A Good Alto is Hard to Find

I discovered the late Italian alto saxophonist (1957-93) Massimo Urbani's music only recently. He had a Mac-Attack attack, in other words he burned. As Steven A. Smith might put it, M. Urbani was no slouch and he didn't play with any slouches; his pianists, bassists, and drummers were top flight musicians; they burned too. As Jackie McLean - one of Urbani's major inspirations along with Mr Charles Parker - might have put it, Massimo Urbani studied at the Universities of Dolphy, Ayler, and Coltrane.
  Exciting alto saxophonists are hard to find these days - Coleman, Braxton, Brötzman, and Lake remain on the scene; but young altoists?, I'm at a loss to think of any. Rudresh Mahanthappa? Perhaps?
  I recommend Massimo Urbani's discs Dedications To Albert Ayler And John Coltrane (1980) and The Blessing (1993) - this last item features the outstanding piano and drums of Danilo Rea and Roberto Gatto. You Tube (1987) reveals:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPBX4RNhEPI

Darkness & Light

I haven't been in a blogging mood lately. I had hoped to finish my post on music aesthetics; but in spite of Dr King's words of caution, his reminders against getting turned around or getting side-tracked; I managed to do both. Sometimes being off course leads to discovery and creative energies. In my present state of being turned around, nothing very encouraging has transpired along creative lines.
  But fortunately my wife, Maria, has finished a very fine portrait of me. And this has boosted my spirits. Writing these words has set something off in me. The best way to write, if one is having trouble doing so; is to write. According to James Ellroy, getting next to your thoughts by just sitting in a dark room works too. For me listening to music in a dark room is the best way to focus on the music and on other ancient cares.
  My wife, again fortunately, is encouraged by light - after all she's a painter. I'm encouraged by what I hear and feel in the dark.
  Take a peek.


(2) Raymond White

Stuff 'N' Things

"Understanding music means feeling comfortable with it – taking pleasure in music is the most obvious sign of comprehension." Charles Rosen -  5 May 1927 - 9 December 2012 R.I.P.

I've been reading Nicholas Cook's  The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna. Cook's Music, Imagination & Culture and his Music: A Very Short Introduction are both worth one's time and effort. The Schenker Project requires a lot of time and massive effort - I've managed to be confronted by a third of it. Richard Taruskin, author of the massively massive (6 Vol.) The Oxford History of Western Music is blurbed on the back cover of Cook's Music thus:

This book is bound to please Sir Elton [John] more than it will Sir Harrison [Birtwistle]; but, love it or hate it, that is the direction academic music studies are taking, and Professor Cook is its lively and accurate reporter.

Like Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol Collge, Oxford, if Taruskin, doesn't know it, it isn't knowledge. (I must get around to reading the Master's College Sermons (1895). And re-reading Richard Robinson's astute and fine  An Atheist's Values (1964); both works are addressed to 1st year students.) The quoted passage above is typical of Taruskin - ". . . Professor Cook is a lively and accurate reporter." Taruskin is a professor-professor, while Cook is a professor-reporter - does professor know-it-all mean 'journalist'? Professor Taruskin has shown that he doesn't understand much about 20th century music, except for a couple of neo-classical Russian composers. (Can the reader guess which composers Taruskin favors?)
  One of my earliest blog-posts in Feburary, 2011 concerned Professors Taruskin and Diana Raffman and their views on tonality and serialism - they reckon atonal, serial 'music' not being perceivable as music at all. I reply that they were 'looking at' Schoenberg, Martino and other favorites of mine through 'tonal glasses' - looking for tonal hooks where there were none (among other things). See my post http://rayesti-thoughtmatters.blogspot.com/2011/02/crammin-jammin.html. I had also promised to write something about Stanley Cavell's "Music Decomposed", which Raffman relies upon in support of her argument. I haven't gotten back to Cavell yet. But I have returned to thinking about music aesthetics, music criticism, music, and culture.
  The first third of Nicholas Cook's The Schenker Project very helpful to me in attempting to understand what, the very often mentioned, Heinrich Schenker was up to. Cook is a very able guide even for those of us lacking technical musical training. Other guides include, for me, Sir Donald Francis Tovey, Charles Rosen, Paul Griffiths, Gunther Schuller, David Schiff, Amiri Baraka, Allen Shawn, and André Hodeir (and a few others).
  Professor Cook's Schenker is not only devoted to Schenker's musical analysis of the scores of J.S. and C.P.E. Bach, but also to performance practice, concert reviews (music journalism), treatises on harmony and counterpoint. He also composed a bit; Schoenberg orchestrated one of Schenker's compositions for piano four-hands. Schenker's theoretical works which were devoted to music were in addition, according to Cook, infused were his ideas on culture, nationalism, and race. Schenker's thought in relation to his time in Vienna helps to infuse the ghost of Schenker with blood. His music theory includes more than music's background and foreground, more than chord changes and sonata forms: it includes the culture in which Schenker lived, thought, listened and wrote. Enough hand-waving. To be continued.

