I have alluded elsewhere to the fact that most of the guidance that I received in The Early Years was negative: "don't do X". There are several problems with negative advice in principle. Here are some, in no order:

1. The avoidance of X, if X is well-defined, may still leave an implicitly-permitted space that is unnavigably large.
2. It presumes knowing what to do.
3. The list of X's quickly grows beyond management or organization.
4. The well is poisoned with respect to each X (the voice on the shoulder says that this is the primary purpose).

As against all of this, there is a familiar cardinal principle of creativity, which has been either discussed or else merely presumed in many previous posts on this blog: "Don't repeat self". This principle even has its own Wikipedia entry -- written from the perspective of software engineering, but much of the discussion is directly transferable to the context of any particular creative activity, and can then be abstracted upwards (as we so enjoy doing) in terms of the technique of that activity.

Wikipedia also talks about two alternatives (again, in a software context). One of those is patently inane, but the discussion of the other contains an interesting formulation that may point a way forward: "Prefer duplication over the wrong abstraction". What is an abstraction and what makes it wrong? The answers to those questions are again software-specific, but we may analogize. Perhaps it is not DRY, but WRY: Why repeat yourself? There can be good reasons, tightly coupled as they are with what kind of repetition is being considered -- and even with the definition of repetition, although it is literal repetition that is most often deemed problematic.

One place where parallels between software and art break down is that it is hardly possible for software to be too legible, but it is obviously possible for art to be too legible as well as not legible enough. Centuries have been spent trying to define the sweet spot in between; perish forbid that effort be renewed here. It is sufficient to point out that everything depends upon rationale, and that rationale can be internalized in the form of conditioning of the imagination.

Down that road (never mind exactly how far down) lies the ability to transform negative advice into positive -- where it is found to survive any validation at all and not deserve to be simply thrown aside.

...except this isn't a review, it is program notes. What's the difference, you ask? Lovely weather we're having.

As I mentioned last time, I spent the first half of this year working with recalcitrant sketches for one or two chamber pieces, which could not decide what their settings should be. Ultimately I realized that the style had degenerated into academicism and that it was necessary for me to conduct some experiments towards a new or renewed style.

This is the second such experiment and the first that attempts extended form. 10 -- 15 minutes seems the natural length for "large-scale" works in this style category. Within that, I seem to have spontaneously rediscovered Momentform or something like it. Perhaps this is necessary and expectable; that point raises many issues, discussion of which must be deferred. But I worked entirely by instinct and by ear.

The concerto is twelve minutes long and falls into fourteen short sections that may or may not be Momente. The six instruments are piano and the standard wind quintet. Everybody gets a cadenza at some point along the way. I am writing a lot of piano music these days and hasten to restate my awareness of my lack of qualifications to do so. This is not "a piano concerto", but quasi- concertante chamber music. The work clearly ends on D and has an overall tonal structure that is not expected to be perceptible. There are two tempi, slower and faster, and the final section is slower still; the meter is sometimes audible, sometimes not. As in any music, the deployment of contrast is essential to creating form; the kinds and ranges of contrast may be unfamiliar, and their unfamiliarity may make them ineffective.

We need to be classifying composers by their implicit views of their audiences: why are they listening, what preconceptions do they bring, what knowledge, how much attention are they expected to pay and of what kind? The answers to these questions leave traces in the music: times very subtle, times as heavy as a sledgehammer.

It does not matter whether these target audiences are large or small, real or imaginary, singular or plural; plural, for example, so much the better, as that is one of the foremost reasons why we admire Mozart. (And for who, or whos, was Chaikovsky writing?) But we will get additional context from listening both as ourselves and (as far as possible) as members of the target audience.

Here is something. New, but "new"? Hold that thought.

We see composers reinventing themselves -- not all composers: some need not, if only (it must be said) because they died just in time; many only once, and that upon their initial discovery of their true voice or manner.

