Vaughan Williams's Veranda

[eyeresist]

Wow - 'no evidence', huh? That's quite a leap you make from the actual content of my post.

Well, you quoted those passages as proof of your assertion, and I'm just saying they don't really constitute evidence for your point.

Finally, note that VW was a composer, not a critic.

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.

By "specific", I was referring to your phrase "the wind-machine as an extreme example of the latter, the ultimate negation of Man", which is a rather specific attribution for this sound-effect.

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.

Sorry, I should have been clear that by "metaphysical hot air" I was referring to the deliberations of the critics, metaphysics being speculation on things that are beyond the "real" and therefore unfalsifiable. Music certainly can speak to our sense of the metaphysical - my argument is that in this case the wind machine is a redundant, extra-musical device that hinders this.

...

We could go round and round like this, couldn't we! You'd better get back to work, Luke, and as for me...
"I am just going outside, and may be some time."

[lukeottevanger]

Well, you quoted those passages as proof of your assertion, and I'm just saying they don't really constitute evidence for your point.

No, I quoted them as reinforcement that the way in which I've described the wind-machine's use - i.e not just as imitation of something specific (though also that) but as symbol of something larger and integral to the symphonic nature of the score - is the generally accepted one. And I made clear that what I posted wasn't a final answer, but a rushed gathering of a couple of available strands.

Sure, he wrote - I have plenty of articles that he wrote myself. But it isn't his job to provide commentary on his own music. What's more, when pushed to do so, he was often deliberately obfuscatory, so as to leave 'interpreting' his music to others. Which is indeed why the interpretations of others, such as the respected sources I quoted above, are the most readily-available opinions to hand.

By "specific", I was referring to your phrase "the wind-machine as an extreme example of the latter, the ultimate negation of Man", which is a rather specific attribution for this sound-effect.

Not really - in that particular context what I meant was, there are lots of 'nature sounds' in the piece, but the wind-machine is most extreme, the most literally natural. Which is why it occupies this privileged position at the diametric extreme from, say, the strings and winds.

Sorry, I should have been clear that by "metaphysical hot air" I was referring to the deliberations of the critics, metaphysics being speculation on things that are beyond the "real" and therefore unfalsifiable. Music certainly can speak to our sense of the metaphysical - my argument is that in this case the wind machine is a redundant, extra-musical device that hinders this.

And that's where I disagree most strongly - with no wind-machine, VW would not have been able to create a dichotomy as extreme as he does. Having the wind imitated by any more standard source would have been the true hindrance, as the clarity of vision of this stark, shocking contrast between man and nature would have been obscured.

As M implied, and as I said earlier - we sometimes need to learn to trust the great composers. They really did know what they were doing, you know.

[sound67]

Sure, he wrote - I have plenty of articles that he wrote myself. But it isn't his job to provide commentary on his own music. What's more, when pushed to do so, he was often deliberately obfuscatory, so as to leave 'interpreting' his music to others. Which is indeed why the interpretations of others, such as the respected sources I quoted above, are the most readily-available opinions to hand.

Creative artists are rarely good analysts of their own work. Thomas Mann wrote analyses of his novels as to prevent literary scientists from misintrepreting them - not a good idea.

The above-mentioned book does contain notes by RVW on his symphonies, but they're performance booklet texts limited to the overall structure of the pieces.

Indeed, when hard-pressed by interviewers, he deliberately clouded the issues in question by vague and misleading remarks.

We sometimes need to learn to trust the great composers.

And he certainly was one of them.   

Thomas

[karlhenning]

I do not see that the wind machine creates a "striking dichotomy" between human and inhuman.

I do;  there is a ready sonic contrast between the choral vocalise and the 'noise device'.

[karlhenning]

No, I quoted them as reinforcement that the way in which I've described the wind-machine's use - i.e not just as imitation of something specific (though also that) but as symbol of something larger and integral to the symphonic nature of the score - is the generally accepted one. And I made clear that what I posted wasn't a final answer, but a rushed gathering of a couple of available strands.

Sure, he wrote - I have plenty of articles that he wrote myself. But it isn't his job to provide commentary on his own music. What's more, when pushed to do so, he was often deliberately obfuscatory, so as to leave 'interpreting' his music to others. Which is indeed why the interpretations of others, such as the respected sources I quoted above, are the most readily-available opinions to hand.

