 09:32:07 AM
There is also a wind machine in Don Quixote. Apart from the already mentioned pieces, I can't think of any others that use it.
I think in Die Walkuere, right after the opening Prelude and where Siegmund enters Hunding's house you sometimes hear some wind effects (not sure whether they are taped or made by an actual instrument live). In any case I don't think it is in the score and frankly think it is pretty distracting.

PerfectWagnerite

Quote from: scarpia on September 07, 2008, 11:13:21 AM
Yes, I had a recording of that piece, probably Hickox.  That is the reason that in a collection with hundreds of composers represented I don't have a single recording of a piece by Tippett.  (Symphony for large orchestra a breathalyzer test.)  Imbecile.


Imbecile is a bit harsh, but I have to admit I don't find Tippett's music really all that interesting either.

lukeottevanger

#823
Quote from: scarpia on September 07, 2008, 11:13:21 AM
Yes, I had a recording of that piece, probably Hickox.  That is the reason that in a collection with hundreds of composers represented I don't have a single recording of a piece by Tippett.  (Symphony for large orchestra a breathalyzer test.)  Imbecile.

That is, IMO, much more than way off the mark. Tippett is one of the glories of 20th century music - more honest and humane than most; more brave and nakedly revealing than any. He was an immensely original composer, writing music of the most startling generosity and beauty - but also a fine, big-hearted human being who deserves better than petty insults of this sort.

Letting yourself be put off VW by the wind-machine in his 7th symphony and off Tippett by the breathing noises in his 4th is pretty much the same as rejecting Mahler because of that 'crass' (  ;) ) hammer in his 6t)

Quote from: PerfectWagnerite on September 07, 2008, 11:23:13 AM
Imbecile is a bit harsh, but I have to admit I don't find Tippett's music really all that interesting either.

And what have you heard?

sound67

Quote from: scarpia on September 07, 2008, 08:18:06 AM
Because it is a crude device that just makes noise?

Well, you've been an obsessive pedant, why change?  $:)

Antheil uses airplane propellers in the Ballet Mécanique, which may be even slightly cruder devices. Mossolov, Honegger and others have shown that machine music can be suggested without using actual machines. So?

QuoteBeethoven, Sibelius, Debussy were able to depict storms using their music. 

Yeah, that's the same.  ::)
"Vivaldi didn't compose 500 concertos. He composed the same concerto 500 times" - Igor Stravinsky

"Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours." - Norman Lebrecht

sound67

Quote from: Spitvalve on September 07, 2008, 11:05:56 AMit follows very closely the template used by Hindemith in his Symphonia Serena, written several years before (1949 I think). I'm thinking particularly of the all-windy 2nd (scherzo-like) mvt. followed by the all-stringy slow mvt. Does anyone know if VW was deliberately following Hindy's example here?

I'd have to dig a bit into my RVW lit to verify that, but every time I'm listening to the 8th, I'm thinking Hindemith, too.

Thomas
"Vivaldi didn't compose 500 concertos. He composed the same concerto 500 times" - Igor Stravinsky

"Mozart is a menace to musical progress, a relic of rituals that were losing relevance in his own time and are meaningless to ours." - Norman Lebrecht

scarpia

Quote from: lukeottevanger on September 07, 2008, 12:02:51 PM
Tippett is one of the glories of 20th century music - more honest and humane than most; more brave and nakedly revealing than any. He was an immensely original composer, writing music of the most startling generosity and beauty - but also a fine, big-hearted human being who deserves better than petty insults of this sort.

Clearly Tippett's music is much better than it sounds.

eyeresist

Quote from: sound67 on September 07, 2008, 07:13:26 AM
I don't know why you're all getting worked up on the wind machine at all. Why not use one?

1. It's cheesy. A symphony is supposed to be a musical work, not an IMAX Experience.

2. It's redundant. What are the singers doing if not evoking the whistling and howling of the wind?

I imagine myself arguing with Vaughan Williams on this point; he crustily replies, "It may be a stupid idea, but it's what I meant."

lukeottevanger

Quote from: scarpia on September 07, 2008, 03:02:11 PM
Clearly Tippett's music is much better than it sounds.

Only in as much as every great composer's music is better than it sounds. Beethoven is better than he sounds. Mozart is better than he sounds. And so on.

