Broadheath Music

500 Miles

Frank Wilhoit — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 19:57:09 GMT

(A fashionable distance! But disambiguation compels us to admit that we are talking about the 1988 song by The Proclaimers.)

Bro has (we deduce) a very toxic girlfriend. He assures her of his devotion in a dozen or so vertiginously escalating ways, ranging from the commonplace, through the distasteful, to the bizarre, and most of which ought to be irrelevant or unnecessary. We can almost see her, sitting like a queen, flatly accepting all of this nonsense as no more than her due, or düe.

But a hook is a hook is a hook, as Gtde Stein might have said if she had any sense of music (an allegation that has not been made); and bro's most distinctive accomplishment is his ability to leap a minor seventh, which most of his competitors could no more do than they could swallow a cinder block. Of such things are "singles" made. It is, overtly, a stunt, and each time (so many times) it brings him to the edge of a hysterical crack that almost redeems the song by introducing the suspicion of self-parody -- a suspicion that is greatly enhanced by the passive-aggressive wisecrack buried deep in the nth verse:

And when the money/Comes in for the work I do/I'll pass almost every penny on to you

Maybe bro is not such a fool after all...? I, too, can sing a seventh, but it is not a boast to point out that that is one of the least of my accomplishments.

Growth and Other Platitudes

Frank Wilhoit — Sun, 14 Sep 2025 20:24:29 GMT

Consider Béla Bartók. The worse things got, for and around him, the more brightly and warmly his music glowed. Of whom else can that be said? His antithesis in that respect was Shostakovich, subject of perennial and voluminous disputes about exactly how and why he stuck crosswise in the plumbing of history. The only point I would like to make about those disputes is that in their presence, any appreciation of Shostakovich's body of work is necessarily selective. One must cherry-pick, and then the rest is which are the cherries and which are the pits.

I may not compare myself to either of those two masters, masters in particular of the string quartet, small and respectful echoes of whose voices may be heard in my latest quartet. But I certainly do not think that I have achieved what Bartók did, in finding clarity and serenity in a world that was going to shít -- as, at the extremely predictable lapse of a human lifespan, ours is as well.

Technically, the new quartet is a step towards stretching the range of my voice. Again predictably, it croaks a bit here and there. Rhetorically, there is some bleakness and grimness about it. When first casting about for a suitable tempo marking for the beginning, on a whim I looked up the Italian for "not fuçking around". To my glee, the first suggestion was "non scherzando"; the fact that this formulation included a musical term settled the matter at once!

The quartet's form is based upon principles that have come to be associated with the work of Franz Liszt. It is a sonata movement, with a slow movement in place of the development; and then a scherzo is wodged in between the second and third sections of the slow movement's ternary form. The whole ends in A, but I really do not know what is going on tonally before that -- I could see if I looked, but I haven't looked. Someday I will, but it is not a high priority for me right now. I am trying to work more intuitively, and I think that approach is paying off, but I also see that there is much more work to do.

(Oh, you say there is a twelve-tone row? Quit picking my trash.)

L'apres-midi d'un faune

Frank Wilhoit — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 15:06:23 GMT

Hearing it for the first time in some middling while, the only thought that came to mind was, mais c'est du Massenet! I remember once, long ago, being invited to appreciate the transgressiveness of it and thinking that it was a fine and conspicuously legible work, not transgressive in any way -- and becoming suspicious of the motivations of anyone who could try to build a case that it was, a suspicion that grew rapidly as similar examples mounted up over time.

Perhaps this morning's reaction was down to the performance, but that reminds me that there are few, if any, other standard works whose performance tradition is so consistent: I do not recall ever hearing a performance that deviated from every other in tempo (apart from indulgence to the harpist at the beginning), phrasing, even details of balance.

Music Pedagogy: Negative Advice

Frank Wilhoit — Sat, 26 Jul 2025 17:14:48 GMT

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:

The avoidance of X, if X is well-defined, may still leave an implicitly-permitted space that is unnavigably large.
It presumes knowing what to do.
The list of X's quickly grows beyond management or organization.
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.

Don't Write Your Own Reviews (New Work: Concerto for Six Instruments)

Frank Wilhoit — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 20:19:47 GMT

...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've Been Going About This All Wrong

Frank Wilhoit — Tue, 22 Jul 2025 17:57:16 GMT

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.

Reinvention

Frank Wilhoit — Sat, 28 Jun 2025 22:11:46 GMT

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.

Schumann

Frank Wilhoit — Sat, 15 Mar 2025 23:06:52 GMT

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.

Music Pedagogy: Starting Points

Frank Wilhoit — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 16:59:36 GMT

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.

This is where attempts to transmit Schenker's insights (the word "method" is radically inapplicable) invariably bog down. ↩

Raw Material: A Roadmap and a Detour

Frank Wilhoit — Thu, 13 Feb 2025 14:38:54 GMT

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.