Good sense.

If a composer has to spend all his time explicating his music to the satisfaction of everyone, he'll have no time for his creative work.

[ChamberNut]

Hello, I'd like to become a 'Vaughanerite'! 

I only have 1 RVW disc so far (Naxos String Quartets and Fantasia Quintet, Maggini Quartet) which I absolulety adore.  Sarge, have you had a chance to listen to this yet?

Last night, after hearing portions of Symphony No. 6 and 'Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis', consider me a fan! 

[lukeottevanger]

Well, I'm not at work now - though I will be at it again in a few hours - and on the drive home I was pondering this whole issue of wind-machines etc. This isn't addressed to anyone, nor is it meant to be argumentative in any way - it's only a few points that occurred to me as I drove. Apologies to those who think I'm taking a small issue too far - but the details of instrumental association and aesthetics are interesting to me. They're something we normally only sense when we listen, but it's fascinating to try to pry them apart and examine them a little.

1) First off, there is the mysterious fact that both VW's eventually-annihilatory wind-machine and Tippett's birth-to-death breathing sounds use a timbre that is, effectively, pretty close to white noise. I wonder idly if any other type of sound would do; bluntly, if wind went wibble-wibble instead of whoosh-whoosh, would it still be a suitable symbol of inhuman emptiness? 

It's perhaps not as ridiculous a question as it seems. When composers, especially romantic composers, want to represent this contact with a world of non-existence - in other words, usually, with Death* or the supernatural - haven't they more often than not chosen a stroke of the tam-tam to do so (Strauss, Tchaikovsky etc. etc)?  The tam-tam per se isn't associated with Death, AFAIK - but its timbre evidently is, and what it is that produces these connotations seems to me to be the acoustical qualities of this mysterious timbre, full yet soft, not harmonically rooted but vibrating in all areas of the spectrum, a pulsating world of otherness - again, something in the same sort of area as white noise.** Viewing things from this perspective again reinforces for me the idea that what VW wanted the wind machine for was not just the sound of the wind, but this quasi-white-noise sound of emptiness and otherness, as used by other means by previous composers.

2) And that brings me towards my second point, already hinted at by M - 'by other means'. That's all a wind-machine is, I think - a means. It's an instrument, whose place is in an orchestra and nowhere else. Importantly, it has a very specific sound, and is usable only in a narrow range of contexts. This means it exists right at the extreme periphery of the orchestra. But an orchestral instrument it remains. Now, a composer who really wants the sound of the wind and nothing else could use a recording - as VW could certainly have done. It seems to me, therefore, that what he wants is  something that exists right at the edge of the orchestral impedimenta, but which nevertheless just about belongs there.

The point is that, as an orchestral instrument, the wind-machine only sounds like the wind to a certain extent - it retains enough abstract instrumental properties easily to be able to exist as a symbol of other things too (as it also does in other works besides the VW 7th). In this it's like the sirens in Varese, which similarly are more an abstraction of the idea of 'siren' than they are like genuine everyday sirens. In Ionisation, for instance, the sirens may tangentially remind us of police cars or air-raid warnings, but more than anything else they bring associations which impart an atmosphere of harder-to-define symbolism - symbolism of danger, apprehension, menace.  And I'd suggest that, just as the wind-machine brings associations of emptiness/otherness not just because it sounds like the wind but because it is a 'white-noise' sort of sound, so the sirens in Varese don't only suggest apprehension because they may remind us of the emergency services! There's also something in those alien glissandi which necessarily goes hand-in-hand with crescendi and decrescendi, sometimes sharp, lurching and aggressive, sometimes slow and threatening....

3) The third point is not really to do with the wind-machine at all, but just to do with something hinted at above - the choice to use, or not to use, a recording of a natural phenomenon rather than a close orchestral simulation. VW chose the latter course, maybe for the reasons I'm guessing at. But occasionally composers have chosen to introduce recordings of the 'thing itself', with greater or lesser effectiveness. I think this must be a very hard trick to bring off.

