Vaughan Williams's Veranda

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

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lukeottevanger

Quote from: M forever on September 08, 2008, 11:43:16 AM
There used to be a device which basically was a box filled with rocks that was suspended on a joint at the middle, and which could be rocked up and down like a see-saw with ropes going over pulleys. I read they have one of these at the Drottningholm Court Theater, but I have never seen one. There also used to be a thunder machine which looks similar to the wind machine and which is a drum filled with rocks and a lever to turn it. I don't know though if that is specifically what Strauss had in mind.

I was going to say that the latter sounds like the 'geophone' Messiaen asks for in Des canyons aux etoiles, but having checked with my score of that piece, it doesn't. The Geophone is a large, flat drum with very thin skins, filled with ball bearings (originally sand, I think) and played by being rocked from side to side. My wife has something very like this at her school, it turns out!

J.Z. Herrenberg

From this page it appears 'thunder machine' and 'thunder sheet' are different things:

Thunder-machine - Machina di tuono - Machine à tonnerre - Donnermaschine

Thunder-sheet   

Wind-machine - Machina a venti - Machine à vent - Windmaschine
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

karlhenning

Oh, just record a rain-stick, and slow the tape down  8)

lukeottevanger

Quote from: Jezetha on September 08, 2008, 12:01:59 PM
From this page it appears 'thunder machine' and 'thunder sheet' are different things:

HB thought so too, so it must be true (from the HBS site):

QuoteBrian's handling of the other untuned percussion instruments is fairly conventional, although once again the Gothic provides a [???? something missing here ????] prescribed in Part Two, as are a thunder machine (Brian did not want the tinny thunder sheet that so often occurs and is so ineffectual) and a 'bird scare' (i.e. a football rattle - called 'scare crow' on page 184 of the published score).  However, for the vast majority of his works, Brian employs a normal section in the usual manner.  Thunder and wind machines turn up in Symphony no 10, and an Indian tabla in English Suite No 4,but these are exceptions.

I'd already mentioned the wind machine in Brian 10; I'd forgotten the thunder machine. The LSSO recording uses a thunder-sheet, though, despite Brian's preference - you can see it being played by them in the 10th's 'storm', about four or five minutes into this, the second of three parts of the 'Unknown Warrior' HB documentary on youtube. I used to rehearse in that same hall too...

Could it look less exciting than it does here?  ;D




J.Z. Herrenberg

That quote looks like something by Malcolm MacDonald, from volume 3 of his Brian study...
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato


pjme

Quote from: M forever on September 08, 2008, 11:35:07 AM
There is no Gewandhaus in Dresden. It's in Leipzig. You have to make up your mind. Was that live or on video? With which conductor? And where are the pictures you posted from?

;D ;D ;D


M forever

I saw the link to those pics, but I am wondering which of the two orchestras you saw, with whom?

Sean

#868
Alright there Luke, some interesting lines there.

QuoteIn 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.

Tippett's trouble was that he changed his style too much without feeling the same artistic assurance about what he was doing. The later bitty prolix style as in a work like The Mask of time skirts the arbitrary and is a long way from the unpretentious cogency of the Conc for DSO, and again in the similar tough gritty glittery stuff of the Piano concerto and King Priam etc it's a lot easier to sense than really experience whatever logic may be there. I'll take The Midsummer marriage.

QuoteBut 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

Sure thing. By the way I had a record of #4 on LP once but don't remember the performers, but later bought the Solti cycle on CD, coupled with the Suite in D for birthday of Prince Charles- which I also studied for music 'O' level in 1984-5!! I remember the teacher remarking on the number of time signature changes, and the overall complexity- but of course it's a marvellous piece that resolves itself and works well.

Quote...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.

Okay, though I rather like my own judgement too(!) and it's typical of all artists to shine for a while but then lose that level of insight... Whatever though!

And, I've a feeling I've covered some of those points in the past. Oh well. I'd like to widen the picture of Tippett though by getting into more of the SQs- I've only got hold of the Second, a well-wrought effort.

M forever

Is the theme in the "Wasps" overture which begins after the "waspy" introduction after about 1 minute an original theme or a quote?

eyeresist

Quote from: lukeottevanger on September 08, 2008, 09:04:48 AM
Quite plainly VW wished to choose an instrument that sits totally apart from the rest of the orchestra, so as to create this striking dichotomy between the human and the inhuman - and quite plainly he succeeded, otherwise you wouldn't be making this fuss about it. You think the wind machine is out of place, and that's just what VW wanted it to be. If' he'd chosen to represent the wind with a trombone, you wouldn't be commenting - and he would clearly have failed to find an instrumental equivalent for 'the Other'.

