Why do you like your favorite composers?

[San Antone]

Do you enjoy Machaut on ECM?

I like Machaut and generally like ECM engineering, so there is a good chance i would     but the recordings escape me at the moment - is that the Hilliard group?  If not, which recordings?   

[Luke]

Why do I like love my favourite composers? I'm writing the following as a sort of free-flowing train-of-thought as I don't have time to neaten my sentences up, so please forgive me.

Janacek - for his roughness, his emotional and sonic rawness, his fearlessness in understanding himself, in revealing his own deepest weaknesses and turning them into strengths (a theme that others in this list share), the sheer bloody life his music always, always emanates, the joy, the rapture, the pain of life in all its forms, human and animal; for the deep rural Czechness in every note he wrote and which calls in a complicated way to the Czech part of my ancestry, a Czechness which in Janacek's music is filtered through speech melodies and twisted through Janacekian turns of melody, harmony and rhythm until it is also a kind of expressionist language which speaks to everyone; above all for the fact that Janacek is the most human and truthful of composers, and when he errs technically (which he does more than any other great composer, I suspect) it is always, always at the service of some greater truth, some greater expressive imperative than mere technical correctness. Other composers below share this trait, this welcoming acceptance of weird, cranky 'errors' in their music, because they know that on a deeper level the errors are expressively 'right.' It's a trait I rate highly in composers, it allows their music to be permeated with what I always think of as the 'Three Hs': humility and humanity and honesty. But Janacek does so with more explosive power than any of them, and that's why when I'm asked to think of my favourite composers Janacek will always top the list, though I am past the days when it seemed that all I did from morning to night was listen to every note the man penned...

Ravel - and Ravel will always be second on that list, and a close second at that. And oddly enough, what I love in Ravel is, if not exactly the opposite of what I love in Janacek and many of the others below, certainly a different way of looking at the same problem: that of speaking with honesty and directness. Ravel never deceives, but he hides behind a mask at almost every turn; he dresses his music up in exquisitely-crafted glittering pastiches; he writes inspired by artifice and automata, by the guilelessness of children, by the filtering out of any contact with dirt and roughness and real life - even the raw sexy passion of Daphnis et Chloe comes not direct from the dusty olive groves of Ancient Greece but via 18th century nymphs-and-shepherds imagery. Why does this appeal to me with such force? Because Ravel only hides because there is such a burning fire within, and the gorgeous dress he finds for each piece he writes is necessary to give him a framework within which to let it burn safely and effectively. In Ravel every single note just brims with an expressive potency that to me only the composer above him and the one below him on this list can equal. And I mean brims - I feel like this is music which is on the verge of bursting its banks. Sometimes it does; sometimes it surges up and overflows and leaves everything reeling in its wake; a climax in Ravel is like a climax in no other composer, it is the point where the truth is at last revealed, if only for a few seconds. So: there is overwhelming dignity in this music; there is elegance and there is refinement but there is also honour and deep, deep human compassion in this music (the last minutes of L'enfant..., if you need an example), a compassion so deep that it needs shoring up behind layers of exquisiteness. Just perfect.