In Pines of Rome, famously, Respighi uses a recording of a nightingale. I think I'm right in saying that there hasn't always been a consensus of opinion as to whether he was justified in so doing. It's perfectly easy to make the case that this is a cop-out, that Respighi could equally have provided a purely orchestral nightingale as other composers have done - that's the same argument that was put forward here re. VW and his wind-machine. But it seems to me that there is a deeper level to the use of the recording, one that I actually find quite touching - it seems to me that there is something like a quasi-religious reverence and awe going here, as if Respighi is putting up his hands, walking away and saying 'I'm not even going to attempt this one - it's too beautiful; let it speak for itself.' And it works - this musical 'frame' Respighi creates is so magically hushed, and the intrusion of a real bird into it makes it extraordinarily privileged.*** 'This is too special to be imitated', the music says.

And yet, what holds true for the Respighi doesn't necessarily hold true for other music. Alan Hovhaness's And God Created Great Whales works in a similar way, with self-explanatory zoological substitution - but the piece itself, IMHO, is a comparative failure. Perhaps that was always going to be the case, given the sound to be used; perhaps the fault lies with Hovhaness, who doesn't IMO provide his whales with the same privileged environment that Respighi creates for his nightingale.


*Forgive the Mellers-ian capitalisation. I find it clarifies concepts for me if for no one else!
**One might expect that a bell would be a better symbol of Death, in fact - because it has ritualistic associations with funerals etc - and of course it is often used in this sense. But a bell has a much stronger fundamental than a tam-tam which take it further away from a dense mysterious mass of approximately white-noise sound, and I have a feeling that this is the reason that is not often used to depict the first contact with Death itself so much as with the rituals which surround Death.
*** Only true if the orchestra is amenable - I've heard horror stories about this, such as the time my wife was in the orchestra for this piece, and someone replaced the nightingale tape with one of helicopters taking off.... 

[Sergeant Rock]

I only have 1 RVW disc so far (Naxos String Quartets and Fantasia Quintet, Maggini Quartet) which I absolulety adore.  Sarge, have you had a chance to listen to this yet?

I've only heard the G minor so far (during dinner the other night). After it ended I didn't want to force more chamber music on the long-suffering Mrs. Rock so we switched to orchestral music after the quartet.

Sarge

[karlhenning]

Hello, I'd like to become a 'Vaughanerite'! 

I only have 1 RVW disc so far (Naxos String Quartets and Fantasia Quintet, Maggini Quartet) which I absolulety adore.  Sarge, have you had a chance to listen to this yet?

Last night, after hearing portions of Symphony No. 6 and 'Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis', consider me a fan! 

Certainly a strong start, ChN!

[ChamberNut]

I've only heard the G minor so far (during dinner the other night). After it ended I didn't want to force more chamber music on the long-suffering Mrs. Rock so we switched to orchestral music after the quartet.

Sarge

I see.  So Mrs. Rock is not a 'ChamberRock', so to speak? 

[ChamberNut]

I see that the 'Vaughn Williams Veranda' is the most active (unlocked) thread in the 'Composer Discussion' forum! 

[Sergeant Rock]

I see.  So Mrs. Rock is not a 'ChamberRock', so to speak? 

No, she isn't. Chamber music doesn't appeal to her, not even the chamber music of composer's she loves (like Dvorak, Brahms, Schumann, Prokofiev). She's prefers opera and orchestal works, and medieval/renaissance song and choral music. The one exception I can think of is chamber music from the 17th and early 18th centuries. This, for example, is one of her favorite CDs: music by Matteis, Blow, Purcell, Geminiani:



Sarge

[Mark G. Simon]

Variazioni senza tema.

Another misleading statement from RVW, this time about the first movement of his Symphony no. 8 in D minor*. Although the movement proceeds through 7 distinct episodes resembling variations (plus a coda), there is clearly a theme, one that you couldn't miss for all the world: the very first four notes, stated by a solo trumpet. D-G-E-A. It is extended by a flute solo which obtains thematic significance in later variations. There is a contrasting idea for the strings, using RVW's characteristic 3rd-related sequence of minor chords and a return to the D-G-E-A motive. Each variation is a little ABA form, then.

