Extremely Long Piano Compositions - What's Their Point?

[Karl Henning]

but I find in them an inverse snobbery which should get called out.

This, in spades.

[Luke]

Oh, yes - agreed - I just meant that I thought it carried group/class connotations as well, rather than meaning a solitary person living in their own world. Like, surely Janacek did not spend his middle age in an ivory tower.

Oh yes, sure. My feeling is that Florestan is using the phrase both to paint Sorabji both as an eccentric hermit with no contact with the outside world, and at the same time as having a coterie of initiates (boy, they're all such loaded terms! They probably all wore hooded robes and chanted Crowlian liturgies...). And I'm just trying to point that, actually, we all isolate ourselves in a (physical, mental, artistic) place where we feel comfortable. It's not such a sin.

[DavidW]

I hate to mention it, but... guess who posted a video (partly) on Sorabji today on YouTube.

Yes, David Hurwitz.

It is almost like he is reading the forum...

[Karl Henning]

It is almost like he is reading the forum...

Well, if he were to google his own name, there may well be a chance that the GMG thread devoted to him might come up as a result, right?

[Karl Henning]

Can somebody please explain me what is the point of such works as Sorabji's Opus Clavicembalisticum, which takes five hours to perform and listen to, or Symphonic Variations for Piano, ditto nine hours? I personally fail to see any at all and honestly, I regard such monstrosities as a sign of the composer's not entirely healthy mental state. I mean, what normal person can imagine that another normal person will have the physical stamina to play the piano for five or nine hours uninterruptedly and yet another normal person will have the mental stamina to listen for five or nine hours uninterruptedly? But then again maybe I'm a philistine, so please enlighten me.

I knew this reminded me of something (a template, if you like) ... someone on Twitter tweeting: "Sorabji sucks! Prove me wrong.

[Cato]

Concerning the composer and practicality...


For many, many hours, I filled music paper in the 1970's with music using quarter-tone scales which I had invented: I even composed the first act of a quarter-tone opera, filling a good hundred pages of orchestral-sized music paper.


A large cantata for orchestra filled many more pages of such paper, and there were other works e.g. a work called Cathedral of Trees using instruments which would need to be invented (e.g. quarter-tone Celesta).


I knew that there was no hope of performance, that what I was doing was seemingly worthless, but two things kept me going: the joy of composing itself. i.e. the thrill of creating these works. the satisfaction in imagining every sound and in seeing the way the notes intertwined and danced across the paper.


The other thing was hope, hope that some day there might be instruments which would be able of producing the music accurately and performers interested in xenharmonic music.


I also composed works using the regular 12-notes, some sounding rather traditional, others much less so.


It did not seem to matter: performers made promises, gave my works great praise, but rarely found the time or an opportunity to perform any of them.


After 20 years of unfulfilled hopes and concluding that family life would prevent me from doing anything connected to composing and finding people to perform any of my works, I found my stacks of music paper a burden and a torture, so I destroyed them and stopped dreaming and hoping.


However, I will admit that my desire to have my works performed was weak, because I found the few performances which did occur to be a psychological autopsy in public.

I realized that, when I heard my music, I did not want my personality, my soul, if you can abide the term, so openly exposed for public examination.  When the few performances occurred, I realized that the experience was so private, that I could not feel anything but embarrassment, as if I were confessing my sins over a loudspeaker.

See:


Why I  Am Not a Composer[/url]


Thirty years later, I see some minimal progress in the acceptance of microtonal music, and some better progress in the creation of microtonal instruments.  I have re-created three works from memory and sketches which survived the purge: interest in them is less than minimal.*



So one answer as to "What is the Point" of either Extremely Long works or Extremely Impractical works by a composer who really finds it uncomfortable when other people listen to his compositions...is that Joy and Satisfaction in the Creation itself! 



That was the point! 




* Here is a MIDI version of the cantata Exaudi Me.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/i9mlhnvdn88z7gv/Schulte%20Exaudi%20Me%20voix%20-%202nd%20mix%20-%2030%20Dec%2016.mp3?dl=0

[AnotherSpin]

Well, the discussion of long musical compositions has steadily moved on to the denouncing of one forum member, Florestan. A strange feeling of déjà vu, somewhere I've seen this before... ah, of course!!! Old Soviet films, in which comrades in the Komsomol or Pioneer cell chastise a stumbling comrade whose fault is that he dared to disagree with the general line. Well, nothing strange, knowing the ardent love for everything Soviet on the GMG forum, one can't expect anything else. As Comrade Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev used to say — Верной дорогой идёте, товарищи!

