Russell Steinberg: Lectures/Press

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General Listening Essay The Late Beethoven Quartets Beethoven's Grosse Fuge Beethoven AudioMap™ Example What is an AudioMap™? UpBeat Live Lecture: American Composers

General Essay on Listening Change the Way You Hear Music Forever

"I love music! I just wish I understood it better."
Sound familiar? As a lecturer in music listening, I hear this all the time. And it's not just novices that say this, but also seasoned concert goers and music enthusiasts. Want in on a dirty secret? Even professional musicians often confide in me the same thing!

What's up with this? Why should most people at classical concerts have to pretend they understand what they are hearing? Or the way I sometimes put it, why is it that we can sit through a 90 minute film with complete focus and attention, yet discover our mind constantly wandering during even a ten minute piece of music?

The answer is that we have lost the skill to follow musical ideas. Imagine how hard it would be to focus attention if that 90 minute film was in a foreign language without subtitles. Yet that is the reality for most of us at classical concerts. Let's face it. We live in a contemporary world that primarily values rhythm and sound effects. Harmony and complex melody are not really on the radar. One reason I think that people find my lectures helpful is because I remember how difficult it was at first for me to listen and comprehend classical music. As a child, I was bored out of my mind. Later, like most people, I would wait for my 'favorite parts' to happen and pretty much zone out before and after.

Becoming a composer changed all of that. I can follow musical ideas and structure as easily as watching a film and this skill has made music far more emotional and vital than just waiting for the 'good parts.' My mission is to help other people hear with the same clarity. If classical music is to survive as a meaningful, vital part of our culture, it must have an emtoionally enthusiastic audience that can understand it and learn to recognize well written music.

I don't believe you need to be musician to be able to follow musical ideas and I have developed special tools to prove it. After taking my classes, most of my students follow musical development with more comprehension than even many musicians.

To begin this journey yourself, I suggest three steps. The first step is to understand how a musical 'story' works. To do just that, I invented AudioMaps™.

AudioMaps™ provide a window into the way a musical work progresses from beginning, to middle, to end. My intent was to represent an entire movement of music on a single page that someone could follow without any knowledge of music notation. Since teaching classes on the Beethoven symphonies using my AudioMaps™, the response from students has been overwhelming. Literally after ten or fifteen minutes, they are following and understanding music for the first time, music many of them had listened to for years. You can order my first volume of the Beethoven Symphonies on this website. It includes charts for all the important forms of classical music.

The second step in classical music listening is understanding harmony. Harmony today is the 'little toe' of music. We don't use it much and we've forgotten what it's for. Yet harmony forms the backbone of most Western music. Where chords come from and where chords lead is pretty much the 'plot' of classical music. Learn to hear harmony and it becomes easy to find your way in any piece. Harmony is largely the subject of my lecture series titled "Classical Vienna: Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven." The first volume of this series is on videotape. It is a one hour exploration of the Classical Style.

Step three of this journey is to get involved--attend lectures, attend concerts, hear recordings, keep a journal, and meet other people who love classical music.Join our community through the music academy concerts and events.
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The Late Beethoven Quartets

I've had the honor of presenting a series of pre-concert lectures on Beethoven for the La Jolla Music Society. The final concert centers around op. 130, the great string quartet that originally ended with the Grosse Fuge (Grand Fugue).

Here are some of the thoughts I shared about Beethoven's late music:

One question people had about the Late Quartets: were they works of genius or confused and disconnected scribblings of a deaf composer of questionable sanity? Beethoven sent a joke to his publisher about op. 131, saying he had just found a bunch of quartet movements lying around and decided to send them to be published as one piece. To Beethoven’s shock, the publisher believed him and was indignant about publishing old musical torsos. Beethoven had to explain he was kidding, that indeed all the music was new and original.

The late quartets change the conventional shape of what we think of as a string quartet rather dramatically. They usually exceed four movements and the movements don’t hold together like conventional music. Sometimes they are interrupted, sometimes we’re not sure if they are part of preceding movements. The four instruments are independent to the point of sometimes not sounding like they’re playing together. The technical demands on the players makes for challenging intonation and beauty of sound. Musical ideas are often cryptic and subtle rather than declaratory and clear. Rhythms are so syncopated that time seems to flow in a new and unpredictable ways. This music doesn’t seem strongly glued together like Beethoven’s earlier works, almost crumbling away at times.