The third variation is a lyrical episode (the four notes appear in the bass) in, whadayaknow, A major. It retains the ABA form of the variations, but it also turns out to be a Second Theme in a larger sonata design. Sure enough, the 7th variation is a recap of this material, coming to a climax in D major.

Far from being a formless lump, the first movement of RVW's 8th symphony has managed to simultaneously satisfy the requirements of two of the standard forms of western music.


* On second thought maybe the statement is not really meant to mislead, but is simply easy to misinterpret. It is possible that the indication "variazioni senza tema" means that RVW simply wanted the listener to regard the opening episode as an integral part of the variation process, the first variation rather than a stand-alone theme to be subjected to variations.

[Catison]

As always Luke, very insightful.

[Catison]

Variazioni senza tema.

* On second thought maybe the statement is not really meant to mislead, but is simply easy to misinterpret. It is possible that the indication "variazioni senza tema" means that RVW simply wanted the listener to regard the opening episode as an integral part of the variation process, the first variation rather than a stand-alone theme to be subjected to variations.

Your footnote is exactly how I have interpreted it.  Consider the title, "Variazoni".  Typically, this implies a statement of the theme, but Vaughan Williams doesn't really give us that, the first section is already a variation.  Perhaps a more correct title would be, "Tema con variazioni senza tema"

[scarpia]

It seems to me too bizarre coincidence that Vaughan Williams principally wanted a sound that would be inhuman or outside the world of the orchestra and by coincidence he chose a wind machine in this piece about a windy place.  He could have picked an air-raid siren, a door buzzer, a steam whistle, a hair dryer, a diesel engine.  By chance he picked a wind machine to evoke the inhumanity of the wind, and this has nothing to do with the fact that is sounds like wind.  It is supposed to produce a shocking inhuman presence (the sight of a personal turning a crank is more inhuman than the sight of a person blowing into a metal tube) despite the fact that everyone on this thread who watches movies has heard hundreds of recordings of a wind machine, which was not developed as a musical instrument, but is a standard tool of the Foley artists who provide the sound tracks of virtually all feature films.  If you've ever seen a movie with a windy scene, (the Wizard of Oz, for instance) you've heard a wind machine.

http://www.natf.org/wad/foley.htm

But no, this is not comparable to the music with a wind machine that we hear as the twister is coming for poor Dorothy, this is an existential statement.   

Well, I'm not at work now - though I will be at it again in a few hours - and on the drive home I was pondering this whole issue of wind-machines etc. This isn't addressed to anyone, nor is it meant to be argumentative in any way - it's only a few points that occurred to me as I drove. Apologies to those who think I'm taking a small issue too far - but the details of instrumental association and aesthetics are interesting to me. They're something we normally only sense when we listen, but it's fascinating to try to pry them apart and examine them a little.

1) First off, there is the mysterious fact that both VW's eventually-annihilatory wind-machine and Tippett's birth-to-death breathing sounds use a timbre that is, effectively, pretty close to white noise. I wonder idly if any other type of sound would do; bluntly, if wind went wibble-wibble instead of whoosh-whoosh, would it still be a suitable symbol of inhuman emptiness? 

It's perhaps not as ridiculous a question as it seems. When composers, especially romantic composers, want to represent this contact with a world of non-existence - in other words, usually, with Death* or the supernatural - haven't they more often than not chosen a stroke of the tam-tam to do so (Strauss, Tchaikovsky etc. etc)?  The tam-tam per se isn't associated with Death, AFAIK - but its timbre evidently is, and what it is that produces these connotations seems to me to be the acoustical qualities of this mysterious timbre, full yet soft, not harmonically rooted but vibrating in all areas of the spectrum, a pulsating world of otherness - again, something in the same sort of area as white noise.** Viewing things from this perspective again reinforces for me the idea that what VW wanted the wind machine for was not just the sound of the wind, but this quasi-white-noise sound of emptiness and otherness, as used by other means by previous composers.

2) And that brings me towards my second point, already hinted at by M - 'by other means'. That's all a wind-machine is, I think - a means. It's an instrument, whose place is in an orchestra and nowhere else. Importantly, it has a very specific sound, and is usable only in a narrow range of contexts. This means it exists right at the extreme periphery of the orchestra. But an orchestral instrument it remains. Now, a composer who really wants the sound of the wind and nothing else could use a recording - as VW could certainly have done. It seems to me, therefore, that what he wants is  something that exists right at the edge of the orchestral impedimenta, but which nevertheless just about belongs there.