By the way, comrades moderators, what does your rules say about when a thread discussion devolves into a discussion of one of the participants?

[Karl Henning]

Well, the discussion of long musical compositions has steadily moved on to the denouncing of one forum member, Florestan. A strange feeling of déjà vu, somewhere I've seen this before... ah, of course!!! Old Soviet films, in which comrades in the Komsomol or Pioneer cell chastise a stumbling comrade whose fault is that he dared to disagree with the general line. Well, nothing strange, knowing the ardent love for everything Soviet on the GMG forum, one can't expect anything else. As Comrade Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev used to say — Верной дорогой идёте, товарищи!

By the way, comrades moderators, what does your rules say about when a thread discussion devolves into a discussion of one of the participants?

Well, I don't think much of your assessment of the thread. Maybe you see what you wish to see.

[Florestan]

In Freundschaft, Andrei, but when I read this kind of statements, one name comes to mind. A name you will not like at all.

Yes, the name is Andrei Zhdanov. Sorry 😞

And I can't avoid thinking that what you are accusing Sorabji et al. of is formalism. Sorry again.

Zhdanov was a man of the party, not of the people. Sorry.

[AnotherSpin]

Zhdanov was a man of the party, not of the people. Sorry.

Believe it or not, the ruling (and only) party did represent the Soviet population. The country was pretty homogeneous, except for a few dissidents who just wanted to go to Israel or somewhere else.

There was never any real resistance to the Bolsheviks, and this applies to such characters as Shostakovich among others. All stories about his dissent are nothing more than fiction.

[Florestan]

Re. Ivory towers - now there's a powerful populist phrase. Ivory towers are bad, right? They're where the snooty elites live, high above the real people, the man in the street, with whom they arrogantly refuse contact.

Well, let's see what Sorabji himself has to say about the matter.

One hears a lot about the tour d'ivoire as the spiritual home of those creative artists who say with Horace 'Odi profanum vulgus, et arceo' – the implication being that their seclusion, while it may be very decorative and graceful, is fragile and brittle like ivory. It is an unfortunate simile, having I think very little relation to the truth of the matter: speaking purely for myself, I want no 'ivory tower', but a Tower of Granite with plentiful supplies of boiling oil and molten lead to tip over the battlements on to the heads of unwanted and uninvited intruders on my privacy and seclusion. Not nearly enough has been said – if anything at all – in favour of the creative artist, provided he be so minded, deliberately withdrawing from contact with his fellows, eschewing the society alike of his colleagues the other composers, who make music (sometimes), and of those who still more often mar it, the performers.

Sounds pretty clear to me: deliberate withdrawal from any contact not only with the society at large, but also with fellow composers and performing musicians.

And if this is still not convincing enough, here's the dedication inscribed in the score of Opus Clavicembalisticum:

To the everlasting glory of those Few
MEN –
Blessed and sanctified in the Curses and Execrations
of those MANY –
Whose Praise is Eternal Damnation.


Incidentally, all this is not far from what Matthew Lee Knowles, composer of the longest piano piece in existence (26 hours), stated in an interview:

My ideal situation would be to live at my piano writing music and never see another human being again in my life (!)

[AnotherSpin]

There is no way out, listening to Sorabji again.

Opus Clavicembalisticum performed by John Ogdon. Somewhere in the middle of a slightly less than 5 hour cycle. Still reminiscent of some of Keith Jarrett's solo albums in places. Which is rather curious, since Jarrett was improvising.

I don't remember where I got my interest in Sorabji twenty or so years ago. To confirm Florestan's thesis, I would say that I definitely wanted to listen to elitist stuff, something that nobody else knew. Perhaps it was a post-Soviet syndrome, because in the USSR everyone listened to the same thing, 5 or 7 of the same composers. I don't remember the details, but the interest in Sorabji didn't take hold then.

[Mandryka]

There is no way out, listening to Sorabji again.

Opus Clavicembalisticum performed by John Ogdon. Somewhere in the middle of a slightly less than 5 hour cycle. Still reminiscent of some of Keith Jarrett's solo albums in places. Which is rather curious, since Jarrett was improvising.

What that suggests is that the difference between an improvisation and a composed work isn't something you can actually hear.

[Luke]

Well, let's see what Sorabji himself has to say about the matter.

Sounds pretty clear to me: deliberate withdrawal from any contact not only with the society at large, but also with fellow composers and performing musicians.