That’s all on one side. And even today you might hear music critics call these quartets overrated, or not as good as Beethoven’s earlier music. Personally, I don’t see how anyone who has any kind of ear and really listens to these late quartets could ever say something that ridiculous. The degree of originality, the astonishing imagination, the intensity of emotion, and both the continuation and disintegration of musical ideas common to all of Beethoven’s music mark these works clearly among the greatest written.

Op. 130 String Quartet in B flat major
During the premiere of op. 130, Beethoven sat in a bar across the street and waited nervously for his friends to tell him how it went. They told him the audience demanded an immediate encore of the two dance movements. Beethoven said, “Yes, sweet trifles, but what about the fugue?” They told him people were less enthusiastic with the concluding movement, the Grosse Fuge. It was just too massive and confusing a work for most people to hear after the already substantial 5 previous movements. Beethoven, enraged, was reported to have growled, "And why didn't they encore the Fugue? That alone should have been repeated! Cattle! Asses!"
His publisher begged him to write another shorter finale and enticed Beethoven by offering to pay for it and to publish the Grosse Fuge separately. Beethoven eventually agreed and even today the quartet is often played with the shorter finale. Personally I think there is a problem with this that any audience can hear almost immediately. You see, the Grosse Fuge is not really an independent piece. It is in every way a summation of what came before.

Some comments about op. 130
Mvt 1 Adagio ma non troppo; Allegro
The slow introduction is not really an ‘intro’ but welded into the allegro part of the piece, almost like yin and yang. Here the continual descending tendency of the slow music is offset by the frenzied scurrying music attempting to ascend. This fast music may be Beethoven’s inside revelation of deafness. Never before have dynamics been this extreme. Contrasts of loud and soft were always a hallmark of Beethoven’s style. But this is different. Every time we accelerate to a resolution, the music disappears in sudden softness, only to come crashing in afterward on a chord that should start soft. This syncopation of dynamics is not dissimilar to what people losing their hearing describe—that strain to hear certain sounds while others are suddenly way too loud. Musically it creates two discrete dimensions of sound. Our ears connect the loud parts as one unit, and the soft parts as another. Throughout the movement the half step motif appears, either going down or going up, connecting in ever larger chains. If we can listen with “long” ears, we can notice that the major sections of the movement outline a continuous long chain of descending or ascending half steps. But it means more than that. The chromatic motif has a disintegrating power that threatens to tear apart the music whenever it enters. And we become increasingly sensitized to its appearance as the piece progresses. This is the deeper kind of connection that is typical of Beethoven’s late style.
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Beethoven's Grosse Fuge

What a setup—and a necessary one—the Cavatina is to the Grosse Fuge. How can this fugue be heard independently when its opening is either the answer or challenge, depending on your view, of all the music that has preceded? It opens with the entire quartet playing loud octaves on the note G. This very same note that ends the chromatic motif underlying the whole piece (Bb-A-Ab-G). This very same note that determined the key of the German dance. This very same note that just dominated the melody of the Cavatina (begins and ends on G). G carries enormous baggage by this time. Now in the Grosse Fuge, that G leads to an ascending chromatic motif—G-G#-A, all in unison—directly reversing the process that began the quartet. What would music sound like that had the nebulous quality of this chromatic motif dominating the foreground, instead of lurking in the background as it has in all the previous movements? Here this motif alternates with another chromatic motif answering it in a higher register that leads to G instead of beginning on G—E-F-F#-G. After the introduction, the fugue formally begins with the melody, or fugue subject, now beginning on the note Bb instead of G. The lower notes are Bb-B-C, the upper notes are G-Ab-A-Bb—our old familiar chromatic motive that began the quartet, just in reverse order. Together, this chromatic tune completely surrounds the tonic Bb without really clearly defining it! In other words, the fugue subject is so chromatic that we can’t clearly recognize a key fit—it is that slippery. And here Beethoven challenges the bedrock of the entire tonal system used as the most basic assumption in music for the past 250 years.

That would be difficult enough. But much of the savagery and dissonance of this mind-blowing movement comes from its stuttering and disjunct countersubject. When two, three, or all four of the instruments play this countersubject, an almost atomic energy is released from the quartet. Much of it comes from the strain of string instruments trying to grab and sound notes that jump between their lowest and highest registers.