The point is that, as an orchestral instrument, the wind-machine only sounds like the wind to a certain extent - it retains enough abstract instrumental properties easily to be able to exist as a symbol of other things too (as it also does in other works besides the VW 7th). In this it's like the sirens in Varese, which similarly are more an abstraction of the idea of 'siren' than they are like genuine everyday sirens. In Ionisation, for instance, the sirens may tangentially remind us of police cars or air-raid warnings, but more than anything else they bring associations which impart an atmosphere of harder-to-define symbolism - symbolism of danger, apprehension, menace.  And I'd suggest that, just as the wind-machine brings associations of emptiness/otherness not just because it sounds like the wind but because it is a 'white-noise' sort of sound, so the sirens in Varese don't only suggest apprehension because they may remind us of the emergency services! There's also something in those alien glissandi which necessarily goes hand-in-hand with crescendi and decrescendi, sometimes sharp, lurching and aggressive, sometimes slow and threatening....

3) The third point is not really to do with the wind-machine at all, but just to do with something hinted at above - the choice to use, or not to use, a recording of a natural phenomenon rather than a close orchestral simulation. VW chose the latter course, maybe for the reasons I'm guessing at. But occasionally composers have chosen to introduce recordings of the 'thing itself', with greater or lesser effectiveness. I think this must be a very hard trick to bring off.

In Pines of Rome, famously, Respighi uses a recording of a nightingale. I think I'm right in saying that there hasn't always been a consensus of opinion as to whether he was justified in so doing. It's perfectly easy to make the case that this is a cop-out, that Respighi could equally have provided a purely orchestral nightingale as other composers have done - that's the same argument that was put forward here re. VW and his wind-machine. But it seems to me that there is a deeper level to the use of the recording, one that I actually find quite touching - it seems to me that there is something like a quasi-religious reverence and awe going here, as if Respighi is putting up his hands, walking away and saying 'I'm not even going to attempt this one - it's too beautiful; let it speak for itself.' And it works - this musical 'frame' Respighi creates is so magically hushed, and the intrusion of a real bird into it makes it extraordinarily privileged.*** 'This is too special to be imitated', the music says.

And yet, what holds true for the Respighi doesn't necessarily hold true for other music. Alan Hovhaness's And God Created Great Whales works in a similar way, with self-explanatory zoological substitution - but the piece itself, IMHO, is a comparative failure. Perhaps that was always going to be the case, given the sound to be used; perhaps the fault lies with Hovhaness, who doesn't IMO provide his whales with the same privileged environment that Respighi creates for his nightingale.


*Forgive the Mellers-ian capitalisation. I find it clarifies concepts for me if for no one else!
**One might expect that a bell would be a better symbol of Death, in fact - because it has ritualistic associations with funerals etc - and of course it is often used in this sense. But a bell has a much stronger fundamental than a tam-tam which take it further away from a dense mysterious mass of approximately white-noise sound, and I have a feeling that this is the reason that is not often used to depict the first contact with Death itself so much as with the rituals which surround Death.
*** Only true if the orchestra is amenable - I've heard horror stories about this, such as the time my wife was in the orchestra for this piece, and someone replaced the nightingale tape with one of helicopters taking off.... 

[lukeottevanger]

It seems to me too bizarre coincidence that Vaughan Williams principally wanted a sound that would be inhuman or outside the world of the orchestra and by coincidence he chose a wind machine in this piece about a windy place.  He could have picked an air-raid siren, a door buzzer, a steam whistle, a hair dryer, a diesel engine.  By chance he picked a wind machine to evoke the inhumanity of the wind, and this has nothing to do with the fact that is sounds like wind.  It is supposed to produce a shocking inhuman presence, despite the fact that everyone on this thread who watches movies has heard hundreds of recordings of a wind machine, which was not developed as a musical instrument, but is a standard tool of the Foley artists who provide the sound tracks of virtually all feature films.  If you've ever seen a movie with a windy scene, (the Wizard of Oz, for instance) you've heard a wind machine.

http://www.natf.org/wad/foley.htm

But no, this is not comparable to the music with a wind machine that we hear as the twister is coming for poor Dorothy, this is an existential statement.   