Notes

  Now Raffman causes a problem with her jumping from "a piece of music" to "a work of art" [70] It seems to me that one cannot judge Schoenberg by American standards of taste. Let's consider the Arditti String Quartet vs. the Kronos Quartet in terms of works premiered by each quartet. The Arditti Quartet toured the North American continent biannually. While teaching positions were more numerous in North America the audience for `new' music was greater in Europe.

Arnold Schoenberg, by Charles Rosen, Viking Press, New York (1975). 

Rosen, page 7, writes, 

In his justification, Schoenberg brings forward the classic dichotomy of nature and civilization, the opposition of an inner compulsion and an 'artistic education' (as he later characterizes 'upbringing'). In this notorious pair, the rights are traditionally on the side of nature - and, indeed, Schoenberg's critics were to accuse him of violating the natural laws of music, of substituting a purely artificial system for one that had been handed down to be used along with the laws of physics. Nature has generally been the ground upon which to build any aesthetic theory, and the most contradictory positions have claimed a base there. If the dichotomy of nature and art can be so easily stood on its head, it should lead us to be suspicious of the opposition. A great deal of nonsense has been written about the relation of music to the laws of acoustics or even the configuration of the human ear, but the irresistible force of history - essentially the same thing as Schoenberg's 'inner compulsion' - ought not to inspire greater confidence in any simpler forms. (Emphasis added.) 

On page 9, Rosen writes, 

The existence and integrity (my emphasis) of what ... [the Viennese public] felt to be the greatest tradition of Western music was menaced by every new step taken, starting with the works of Mahler and even before.

On Page 12 he writes, 

The revolution of Schoenberg has been described, not least by Schoenberg himself, as 'an emancipation of the dissonance'.  The argument still rages as to whether tonality (like perspective) is a natural or conventional system....

System and 'free play'. Mozart plays like a mugg and seems to refer to a tonal system. Examine his 'dissonance' quartet. Rosen writes, page 20: 

This free play is easily to be found in Schoenberg, but the explicit reference to an exterior and relatively stable system of meanings has almost vanished.

In ...[Erwartung] Schoenberg did away with all the traditional means in which music was supposed to make itself intelligible: repetition of themes, integrity and discursive transformation of clearly recognizable motifs, harmonic structure based on a framework of tonality. There is no fully developed sense of key anywhere in Erwartung, and each motif that appears is abandoned after a few seconds. Nevertheless, Erwartung is one of the most effective, easily accessible, and immediately convincing of Schoenberg's works. This apparently total freedom from the requirements of musical form has made Erwartung a well-attested miracle, inexplicable and incontrovertible.[39]

Every eighteenth-century work, for example, is full of rising and descending thirds, but nothing permits us to claim this as a motif until it is contextually given this status within the work, and for this there must be a confluence of rhythm, harmony, and texture lacking in Erwartung. [41]

Though Babbitt entitled the article The Composer as Specialist, High Fidelity rechristened it Who Cares If You Listen?, a title Babbitt greatly disliked, contributing to its notoriety and convincing many that Babbitt simply wrote music for his own amusement. Robert P. Morgan, Guardian 30 January 2011

The Jazz Review on a Winter's Day

I met the composer, musician, author, educator, Gunther Schuller a few years ago at a celebration of his music at The Ohio State University. I re-read (in) his The Swing Era: The Development of Jazz (1930-1945) very often. I asked him when we might expect his sequel to The Swing Era on the modern, bebop era. He said that there would be no sequel; but there would be a lot of interesting bits in his (then) forthcoming autobigraphy, Gunther Schuller: A Life in Pursuit of Music and Beauty (2011). Fortunately there is a lot of Schuller's wisdom in the pages of The Jazz Review that was founded bu Nat Hentoff, Martin Williams and Hsio Wen in 1958. Because The Jazz Review was too good, it ceased publication in 1961. When I was in high school, in Highland Park, Michigan, I subscribed to it and Down Beat. The Jazz Review was far superior to Down Beat. The latter could have been edited by Walter Winchell or published by Rupert Murdoch. The Jazz Review was dedicated to informing an educated reader about creative music from Jelly Roll Morton to Ornette Coleman. Down Beat was dedicated to such non-musical events as Billie Holiday's arrest at her hospital bedside - I've never been able to rid myself of Down Beat's sordid account. Since Lady Day's death in 1959, I've never paid any attention to Down Beat - musically it's still worthless, nothing is better than it.
  I spent today reading and looking at back issues of The Jazz Review. Gunther Schuller's long review article on the Blue Note, Prestige and Riverside recordings of Thelonious Monk is precious. Ethan Iverson's blog, Do The Math http://dothemath.typepad.com/ is in the tradition of The Jazz Review.
  The Jazz Review is available on line: http://jazzstudiesonline.org/?q=node/206 This should get one through the winter and beyond.