Brahms - well obviously, who doesn't love Brahms? And to me love is the key here. Every six months or so I go through a Brahms phase. It's all I want to hear - the chamber music, the late piano music, some of the songs above all. During one of these phases, years ago, I felt a sudden revelation - every phrase is singing, I thought, and what it is singing is 'I love you...' Fanciful, and nonsensical, of course, but it felt true at that moment (I was listening to the A minor SQ at the time IIRC, and I still think those two op 51 SQ's are scandalously underrated, as I find them among the most explosively expressive works in Brahms' already potently explosive collection of chamber music masterpieces) and I still think it's true, in a sense. Brahms never writes a note he doesn't mean; he never 'writes down,' his music is always heading in a masterly way towards a point of overwhelming realisation/catharsis, and yet he does all this without once over-reaching, without once taking the easy or sensationalist way; he does it with gorgeous craftsmanship and integrity. Brahms and Ravel are strange bedfellows, but IMO what they share is the way that unimpeachable technique is used as a carapace to protect the sheer force of the notes within - to protect the delicate notes from us, the clodhopping listeners, and to protect us from the notes, whose power would maybe overwhelm us if it were allowed its full head a la Mahler or Wagner. This, to me, makes the music all the more powerful, much, much more powerful than either Wagner nor Mahler, for that matter. Less is more; restraint and control makes what-is-said all the more potent. My mind always goes automatically to three pieces in particular at this point, two early and one late, but in truth one could take almost any piece and easily find bountiful examples such as these - the Schumann Variations op 9 in which the turbulent emotional complexes of the Robert-Clara-Johannes triangle are played out in music of sublime beauty, but framed and given strength and objective truth by hidden canons of the most complex types; much much later the first of his final piano sets, op 119/1 which that same Clara called 'a grey pearl,' and which seems to me to share the same feature - extraordinary soft fleshy harmonies (derived from that supreme Brahmsian tool of catharsis the chain of descending thirds) protected inside rigid-yet-supple canonic outer parts like an oyster in its shell; and then that wonderful early choral piece the Geistliche Lied which again plays something of the same game, being a strict double canon which uses the form not as a show of skill but as a way of expressing the fatalistic, steadfast patience the text exhorts us to.

Tippett - when I go on a Tippett binge it is more intense than when it happens with any other composer. I become addicted to those features in his music which he shares with Janacek, in particular - his self-scathing honesty and his complete (Jungian) self-awareness, his utter desire to speak the truth even if it reveals flaws in his own compositional technique, which it often does and which only, for me, increase the expressive force of his music. The style and the technique of the music offer such a true reflection of the man himself, they are all of a piece, so that when I listen to it I feel so much more than just music, I feel access to a subconscious world which is very hard to put into words. So maybe I won't try right now!

Brian - Brian, for me, is a hero figure, a dogged, rugged, brave (to the point of foolhardy) figure who did what he needed to do no matter what the cost and well past the point where anyone else would have stopped. His music carries these impressive traits in every bar. Listening to Brian symphonies becomes like venturing into an inner landscape in which everything is both familiar and utterly bizarre, and as we journey deeper into them, and deeper into his old age with him, we reach places where only wisdom and experience and a lifetime of fearless against-the-grain exploring can take you. It is odd, and often very confusing, but I've learnt to trust Brian. He Knows. What I love here above all, as in Tippett and Janacek, is the warts-and-all nature of the music.

Satie - Satie only wrote about twenty pieces which I really love. Twenty five or thirty, maybe. The early things - the obvious ones like the Gnossiennes and the Gymnopedies, and the Pieces Froides too, and actually more than any of these the three early songs from 1880 (IIRC). And the last ones - Socrate and the Nocturnes. That's about it. That figure is arrived at by counting all the individual Gnossiennes etc as individual pieces, too. On the basis of these few pieces, though, I love his art inordinately. Satie's music is the epitome of the idea of music which is humble and poor in spirit, and in material, too. Not for nothing was he known as Monsieur le Pauvre. What I respond to is the simplicity of this poverty, the simple, humble ideas and material, the simplicity of repetition, the unpushy nature - just this is enough, he says, and now I've done it once I'll take my time and give you two more pieces in which I do it again. No 'pointing', no goals, no climaxes, just a gentle drift from chord to chord. What Satie does, I think, is to give us what are often fairly shocking or sensuous harmonic changes time after time after time - every couple of seconds really - but at the same time to present them as utterly normal, everyday things, nothing to shout about, nothing to reach via a dramatic crescendo. There's something quite profound here, and I think that deep down it's probably what makes Satie's music so popular; at the same time it might be part of what made it appeal to Cage - because it's quite Zen, really. What we have in each piece is a series of moments which are both utterly mundane and utterly beautiful, and by letting them flow past calmly and without drama we appreciate each for what it is, not as gradated points on the way to a peak but as an endless series of small frissons of perfection. And this returns me to my first point - I may 'only' love this small set of pieces, but in each one of them every single chord change creates its own infinite world of magic in a way which other music will reserve for more rarer, dramatic moments. It's music which makes you aware of its beauty in a different way.