Dear Lord, man, but you don't get it at all, do you? And it's so simple! Either that or you have a taste for strawmen. Look back at my posts and tell me where I've said, as you say I have, that the choice of wind-machine 'has nothing to do with the fact that is sounds like wind' but is only meant to refer to something else. I've explicitly said that it's there to do both - to sound like the wind, of course, but also, naturally, to represent the inhumanity of nature, and indeed its anihilatory powers. That's precisely why it's such an apt choice of instrument. Look at it the other way round: the wind machine appears at the end of the symphony. Tell, me, is VW only interested, here, in the fact that the wind is blowing? As a purely acoustic phenomenon. Or is it just possible that he might be somewhat moved by this empty landscape, all human existence gone and destroyed, the wind all that remains (and thus in itself reminding us of the disappearance of humanity). It's blatantly clear that he couldn't have composed the darn thing without the idea that 'the wind' wasn't just a sound but was fraught with more significance than this. Otherwise he wouldn't have put it in at all.

The point about movies is also the result of flawed logic, I think. The wind machine in VW 7 certainly has its origins in the Scott of the Antarctic film score, but there the music is subservient to the image - if we see the action of the wind, we need to hear it too. On stage, as a symphony, this is a wholly different matter, different priorites, different aesthetic, different way of working, different audience expectation - we may have heard hundreds of wind machines in the movies (without really noticing it), but of course it's more shocking and unusual in a symphony. If it isn't shocking, as you're now saying it isn't, then why did it cause you to make all this fuss about it?

[karlhenning]

. . . I've explicitly said that it's there to do both - to sound like the wind, of course, but also, naturally, to represent the inhumanity of nature, and indeed its anihilatory powers. That's precisely why it's such an apt choice of instrument. Look at it the other way round: the wind machine appears at the end of the symphony. Tell, me, is VW only interested, here, in the fact that the wind is blowing? As a purely acoustic phenomenon. Or is it just possible that he might be somewhat moved by this empty landscape, all human existence gone and destroyed, the wind all that remains (and thus in itself reminding us of the disappearance of humanity). It's blatantly clear that he couldn't have composed the darn thing without the idea that 'the wind' wasn't just a sound but was fraught with more significance than this. Otherwise he wouldn't have put it in at all.

And, if there is not such an 'artistic narrative' implementation of the instrument, why does Vaughan Williams apparently omit it from the third movement Lento, which specifically bears the title Landscape?  The wind should have been blowing then, too.

(In a wry orchestrational sense, the wind does blow in that movement, too, of course . . . there is a powerfully prominent organ entrance, and the organ pipes are powered by a bellows, indeed.)

[lukeottevanger]

I love the idea implicit in this VW criticism that he was a composer unable to see beyond the purely mimetic use of an instrument - purely because those criticising find it hard to listen in any way other than the strictly literal, and hard to believe that a composer (who ponders and balances and assesses and lives every note of the piece he is writing, let's remember), should perceive the various relationships between instruments and groups of instruments in an aesthetic or moral sense.

And I love the idea because, of all composers, VW is one of the very first to spring to mind when it comes to questions of understanding the aesthetic implications of his music. (Nielsen's the second, for me.) As I said pages ago to M, describing VW's idiom - he's a composer whose language in terms of interval, mode, key, gesture and instrumentation is extraordinarily sensitive and incredibly consistent. In his finest scores there is not a note which doesn't partake wholly and in every parameter of the aesthetic concerns of the whole - whether that's the wheedling tritone-driven and sax-dominated scherzo of #6 or the purely fifths-fourth-and-seconds strings that open #2. The implied idea that VW, in turning his film score into a symphony, simply lifted the wind-machine from one to the other without assessing the aesthetic considerations this entails is ridiculous; the idea that he of all composers would have been deaf to the symbolism of the wind blowing through the emptiness ditto.

[Christo]

     Err ??       

Again, admirably argued, Luke, and simply absolutely correct in all respects. (And we may also admire you for your perseverence even when some seem to be turning a deaf ear.)