But Tippett's music, like Beethoven's and Mozart's, is also simply glorious just as sound - to mention just a few, the Piano Concerto, the Triple Concerto, the earlier works for strings: these are about as beautiful as 20th century music gets. Rejecting Tippett's oeuvre on the basis of the breathing noises in the 4th is as ridiculous as M's rejecting VW based on a couple of superficial listenings (or your rejection of VW on the basis of the wind machine in the 7th, for that matter); extrapolating from the same breathing noises the 'fact' of Tippett's 'imbecility' is as ridiculous as M's extrapolation that VW's status is simply a matter of over-compensation by an English nation desperate for some composer, any composer, to call their own. You excoriated him for that, remember?

Quote from: eyeresist on September 07, 2008, 09:28:08 PM
1. It's cheesy. A symphony is supposed to be a musical work, not an IMAX Experience.

2. It's redundant. What are the singers doing if not evoking the whistling and howling of the wind?

It's neither. As I said, it occupies precisely the same sort of position as the hammer in Mahler 6 (or the breathing sounds in Tippett 4) - that is, as an extra-musical symbol of something that exists at or beyond the borders of the music proper. In Mahler, we have an extra-musical symbol of 'Fate'  - it has to be extra-musical in order to be a shocking intrusion from the 'outside world'. In Tippett, we have an extra-musical symbol of the bare basics of 'Life' - it has to be extra-musical in order to be the blank canvas from which the music grows and to which it recedes. In VW 7, we have an extra-musical symbol of 'Nature' (in its rawest, most dangerous state) - and it has to be extra-musical in order to evoke that inhuman world which is far beyond, and oblivious to, human concerns. To suggest that the singers would be an acceptable substitute shows a lack of understanding of the musics' fundamental dialectic.


eyeresist

Quote from: lukeottevanger on September 07, 2008, 10:53:09 PM
It's neither. As I said, it occupies precisely the same sort of position as the hammer in Mahler 6 (or the breathing sounds in Tippett 4) - that is, as an extra-musical symbol of something that exists at or beyond the borders of the music proper. ... In VW 7, we have an extra-musical symbol of 'Nature' (in its rawest, most dangerous state) - and it has to be extra-musical in order to evoke that inhuman world which is far beyond, and oblivious to, human concerns. To suggest that the singers would be an acceptable substitute shows a lack of understanding of the musics' fundamental dialectic.

Sure is a shame I don't understand the music's fundamental dialectic the way you do!

Orchestral music conjuring grand, lonely, inhuman vistas of icy wilderness; Singers evoking the eerie call of the wind, the only "voice" to be heard in this desolate place. Powerful stuff, which I think covers everything you say the wind machine is needed for.

lukeottevanger

Sounds a bit facile to me, I'm afraid. The voice is by definition the most human of instruments, and what VW wants here is inhumanity, or, rather, absence of humanity. He needs a shocking symbol to acheive this, something exterior to the normal range of orchestral or vocal sound. somethin 'other'. This is why the wind machine is used here, and for similar reasons in Messiaen's Des Canyons.... for instance. It's only in e.g the Alpine Symphony that its use is purely literal - perhaps not even there, though I'd hesitate to make that argument.

J.Z. Herrenberg

Quote from: lukeottevanger on September 08, 2008, 01:03:12 AM
The voice is by definition the most human of instruments, and what VW wants here is inhumanity, or, rather, absence of humanity. He needs a shocking symbol to achieve this, something exterior to the normal range of orchestral or vocal sound. something 'other'.

Precisely. Vaughan Williams doesn't want 'art', he wants to conjure up something that stands apart from culture and human heroism (or folly). The very uncivilized wind machine is perfectly suited. And it is not as if he would have been unable to do it in the more 'musical' way.
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

lukeottevanger

To add to the list of major works using wind machine - Enescu's Vox Maris, and his masterpiece opera Oedipe (which also has a part for musical saw, for pistol shots and for recorded nightingale a la Respighi). Enescu's music is of unprecedented orchestral subtlety - he easily ranks with the finest orchestrators of all, alongside Strauss and Ravel. If the wind machine was good enough for them, it's good enough full stop, IMO.

Sean

Luke, I'd love to lock horns with you on some of the points/ opinions you raise but I've only got time to say hello here...

The Fourth symph breathing is probably a misjudgement but the work is likely his most successful in his late style of shifting surface detail. I always thought symphs 1-2 remarkable documents charting English tonal dissolution, really interesting music.