And if this is still not convincing enough, here's the dedication inscribed in the score of Opus Clavicembalisticum:

To the everlasting glory of those Few
MEN –
Blessed and sanctified in the Curses and Execrations
of those MANY –
Whose Praise is Eternal Damnation.

Sure, Sorabji loved this barbed, misanthropic language. He loved invective, he loved disdain, he was full of contempt (for some, not for all). He uses it all the time, and sometimes even more pointedly than that. The front page of his Passeggiata Veneziana quotes Norman Douglas...

'Consider your neighbour
What an imbecile he is!'

but to those who feel themselves inside the Sorabjian universe he offers equal scorn on the same page:

Public performance except by special permission prohibited
and playing within the hearing of earnest high-mind solemn dolts strongly deprecated!

He leaves few people safe!

In doing this he closes off much of the world from accessing him - because (for a number of reasons, musical and biographical) he was both proud and paranoid, full of an expansive sensuality but also of a closed-off suspicion, and because he knew his ideas were so easily misunderstood and misinterpreted. But, importantly, he isn't closing himself off from the world. His music is full of a deep awareness of 'things outside,' (as I showed in my earlier post, and as is also shown in his writings, which are much more nuanced than a few cherry-picked quotations can show)

[Luke]

What that suggests is that the difference between an improvisation and a composed work isn't something you can actually hear.

It suggests that you are right, but only wrt that particular listener's way of hearing. To my ears, there is little in common with Jarrett, even at his more extreme, and Sorabji. Jarrett's incredible improvisations are not generally fugal or contrapuntal, they are more restrained and less quickly evolving in their approach to the keyboard, they are harmonically less dense... That's to me, at any rate.

[Mandryka]

It suggests that you are right, but only wrt that particular listener's way of hearing. To my ears, there is little in common with Jarrett, even at his more extreme, and Sorabji. Jarrett's incredible improvisations are not generally fugal or contrapuntal, they are more restrained and less quickly evolving in their approach to the keyboard, they are harmonically less dense... That's to me, at any rate.

Maybe we can say this: where the form is audibly complex, what you hear is justification for saying that it is composed. Where the complexity of the form is not audible (Structures 1a), you don't have grounds to say it's composed based on what you hear.  And where the form is audible but not complex (some of the pieces in Messiaen's Catalogue for example) you have no way of telling what it is.

And of course, this leaves the question whether you can hear that an improvisation is an improvisation.

[DavidW]

By the way, comrades moderators, what does your rules say about when a thread discussion devolves into a discussion of one of the participants?

Don't worry we are watching the thread closely! 

What I have seen so far is a spirited critique of Florestan's arguments and motivation, but not an attack on his character.  But if it does cross the line, we are here.

[Karl Henning]

A large cantata for orchestra filled many more pages of such paper, and there were other works e.g. a work called Cathedral of Trees using instruments which would need to be invented (e.g. quarter-tone Celesta).


I knew that there was no hope of performance, that what I was doing was seemingly worthless, but two things kept me going: the joy of composing itself. i.e. the thrill of creating these works. the satisfaction in imagining every sound and in seeing the way the notes intertwined and danced across the paper.

The entirety of your account is most interesting, and (though the passing years have perhaps made the divulgence easier) touching in laying your inner self bare. I half wonder if the OP might not (if you were not a participant here, I mean, for he would not do you such a discourtesy personally) mightn't respond to what I have italicized above with:

honestly, I regard such monstrosities as a sign of the composer's not entirely healthy mental state.

[Karl Henning]

Maybe we can say this: where the form is audibly complex, what you hear is justification for saying that it is composed.

This verges upon what I see as a frequent motivation for the composer: the desire to hear music which has never been heard before. The OP may not be pleased by my citing Arnold Schoenberg (that supposed Enemy of Art) who wrote, Never do (in composing) what a copyist can do for you.

And of course, this leaves the question whether you can hear that an improvisation is an improvisation.

It's a beautiful and apt question.

[Karl Henning]

It suggests that you are right, but only wrt that particular listener's way of hearing. To my ears, there is little in common with Jarrett, even at his more extreme, and Sorabji. Jarrett's incredible improvisations are not generally fugal or contrapuntal, they are more restrained and less quickly evolving in their approach to the keyboard, they are harmonically less dense... That's to me, at any rate.

I don't know how many organists maintain the tradition (I know one here in Massachusetts), but they used to practice (as it were) improvising fugues.