And that’s not all. The final dimension that makes the Grosse Fuge so complex is that Beethoven takes his trademark sforzandos that we’ve heard in his earliest music to their farthest horizon, so that rhythmic syncopations unfold between all the instruments with an intensity that makes it nearly impossible to tell the meter (or grouping) of the music. The opening fugue subject itself deceives our ears. It is written one beat later than we hear. In other words, it begins on the weak beats—two and four—instead of on the strong beats—one and three. Only at the cadence—the end of the subject—do we become aware of this deception. And then, instead of sounding decisive, the effect on our ears is that the music accelerates past any sense of downbeat. This last obstacle keeps many a quartet from being able to perform this piece, and many a listener from being able to follow!

All these dimensions led avante-garde composer Igor Stravinsky to state that the Grosse Fuge sounds eternally modern. And indeed one can trace an immediate path from this piece to the quartets of Schoenberg, Webern, and beyond to Ligeti and Lutoslawski.

Is there a way we can follow this music as eager listeners? Absolutely. This is a fugue, which means that we just have to pay attention whenever the subject appears. There you will find it—sometimes inside the most chaotic and stormy textures and other times as a quiet accompaniment to an expressive melody. The music changes tempo and character dramatically as it travels to different sections. But the fugue subject is nearly always present. It is a hunter lurking within, all the while searching, stalking its prey—the home key of B flat. Follow it through all the different tempi and sections until we reach the coda. Here Beethoven’s final answer of the controlling motif—the reverse ascending form G-G#-A-Bb—triumphantly establishes the home key of Bb, not just for this grand movement, but for the entire quartet.
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Beethoven AudioMap™ Example: Symphony #1 movement 1

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What is an AudioMap™?

An AudioMap™ is a chart that helps you focus on the journey of a piece of music from beginning to end. I got the idea from observing how LA drivers rely on the Thomas Bros. maps to travel anywhere in the city. AudioMaps™ do not rely on musical notation, but rather on a simple series of connected boxes with thematic names to make the musical 'story' as clear as possible.

How to Follow an AudioMap™

It takes less than ten minutes to learn this. AudioMaps™ are read left to right. The top titles indicate the structural sections of the music. The boxes represent the musical themes and ideas--the shape of what we actually notice psychologically. Boxes can represent events that last only moments or events that last almost a minute! Beneath the boxes are standard Italian abbreviations to denote the changing loudness of the music.
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UpBeat Live Lecture: American Composers

These are my notes from an UpBeat Live at Walt Disney Concert Hall. Of course it is missing the recorded musical excerpts as well as my piano examples, but the content might be of interest.

RUSSELL STEINBERG UPBEAT LIVE TALK ON Friday, Saturday, Sunday, May 18, 19, 20, 2007, 8:00 PM

Upshaw sings Foss and Golijov
_Barber: Toccata Festiva _Foss: Time Cycle_Golijov: Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra_Bernstein: Symphonic Dances from West Side Story


INTRODUCTION

I looked at the scores to the pieces on tonight’s program and I have to say just that alone was thought provoking. The Barber Toccata Festiva is full of black ink and Americana muscles. You can immediately tell the sound will be huge because of the doubling of all the instruments. To be sure there are gorgeous lyric moments as well. But the look of the score places it as American 1930s or 40s, well before its written date of 1960.

The Lukas Foss Time Cycle was written the same year as the Barber. The two might as well be separated by a century. With just a glance you can see the Foss piece is sparse, pointillistic, improvisatory. Yet 1960 fits its look—the Western world of art music was in full-throes of post-Webern serialism. Foss here was an American composer not going the Copland, Barber route, but hitting the European avante-garde of Boulez and Stockhausen square in the eye.

Then there is the Golijov composed just a few years ago. But to look at its score…well frankly, it’s a score that Vivaldi would have been comfortable reading. Its clear patterns, clear and very simple tonal harmony, and its expressive vocal style is not very far from the world of Vivaldi’s concerti. Its look on the page is far simpler than any other of the pieces on tonight’s program. What has happened? Have we gone literally back in time with our 21st century?