Does anyone know what the composer himself said about this? Did he say it was "symbolic"? Not sure I believe Luke's mindreading act...

scarpia

Quote from: M forever on September 08, 2008, 06:04:33 PM
Is the theme in the "Wasps" overture which begins after the "waspy" introduction after about 1 minute an original theme or a quote?

For what it's worth, the notes for the recording I have say that the Overture to the Wasps does not contain any folk song quotes.

scarpia

#872
Quote from: lukeottevanger on September 08, 2008, 09:04:48 AM
The wind machine is a freak, an instrument we hardly ever hear,  whose sound is essentially a natural one, uninflected by human harmony, or melody, or by association with human activity. Quite plainly VW wished to choose an instrument that sits totally apart from the rest of the orchestra, so as to create this striking dichotomy between the human and the inhuman - and quite plainly he succeeded, otherwise you wouldn't be making this fuss about it. You think the wind machine is out of place, and that's just what VW wanted it to be. If' he'd chosen to represent the wind with a trombone, you wouldn't be commenting - and he would clearly have failed to find an instrumental equivalent for 'the Other'.

I do not see that the wind machine creates a "striking dichotomy" between human and inhuman.  It is an utterly banal device which is used ad-nauseum in film scores, film soundtracks, stage shows, etc.  I'm not making a fuss because I reject the "striking dichotomy" but because I am not impressed with corny stage effects being used to ruin what could have been a compelling piece of symphonic music.


M forever

Can you cite concrete examples of where the wind machine is used in film scores? Other instruments are used in film scores all the time, too. Does that make them "banal" as such? I don't think so. Where does it say that naturalistic sound effects are forbidden (although one could argue that the wind machine is more symbolic than naturalistic because it deosn't really quite sound like wind, or rather, wind can make a very wide variety of sounds.
Sorry, dude, what Mr O says makes way, way, way more sense than your narrowminded, prejudiced and generalized "opinion". When composers of the stature of Strauss, Ravel, or even Vaughan Williams who I am not particularly fond of find interesting ways to use it, then scarpia's "opinion" is diminished to a value very near zero.

Quote from: scarpia on September 08, 2008, 07:48:55 PM
For what it's worth, the notes for the recording I have say that the Overture to the Wasps does not contain any folk song quotes.

Thanks, but that's not worth anything. I need an answer from somebody who actually knows the answer from knowing the musical substance, not someone who read something somewhere. And, I did not specifically ask just for "folk song quotes" anyway.

sound67

Quote from: scarpia on September 08, 2008, 07:54:42 PMIt is an utterly banal device which is used ad-nauseum in film scores, film soundtracks, stage shows, etc. 

No. It is used in films etc. as a sound effect among many others, not in a musical context! If you can't see the difference (which is what I must assume from your words), then there's no use explaining how using a technical device (in the Antartica, or elsewhere) can make musical sense.

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

lukeottevanger

Quote from: eyeresist on September 08, 2008, 07:36:45 PM
Does anyone know what the composer himself said about this? Did he say it was "symbolic"? Not sure I believe Luke's mindreading act...


Well, I don't have access to VW's writings, but all others I can find who go into the subject in any depth at all agree with me. And I must say that an inability to hear the wind machine as doing anything more than 'imitating the wind' can only appear to be somewhat deficient in poetic sympathy. (I return to Mahler 6? Is the hammer only referring to Mahler's love of DIY?) Anyway, here's Wilfrid Mellers; I start my quotation obliquely to the subject, but you'll see why:

Quote from: MellersRiders to the Sea was scored for a noraml small orchestra with the addition of a sea-machine - which might be considered a contradiction in terms since it represents elemental Nature, as opposed to anything man-made, let alone mechanistic. The Seventh Symphony [includes] a wind-machine. The purpose of the abnormal instruments is much the same as that of the sea-machine in Riders....now, as nature's supernatural instruments appear....this paragraph is Nature herself, not so much mimical to as oblivious of him. So the duality of sonata is manifest in a peculiarly direct from

Mellers goes on in this way throughout his discussion of the symphony, but I'll stop there because that last point is so important - it emphasizes that VW integrates the wind machine (and the other 'magic instruments') into a purely symphonic, sonata structure, in a 'peculiarly direct form'. Too direct, it seems, for those who can't hear beyond 'it sounds like the wind'.

Michael Kennedy gives early reviews of the symphony who agree on this point, e.g.:

Quote from: Frank Howes[VW] has broken new ground, not in the fact that he uses a larger orchestra, but that he has found in sheer sonority devoid of thematic significance a means of conveying his vision and placing it within a symphonic scheme.

And so on. I don'thave time right now to type out more, but there are plenty. The point is, the wind-machine does sound like the wind, of course it does - and perhaps even VW himself was unsure about the suitability of this. But the symphony turns it into more than this - the dialectic which every symphony needs is in this case Man-Nature, as all critics I have read agree, and the wind-machine as an extreme example of the latter, the ultimate negation of Man, is thus perfectly well integrated into symphonic form.