Long ago, for example, the notion of Beethoven's "three styles" took hold, so firmly that we cannot help seeing them in retrospect, although his contemporaries gave him no credit for any consolidative phases. We see him reaching the end of one road, in the extensive but ultimately sterile sketches for a D-major piano concerto, but then almost immediately surging forward, still in 1815, with the 'cello sonatas Op. 102 -- NB. before the period of reduced activity that followed until 1819, which was therefore not down to any prolonged and difficult struggle to find a new manner.

Soon thereafter, Schubert also ran out of road; he was the one who had a long, hard time to find a way out, being nearly unable to complete any large-scale works between 1821 and 1824. The B-minor symphony was abandoned, not only because its third and fourth movements fell so far short of the mark set by the first two, but primarily because those first two movements were in the same tempo and meter, which set a trap from which there was no escape. The distinction between "fast" and "slow" music continued to vex Schubert from that point onwards.

These are only a couple of the most obvious examples and they involve composers of such stature as decisively to forbid comparison; but the general phenomenon is a commonplace one, and the time has come for me to reinvent myself. After working productively in a particular manner, producing a dozen or so large-scale works over the past ten or twelve years with (as I would think) acceptably little self-repetition, I found that my attempts to push that manner forward had abruptly (as I would think) descended into academicism.

The new piano pieces linked at the top of this post are an initial effort to discover aspects of new manners. They are not the reinvention itself; they are at best a beginning. They may, or may not, turn out to contain bits of a solution. I release them because I am confident enough that they are not merely inane and may even, in small ways, be instructive to study or fun to play.

It becomes more difficult to understand the reception, during his life, of Schumann. There were so many of him -- and that is not a crack at the facile third-hand diagnoses of mental illness that have always clouded his reputation. Rather, it refers to his styles or style-periods, and to the geographical aspects of his reception.

I have a box-set of his chamber music played by French artists. They make him sound very French. Certainly his chamber style was most influential in France: without Schumann, no Saint-Saëns, no Fauré. The pivotal work here is the first piano trio (D minor, Op. 63), and specifically its dense and virtuosic keyboard part, which is really a solecism and which stands in glaring contrast to the piano part of the Quintet, which is -- as it properly should be -- within the reach of many amateur pianists.

This trio can also be taken as the beginning of "late Schumann", a period during which he became more productive, but of works that posterity has tended to deprecate in favor of his early piano music and Lieder. His later focus upon large and established genres creates a superficial appearance that he was trying to "get serious" after his juvenile oversharing of such fantastic conceits as the Davidsbund, but his late music is also experimental, in different ways. Times, to be sure, he talks to himself -- but he always did that. Where would we place Schumann today without the implacable advocacy of Brahms? But even Brahms could not follow Schumann to the end, notoriously rejecting the violin concerto, which stands high among "last" works.

We listen to music, and we hear things. Then we look at music, and we see things. But mostly the things we hear and the things we see are not the same things: the overlap is never very substantial, and often zero. The connection between means and ends typically eludes objective, or even intersubjective, description, except on a trivial level. This is the broader notion of "legibility", and in that sense, much music -- even music to which we assign high status -- is profoundly illegible. That is a problem, because it crimps the transmissibility of tradition.

There are corpora of analytical technique and of applications of analytical technique. From these emerge, to take one example, a notion of "common practice". We "know how" to "analyze" music from the "common practice" period. Very well, let us "analyze" two contemporaneous works: one by Mozart, one by Ditters. They have a lot in common, don't they? Do you see the problem?

This is what gave Schenker his opening. He recognized that there are higher layers, where the operations occur that allow us to distinguish between the supremacy of Mozart and the defiant inanity of Ditters. He also recognized (probably only intuitively, as he could not explain it) that what matters is not the existence of the higher layers, nor yet the ability to recognize them in a musical text¹, but the management of complexity at the interfaces between the layers. When we assess the "quality" of musical works, this is what we are assessing -- using, as one thinks, criteria unlike and beyond Schenker's.  That assessment is functionally adequate, in that we do it all the time, in real time, with high repeatability and high confidence; but very little of it is conscious, and very little of that can be expressed in transmissible form. So: still not good enough.