All this got me thinking about a deep question—the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. What does it mean for a composer to embrace or reject the Zeitgeist? What penalties are there for ignoring it? What is the danger of embracing it too closely? What does it mean for a composer to anticipate it, or to catch it on a rising wave, or jump on when it’s just about to shift again? What does it mean for an audience to “hear” according to the Zeitgeist or to ask an audience to hear in another context?

What led me to these questions was my talk last month on a Baroque concert by il Giardino Armonico that featured virtually unknown pieces, many by composers that time has forgotten. In their day, some of those composers enjoyed popularity but over time their works disappeared. Others didn’t even have that. One, such as the young Johann Goldberg, tried to absorb everything around him, much like many of us composers feel obligated to do today. The result was a very imaginative succession of ideas but in trying to include everything, there was not a strong unifying control.

Johann Sebastian Bach himself is always interesting to study in terms of this Zeitgeist question. Scholars often point out that Bach was an old-fashioned fuddy-duddy, writing music in a style popular 50 years earlier. I would qualify that by saying Bach was competing intensively to write the most cutting-edge music, but yes, competing with composers from earlier generations when counterpoint was king. The price he paid for not writing in the spirit of his time was in one sense pretty severe: he was viewed much more as an organist than a composer. We also know with historical lenses that had Bach not established a large community of devoted students who kept his work alive in small circles through the time of Mozart and Beethoven, his music would probably not exist today.

So to the matter at hand! What were Barber, Bernstein, Foss, and Golijov’s reaction to the Zeitgeist of America in the 1940s thru the 90s?

Barber: Toccata Festiva

Barber asks us to hold an incredible variety of music in our ears. There are loud boisterous themes and lyrical ones and mysterious ideas. The orchestration sometimes sounds like the music of big film scores of the 1940s, other times like a big symphony, and other times like simple lyrical folk music. Sorting out the material and themes makes listening to it rewarding. It’s kind of an original hybrid. You can hear it as either the orchestra being an extension of the organ, or the organ being an extension of the orchestra. Toccata is of course a reference to the famous Bach Toccatas that emphasize the virtuosity of “touch” in the organ. Barber clearly extends the sense of “toccata” to the entire orchestra in this piece as well.

Its form is a dense symphonic sonata slash concerto movement firmly in the Americana style, meaning the world of Copland’s third symphony, or the music of Roy Harris, William Schumann, or Vincent Persichetti—or for that matter, John Williams. (In fact, Barber’s piece uses a fanfare that would sound very comfortably in Star Wars!).

The orchestration features heavy doubling of material, rousing brass fanfares and percussive moments, but also moments of tender lyricism. The organ has several cadenza moments, but truly a great cadenza near the end remarkable in that it is only for the pedals. The organist’s feet have to work blindingly fast and we’ll have an opportunity to see that feat in this performance.

The opening features virtuoso ascending swoops very much in the toccata style. Notice the organ’s entrance is obscured in that it just sounds at first like another element of the orchestra.

The second theme is has a beautiful lyricism resonant of American folk music that strikes a great contrast with the energy of the first section.

The development section is bewildering in its contrasting textures and tempi. One great moment as I mentioned has a fanfare that would fit in Star Wars

The Pedal Organ Cadenza. Defying expectations of a normal virtuoso cadenza, this one gathers great steam but then dissipates to pianissimo and the orchestra enters with equally quiet lyricism. It remains for the orchestra to eventually gather momentum for the ending fanfare of the piece.

The final pages of the piece are as rousing as Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and worth the wait.

Foss: Time Cycle
When Leonard Bernstein premiered Time Cycle in 1960, he addressed the audience of Carnegie Hall: “My colleagues on the stage and I think so highly of Lukas Foss’ Time Cycle that we would like to make a proposal: If you wish, we will repeat the whole piece for you…And if there are only twelve people in the house who want to hear it again we will play it for those twelve.”

Bernstein probably used the number twelve as a pun for the clock motive that permeates this piece. For our context as listeners, it helps to understand that the aesthetic of this piece comes from the language of Webern’s music that literally swept the contemporary music world after World War II. It emphasized an extreme sensitivity to individual tones, rather than the connecting of tones into a recognizable tune. To make each stand out, notes were often separated by tremendous spaces in register. And instead of placing these notes in cozy chords like we are used to in classical music, Webern and his followers created unique chord structures that wouldn’t “hide” the pitches. When listened to casually this music might sound just like “plink, plank, plunk.” But on deeper listening, you can hear great expression and intensity in each moment and chord. This piece is particularly powerful because it uses the idea of a clock with all its emotional resonances of time as a unifying motive very well expressed with pointillistic textures.