J.Z. Herrenberg

Quote from: lukeottevanger on September 08, 2008, 11:30:21 PM
(I return to Mahler 6? Is the hammer only referring to Mahler's love of DIY?)

Yes. What else? Fate?! Utterly simplistic. It spoils the Sixth for me.

;)
Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything. -- Plato

eyeresist

Quote from: lukeottevanger on September 08, 2008, 11:30:21 PMWell, I don't have access to VW's writings, but all others I can find who go into the subject in any depth at all agree with me. And I must say that an inability to hear the wind machine as doing anything more than 'imitating the wind' can only appear to be somewhat deficient in poetic sympathy. (I return to Mahler 6? Is the hammer only referring to Mahler's love of DIY?) Anyway, here's Wilfrid Mellers; I start my quotation obliquely to the subject, but you'll see why:

Quote from: MellersRiders to the Sea was scored for a noraml small orchestra with the addition of a sea-machine - which might be considered a contradiction in terms since it represents elemental Nature, as opposed to anything man-made, let alone mechanistic. The Seventh Symphony [includes] a wind-machine. The purpose of the abnormal instruments is much the same as that of the sea-machine in Riders....now, as nature's supernatural instruments appear....this paragraph is Nature herself, not so much mimical to as oblivious of him. So the duality of sonata is manifest in a peculiarly direct from
Mellers goes on in this way throughout his discussion of the symphony, but I'll stop there because that last point is so important - it emphasizes that VW integrates the wind machine (and the other 'magic instruments') into a purely symphonic, sonata structure, in a 'peculiarly direct form'. Too direct, it seems, for those who can't hear beyond 'it sounds like the wind'.

Michael Kennedy gives early reviews of the symphony who agree on this point, e.g.:

Quote from: Frank Howes[VW] has broken new ground, not in the fact that he uses a larger orchestra, but that he has found in sheer sonority devoid of thematic significance a means of conveying his vision and placing it within a symphonic scheme.
And so on. I don'thave time right now to type out more, but there are plenty. The point is, the wind-machine does sound like the wind, of course it does - and perhaps even VW himself was unsure about the suitability of this. But the symphony turns it into more than this - the dialectic which every symphony needs is in this case Man-Nature, as all critics I have read agree, and the wind-machine as an extreme example of the latter, the ultimate negation of Man, is thus perfectly well integrated into symphonic form.

I'm afraid argument from authority won't work on me. There is no evidence to assert that the wind machine sound embodies some (remarkably specific) concept of Nature - this is just metaphysical hot air. This idea might be more creditable if RVW hadn't called the work "Antartica" and appended a quote from Scott's diary - then the symphony might be seen as an allegorical treatment of the themes you have mentioned. But RVW was too specific, and the sound of the wind is just that.

lukeottevanger

Quote from: eyeresist on September 09, 2008, 12:14:20 AM
I'm afraid argument from authority won't work on me. There is no evidence to assert that the wind machine sound embodies some (remarkably specific) concept of Nature - this is just metaphysical hot air. This idea might be more creditable if RVW hadn't called the work "Antartica" and appended a quote from Scott's diary - then the symphony might be seen as an allegorical treatment of the themes you have mentioned. But RVW was too specific, and the sound of the wind is just that.

Wow - 'no evidence', huh? That's quite a leap you make from the actual content of my post. Please note that I did specifically say that I don't have access to VW's writings; also that I specifically said I didn't have much time to write that post. Finally, note that VW was a composer, not a critic. Usually, composers do the music and others write about it. I have no idea whether VW wrote about this issue or not - he may well have done. But I'm pretty certain that, had he been asked his views - 'Mr Vaughan Williams, is the wind-machine in your 7th solely an imitation of the wind, or does it represent some larger idea? - I'm pretty certain that he'd have supported the latter interpretation. If he hadn't been in one of his sarcastic moods, that is  ;D

Again, no time to write more. I should be working.

lukeottevanger

#879
I'd add though, that I don't find the concept of 'Nature/the non-human' to be 'remarkably specific'. It's a theme that has been used by composers on many occasions. Metaphysical perhaps - a lot of music works on this metaphysical level. But that doesn't make it hot air. Your pairing of the two terms is disingenuous, but it also suggests a suspicion of or lack of sympathy with anything non-explicit which explains your difficulties with this piece.

In any case, hot air would make a wind machine a health hazard, wouldn't it?

Don't forget, too, that this wind really does have more than meteorological connotations. This isn't some light breeze over the Trossachs, it is in a genuine sense, annihilation, and in annihilation we surely have a metaphysical concept that is worthy of expression. One can't but be aware of that when hearing it in the VW 7th, I'd have thought.