Feldman - Well, clearly what I've said about Satie applies here too. Feldman, for me, is like dust falling slowly through a shaft of light in an otherwise darkened room. Always the same, always different, utterly peaceful and quiet, endless, both pure and sullied... Like Satie - but even more so - Feldman just lets things be, for the most part, he doesn't impose his [massive] self. Humility again, in his materials and his way of dealing with them, but humility stretched to enormous, patient lengths.

Cage - I admire all Cage, but I'm one of those tedious souls who only really loves the pre-chance music. Every from about 1945 up to the string quartet, the prepared piano concerto and the Dances. The Six Melodies are exquisite, too. But obviously the Sonatas and Interludes are the focal work here. For me they are one of the key pieces of the 20th century and their ramifications are enormous. I'm not really a multiple recordings kind of listener, but as I do with Ives' Concord and Janacek's Quartets I make an exception here, and I have plenty. Cage talked about finding materials for this piece like picking up beautiful shells on a beach and then simply arranging them - this is his gamut technique, which I find such a satisfying and calmly beautiful way of putting a piece together. There is drama in these pieces, to be sure, but the drama is pared right down because of the delicacy of the instrument (a bit like the way a clavichord is such an ultra-expressive instrument but with everything focused tightly down onto a miniscule stage because of its dynamic limitations). What I love in the S+Is is the way one can sense Cage finding his materials. The score is a kind of tablature - it shows you what to play but not what it will sound like, so if you've ever sene it you will know that this piece is full of the most basic of keyboard figurations, simple parallel triads and scales, pieces which look straightforwardly diatonic....but what comes out only holds the ghost of those clicheed, well-known figures. We hear the music as utterly strange and yet consolingly familiar. This Cage - balanced, delicate, poised, refined, enigmatic, utterly beautiful and meditative, and yet somehow raw, primitive, anti-sophisticated and anarchic at the same time - is the one I love.

Chopin - I'm starting at a tangent here, but Schumann is the most poetic of all composers in a strict sense. The son of a bookseller, fascinated by literature his whole life, a great writer himself, his music is permeated by techniques drawn from poetry rather than from other music. And yet to me it is Chopin whose music actually speaks with the most natural and fluent poetry. I can't explain it in any other way. Chopin's music has an intricacy and a complexity which is doesn't shout about itself - I'm not talking about its technical difficulty or the reams of notes it might throw at the performer, and they do shout about themselves, of course. I'm talking about the small details, the way a sequence of parallel thirds (chords) might repeat itself as a set of separate lines, the notes suddenly curling around each other in loving duets; I'm talking about the way a melody can be written with the most miniscule changes in articulation on each appearance (especially in the Mazurkas) so that it seems to throb with life rather than stultifying; I'm talking about the way he plays with part writing so that each line speaks with direct urgency....but also the way he counterpoints this sort of writing with other textures, so that the whole is dramatised. The music springs off the page with a reality that e.g. Liszt (who I also love inordinately, though for different reasons) does not. Playing Chopin is like playing a poem, and that is why I love him.

I want to write about others, but I think that is enough. Sorry for my repetitive and poorly-formulated thoughts!

[Karl Henning]

Love this post.

[ZauberdrachenNr.7]

Why do I like love my favourite composers?...

Gospel according to Luke; if I didn't already love (most of) the same composers you do I surely would be converted.

[Luke]

Thanks, guys. 

Re-reading what I just wrote, and giving it a couple of much-needed edits, I'm struck by how much I am saying similar things about these very differnet composer, IOW how much continuity there is in the way I feel about them. What is it I seem to love? Clearly, if the above is right, it is: vulnerability, humility, the bravery to make mistakes if it means being honest, and a lack of shouting! Which in turn tells me something about myself (though in this case nothing I didn't already know as these are the sort of questions I am confronted with when I am composing my own music). Which acquisition of self-knowledge is I suppose at least part of why we do this sort of thing.

[Karl Henning]

Aye.

[Karl Henning]

(Me and my one-word posts . . . .)

[Luke]

Hmmm

[Luke]

(that one wasn't even a word)

(and they are probably preferable to my why-use-one-word-when-you-can-use-twenty posts as seen above)

[Karl Henning]

(that one wasn't even a word)

(and they are probably preferable to my why-use-one-word-when-you-can-use-twenty posts as seen above)

No, there is not a word in your post but was to the purpose, and which it is a pleasure to read.