I. We’re Late (Auden)
The pointilistic clock motive with woodwinds strings and harp permeates the piece. The singers disjunct leaps imitate this percussive effect. No melismas—it makes the words sharp like icicles.

Improvisations in between the movements

II. When the Bells Justle (Houseman)
Bells introduce a brass clock-like ostinato. That leads to a widely spread pointilistic fabric encompassing the entire orchestra. Word painting—using music to capture the meaning of a word is particularly strong on the word “sour” from the phrase “the taste is sour”—the poet’s sense of regret realized with the passing of time.
If you follow along with the text, you’ll practically pucker your mouth at that point. J

III. January 16 (Kafka)
About the contrast of external and internal time: the thing to listen for is the gradual emergence of a contrasting pulse in the percussion and later the flutes.
"The clocks do not synchronize: the inner one chases in an inhuman manner, the outer one goes haltingly at its usual pace."

IV. O Mensch, gib Acht (Nietzsche)
This last song is a quietly dramatic and haunting culmination. Two flutes are at one end of the stage, two violins at another. Also, at different points in the piece musicians not playing are asked to whisper numbers, literally “clocking” the piece from one to twelve.
The flute duet and violin duet interact with the singer while pointilistic writing goes on with the winds and percussion.

A kind of miracle happens in the context of this piece: when the singer sings the final lines “But lust desires eternity, deep deep eternity” the music becomes intensely tonal in Mahlerian moment that will leave you with the good kind of chills…

Golijov: Three Songs for Soprano and Orchestra

1. Night of the Flying Horses—a lullaby set in Yiddish, then a doina (Romanian lament) and then a Gallop
2. Lua Descolorida (Colorless Moon)
3. How Slow the Wind—Emily Dickenson fragment on loss

I said at the beginning that the Golijov score resembled Vivaldi. That was not too much of an exaggeration. In fact, the composer specifically asks the string players to play in the early Baroque style. The second song even refers to a work by the French Baroque composer Louis Couperin. The third song begins not unlike the Winter movement of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Unlike the Barber or the Foss, this is a simple music in the same sense the early Baroque composers wrote simple music—there is a melody and there are chords supporting it. No messy counterpoint. No difficult structures.

But don’t get me wrong. This is plain music in the high sense: as in highly expressive, highly intentioned, and highly communicative. These elegiac songs will certainly have you weeping. And the orchestration is so subtle and inventive: listen for the bass clarinet, for the basset horn, for the chimes, the celesta, the bowed vibraphone—all these give a beautiful shimmer to the work. Golijov takes great pain to write specifically throughout the score how the players should conceive of their individual parts.

I. Night of the Flying Horses: the lullaby begins with voice alone—a mother singing to a child. The sweetness turns dark in the Doina with a Klezmer, or Romanian Bass clarinet solo that introduces a very dark and expressive solo for the violas the composer wants to sound like an enormous dudek—the pungent Armenian double reed instrument.

Gallop—Vivaldi meets World Music—strings playing tremolo under winds and violins playing a Middle Eastern sliding lament

II. Colorless Moon (Lua Descolorida)—begins as a vocalize that again has a decidedly Baroque opera feel that also intentionally recalls Mahler’s delicate scoring for voice and orchestra. The beauty of the writing is here so seductive. The harmony so simple that it is almost all “white notes.” The composer instructs the strings not to connect the notes, but to play with the same air that early music players use for Baroque music. In terms of Zeitgeist, could it be further from the Foss?

III. How Slow the Wind
Perhaps the most exquisite of the three, this song again recalls the world of Baroque music and the world of Mahler’s late symphonies. The opening has the same string restlessness of Vivaldi’s Winter. The English horn solo recalls the chilling oboe solo of Mahler’s Song of the Earth.
There is a poignant vocalise that consists only of a descending scale but it would have Puccini passionately envious if he heard it, and you will probably remember it best from all three songs.
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