If we were going to "analyze" music, the purpose must be to explain the connection between means and ends. "Analysis" that falls short of that goal is waste motion, but that is nearly all "analysis". A few isolated, pinhole insights can be gained by the study of selected repertoire. We are so far sunk into learned helplessness that we celebrate those few microscopic successes and try to erect systems out of them: exhaustive, algorithmic, explanatory systems. We call this "learning", though it is mostly not transferable. The bar has been set that low.

Next time, we will try to inject a composer's perspective on analysis. Won't that be fun.

When we come back to the different respective impacts of Schoenberg and of Webern on successive generations, we will need to drag in Stravinsky, which may only be an indication of how tangled the whole situation is, or was. It will need a lot of unpacking.

Therefore, the next few installments of this series will be on a different track. The ultimate goal has always been to try to find a workable approach to pedagogy, because hitherto there has never been one. There has never been an effective framework for teaching and learning music. The problem starts at the level of terminology. The available descriptions of the rudiments of music arose from a ghastly farrago of historical accidents, going back over a thousand years. Subsequent discoveries could not even be classified, at the time they were made, as either cumulative or independent. The linguistic tools for transmitting those discoveries were so poor that they led then to tendentiousness and lead today to guesswork. It is a miserable and totally unworkable situation, because the rudiments of music make sense if their rationales are understood, but not if they aren't. The upshot is that no one is taught music: if they learn it, it is despite the teaching. And that, intrinsically, is a matter of luck, and luck is nobody's friend.

Suppose one wanted to clear away all that confusion: where to begin, and how justify that particular starting point? That, too, will need a lot of unpacking. Watch this space.

We need to compare Schoenberg and Webern, stylistically and technically, because we need to distinguish between their respective influences upon their successors -- and, regrettably, upon academic practice. But it is not going to be easy. Rather, it is not going to be easy to do with any kind of logical rigor; it might be easy to do on a basis of complete and utter handwaving, but that would be wrong.

Schoenberg and Webern influenced each other throughout their careers. While Schoenberg was living in Vienna and the two men were working closely together, the influences could be essentially immediate, sometimes even to the point of creating confusion about dates and priority. After Schoenberg left Vienna, not only were their verbal interactions constrained by the latency of correspondence, but the samples of work-in-progress that they could share with each other could only give a much more coarse-grained view into their creative processes. It is easy to spot certain parallels between their developments, but those parallels demonstrate, at a deeper level, the characteristic difference between them, which I waved a hand at last time by saying that Schoenberg liked to conflate whereas Webern liked to distinguish. Webern was also more interested than Schoenberg in consolidating stylistic and technical experiments.

One obvious parallel is that both composers went through a period of composing extreme -- still, to this day, fantastically extreme -- miniatures, before moving back towards larger and more legible forms.

This phenomenon should remind us of Robert Simpson's question whether an elephant were more concise than a flea, which then leads to the distinction between concision and ellipticality. My own view on this point is that concision is usually a virtue and sometimes an obligation, whereas ellipticality is seldom appropriate and usually unfair.

"My own view..." A red flag if ever. I could go on at great length giving examples of individual works, pointing out instances of ellipticality (mostly in Webern) and where/why it is a problem; but there are three problems with this.

1. I would not be able to appeal to consensus opinion.
2. I have struggled to eliminate ellipticality from my own works and my judgments would be influenced by that experience.
3. Most such observations would carry at least implicit rebuke, and I am not entitled to that, in light of the two points above.

Next time, we will try to find other ways to talk about the differences between these two composers and their effects upon the practice, theory, and epistemology of music during the period when those effects were greatest.

Score, audio rendering, and score video (YouTube) here.

It was in the ninth year of the reign of Lur the Trifling that the snows came. Prior to that, it had not snowed for so long that snow was only known by reputation; no one had any experience of it. At first, it was potentially amusing, as people slipped, and slid, and landed on their bum-bums. But the snow fell and fell and fell, without stopping, until it was yards deep and began to suffocate people in their buried houses; and still and on it fell, until only bits of the very tallest houses could be seen. One might come and go through one's garret window; but that did not make coming, or going, at all a wise thing to do.