[some guy]

Luke's eloquence and intelligence to the contrary, what I find is simply bafflement.

If I come up with an answer, I find that that answer must itself be questioned.

"I like X's asymmetrical rhythms" engenders the question "Why do I like asymmetrical rhythms?"

I don't know.

I like girls, for instance. I don't know why. I don't need to know why.

My male cousin likes boys, for instance, I don't know why. I don't need to know why.

What I do know without a doubt is that none of my likes are normative for any other human being anywhere, though many humans everywhere share them.

[Karl Henning]

Part of the great interest in the posts, is the "what I tell you that I like about my favorite composers, illumines myself" aspect, and therefore respect and admiration for Luke's vulnerability, humility, and bravery to make mistakes.  My own character has everything to learn from such an example.

[Luke]

@ some guy - I agree, you can never get to the end of these 'whys', but as Karl says, the exercise allows us, at least, to narrow in on things, to see the underlying trends, and to understand a little better if not completely.

@ Karl - I wish I had those qualities! I probably don't. But I know I like it when I find them in others. Hence my love of the composers I mention.

[Florestan]

Janacek is the most human and truthful of composers,

As opposed to Mahler, for instance, who was from Mars and rather deceitful; or Schubert, a bot, and a lying one for that matter... 

Seriously now, isn´t that claim a bit exaggerated? Isn´t actually any claim in the form X is the most y of composers a bit exaggerated?

[Karl Henning]

The expression is not superlative to the exclusion of others;  simply strong emphasis, Andrei.

[Florestan]

I know, I know, but still....

If I said that Schubert was the most human and truthful of all composers that would clearly collide with Luke´s claim --- and we can´t be both right, can we?

Ummm... forget about it.

[Luke]

As opposed to Mahler, for instance, who was from Mars and rather deceitful; or Schubert, a bot, and a lying one for that matter... 

Seriously now, isn´t that claim a bit exaggerated? Isn´t actually any claim in the form X is the most y of composers a bit exaggerated?

We're talking about why we love particular composers here. Isn't love rather blind? I'm not claiming exemption from this. Hyperbole is in order here if nowhere else.

But actually, I mean it, too, in quite a specific sense. I'm using 'truthful' here not to suggests that Janacek was a man of surpassing honesty in his everyday life, only to suggest - and it's a claim that can be substantiated by reference to his own writings - that Truth, writing music that rang true, that expressed the essence of a character or an emotion as honestly and as precisely as it could, was for him the absolute essence of what he did. Nothing mattered more. He says it over and over again. That's why we have all that concern with notating speech melodies (and the sounds of birds and waves and fountains etc. too), and with using Hipps' Chronoscopes to do so, and so on and so forth: these were the tools he felt necessary to understand how people express the truth about themselves through their voices, and the lessons he drew from this were applied as scrupulously as he possibly could. I don't know a composer who thought about this or worried about it as much as Janacek did, and in the absence of one, I think saying what I did is justified 

Now, in fact of course he might not have been right about any of this, scientifically speaking. He probably wasn't. Maybe it was all an enormous blind alley which he explored for most of his career. If so, fine, it rather illustrates my point - the error is revealing, it reveals that this is a man of enormous, obsessive belief and one with a deep, overwhelming desire to do what feels right, what feels truthful, even if it makes him look like a crank...!

[Luke]

I know, I know, but still....

If I said that Schubert was the most human and truthful of all composers that would clearly collide with Luke´s claim --- and we can´t be both right, can we?

Maybe not, but we could discuss it and that would be illuminating in its own way... 

And Schubert could give Janacek a run for his money in this particular race, I'll give you that 

[Florestan]

Maybe not, but we could discuss it and that would be illuminating in its own way... 

And Schubert could give Janacek a run for his money in this particular race, I'll give you that 

Ok, let´s discuss. But first of all, please define what do you mean by "most human and truthful" and explain why the definition suits Janacek and Schubert (thank you, most kind!) but not Mahler. 

[Karl Henning]

What could be more human than a drama queen?