I can't rate Tippett as highly as you though and don't seriously feel he ever surpassed Concerto for double string orchestra.

Must rush.

lukeottevanger

That's alright Sean, you can't be right about everything  ;D

Actually, though, you might be right - maybe Tippett never did surpass the Double Concerto, a marvelous work in all respects. But he equalled it, IMO, more than once. In the same sense, perhaps, (and trying to keep OT!) maybe VW never wrote anything finer than the Tallis Fantasia. But he wrote works which were its equal.

To be honest, this might be the place to say that I agree with you about the breathing in the 4th. It may well be a mistake, and I don't really like it myself. But what's irked me in previous posts is the eager rush to pounce on this sort of thing in order to be able to damn a great musician or reject them summarily - as an 'imbecile' in Tippett's case. It's as if some here are on the lookout for signs of fallibility in a composer* so that they can flock around it, maybe laugh at it, and somehow prove that their own musical sense is superior. Seems hubristic, opportunistic, ungrateful and disrespectful to me.

Personally, I feel that if the composer has earned the trust of others who I myself trust then he's probably worth persevering with; if he's earned my respect in the past but a new-to-me work seems to fall short, then I will try to presume that I'm simply unequipped to follow the composer down his new path, not that he's lost the plot. Composers are more deeply involved in their own craft than anyone else can be, they don't write parts for e.g. 'breathing noises' without thinking the idea through more deeply than any of us have done, and it's ridiculous to simply cast them aside impatiently or denigrate them as soon as they do something like this which one doesn't 'get'.

*Tippett is fallible - beautifully so. It's because he's such an honest and open composer - he doesn't play safe or hedge his bets. That's why even his 'mistakes' are effective and touching. It's also why he's an easy target. for those who feel the need to have a pop at someone great.

not edward

Quote from: lukeottevanger on September 08, 2008, 04:48:02 AM
*Tippett is fallible - beautifully so. It's because he's such an honest and open composer - he doesn't play safe or hedge his bets. That's why even his 'mistakes' are effective and touching. It's also why he's an easy target. for those who feel the need to have a pop at someone great.
I totally agree here. Tippett's one of those few composers whom I love in part because of his mistakes, not despite them. (Berwald would be another.)

Very much OT, but I think one of the best uses I've heard of the wind machine is in Scelsi's I Presagi, where the frantic, near-apocalyptic brass writing is eventually drowned out by the white noise of the wind machine. I find it highly effective even on CD: live, the effect is even more impressive.
"I don't at all mind actively disliking a piece of contemporary music, but in order to feel happy about it I must consciously understand why I dislike it. Otherwise it remains in my mind as unfinished business."
-- Aaron Copland, The Pleasures of Music

karlhenning

The wind-machine in the Sinfonia antartica never bothered me, that I can think.  And apart from an initial (isolated) hearing (a Previn recording, I think) in Rochester when I just didn't 'take' to it . . . the piece has always felt to me like a proper symphony, not at all like a concert-work salvaged from film music.

Sergeant Rock

#837
The wind machine in VW's 7th has never bothered me either. From my first hearing (probably forty years ago) it seemed a perfectly suitable "percussive" effect given the programmatic nature of the music. There are many examples of symphonic music making use of "non-musical" instruments, not just Mahler's hammer but the ratchet, anvil, whip, pistol, etc.

The breathing in Tippett's Fourth is used both percussively (at least I think so) and as weird song: inhuman sound and the most human sound. It's not only unique but, I think, highly effective. Love that Fourth.

Sarge
the phone rings and somebody says,
"hey, they made a movie about
Mahler, you ought to go see it.
he was as f*cked-up as you are."
                               --Charles Bukowski, "Mahler"

Sergeant Rock

Luke, tried to PM you but your inbox is full.

Sarge
the phone rings and somebody says,
"hey, they made a movie about
Mahler, you ought to go see it.
he was as f*cked-up as you are."
                               --Charles Bukowski, "Mahler"

karlhenning

One of the 'facts of orchestration' demonstrated by the Vaughan Williams Pastoral and Sinfonia antartica (and the Nielsen Sinfonia espansiva, and I imagine the Tippett Fourth) is that un-texted vocalise makes the voice as an instrument something quite other than, well, the medium of text-delivery . . . and that, as a timbral resource, the 'range' of the voice, or of a choir, is appreciably broadened.

But of course, we knew this in part already thanks to Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the Snowflakes, and Ravel's Daphnis