Finally the snow stopped, after thirty-nine feet had fallen, layers crushing layers to the firmness of stone. The few people who were left began to realize that a really uncharacteristic misfortune had come upon them and that, even were the snow some day to melt, nothing would again be as it was. Yet they did not blame Lur the Trifling, could not, for, as they justly spake among themselves, Lur couldn't make it snow if you beat him with chains.

So another scapegoat must be found, but for some time, that goal was not pursued, as it seemed out of place, meet only to commonplace disasters and not to such an one as this. But eventually the food, and the firewood, and the ability to explain anything to children, began to run low. As if at once, it was discovered that the lore of a lifetime had ceased to apply: nothing was as one had thought. For only one example, there is not much meat on a cat, and that not easy to get, or to cook. Here or there, such epiphanies might be improving; but most were gall, and therefore somebody's fault.

Meantime, Lur the Trifling was growing weary of living (if the word will reach so far) on the top floor of his palace, whose windows had no balconies. Severed from his audience, he missed them, though he had not known he would, and though they missed him rather less. He would have liked to reach out to his people with vague words of comfort (key word "vague"), but mere occupancy of the throne did not endow him with any exceptional power to shout across drifts of snow.

But that is how his subjects were reduced to communicating, and their conversations turned increasingly to the question of blame. Setting aside, as mentioned, any thought of reproaching the head of state his person, it was nonetheless clear that the snow should have been prevented, and that prevention in general was the particular job of Those, or Them, In Charge.

Anticipating sovereign desire, a chamberlain had made search in the archives for relevant historical parallels, and found that once before, it had snowed likemuch: in the fortieth year of the reign of Swinn the Inexplicable, nine- greats-grandfather of the present ruler. Eagerly turning brittle pages, hoping to find pertinent advice, the courtier gradually fell into disappointment, as it became apparent that the records of the fourth-preceding century preserved as much fantasy as fact, if not more. The stomach dropped at the thought of reminding majesty that, on the only similar occasion, the snow had been melted, and the melt, in its millions of gallons, drunk, by a fire-breathing dragon, which had then proceeded westward at speed and voided the oceans themselves. It seemed to somehow make light of the current predicament -- quite apart from the complete implausibility of such a thing happening twice.

But...! The chamberlain had a sudden flash of insight, much above his pay grade, which caused him to sit back so quickly that his chair overset. Once he had been brought round and the bleeding stopped, he was pleased to find that he remembered his brainstorm: suppose a dragon, so far from solving the problem, had caused it? Not a fire-breathing, but a snow-blowing dragon: white as the snow itself and thus conveniently invisible, and of any useful size (a hundred feet tall, two hundred...?) Here was the exact needful propaganda, accommodating the people's righteous rage while aiming it towards an imaginary target, capable of withstanding infinite imaginary retaliation.

Rung were the bells, hoarse were the shouts, as the word spread quite literally from rooftop to rooftop: it was the dragon that did this thing, the dragon that had not been heard of for three hundred and forty-seven years -- and would probably not resurface for another three centuries and change. The whole exercise unfolded just as taught in the textbooks of public relations: minute variations in the story sparked sterile debate on the margins; divisions between strategies (hot pursuit, or preparation for next time?) emerged and were lovingly heightened.

It was yet the same day, late but before dusk, when the public discourse was gradually supplanted by awareness of a series of immense crunching sounds, each louder than the last, but so deep and vast that they seemed to come from every direction at once. Louder and inconceivably louder they grew, until the next one must have split every surviving eardrum in the city: then they stopped, and there was an awful pause, while every eye searched the sky in vain for the least gradation of white on white.

Then came the voice, enormous, hollow, withal somewhat tentative, even ingratiating. Slower than slow, from an invisible height it spoke, saying:

"Y'all need some help with this mess?"