a great musical partnership

Boston Symphony Orchestra (bso.org)
Saturday, 30 April
Christoph von Dohnányi, conducting
Birtwistle, Shadows of Night
Mahler, Symphony No. 1

April 30 performance reviewed by Karl Henning.

The BSO and Christoph von Dohnányi made a great musical partnership with this program; both pieces are works of which this listener entertains questions, but there is no question that the musicians all made a very convincing argument in both cases. Harrison Birtwistle appeared onstage at the conclusion of Shadows of Night, and his face radiated understandable pleasure over an utterly dazzling performance.

And as to the Mahler, this questioning listener is in a clear minority; the audience rose to their feet as one, directly the last chord rang out into the Hall. It’s an audience intoxicated with their Mahler, and Dohnányi with the BSO did not disappoint them in the least; truly a superb performance. A friend of mine (not a complete cynic, mind you) asked me yesterday, “Is there ever a time when the grateful Boston audience doesn’t applaud on its feet?” To which the only suitable reply seemed, “When the composer is born after 1865.”

The late Yvar Mikhashoff was on the faculty of the University at Buffalo, in both piano and composition. He was a voracious reader, and indefatigable champion, of new music; and it is just possible that more living composers wrote pieces specifically for him, than for any other pianist in history. Yvar was gracious to composers of a great stylistic variety, was tirelessly inquisitive musically, and keen of perception.

In a graduate composers seminar one day, Yvar played us two recordings, carefully selected for both similarity of ensemble, and difference in the composer’s approach: one piece by Milton Babbitt, as an example of meticulously organized music (“rigorous” is one adjective in common use); and another by John Cage, an exercise in ‘non-organization’ of music, the application of chance (itself a debatable practice, since the question of method tends to get shifted to, how do you convert your chance operations into music notation).

The shock of Yvar’s exercise was, its concrete character as inarguable experience (if experience be concrete). Here were two pieces, the differences between whose organizing principles could drive (and have driven) an entire musicological literature; but the sound of the two pieces was nearly indistinguishable.

There is a veil here which many will fear to draw away, perhaps; because the fact is, a good deal of our discussion of music in the twentieth century (and since) turns on how the composer thinks the music’s organization out, why he puts what notes where, as though that necessarily draws us a kind of portrait of how the music will sound. And here were two pieces which, judging by the theoretical discussion, ought to have sounded completely different; yet completely different, is exactly how they did not sound.

Gentle reader, I have not entirely forgotten that I am actually writing a concert review; so let us turn to Harrison Birtwistle’s Shadows of Night.

We will not here discuss Birtwistle’s extra-musical, quasi-dramatic artistic associations in conceiving of the piece, though these make for undeniably interesting reading. Let us content ourselves at present with reflecting that music is so emotionally rich, and yet so elusive of specific meaning, that there is hardly anything to be found in the wide world, but we can find some music (and, really, a variety of musics, strange to say, perhaps) which can ‘mean’ that thing.

Nor will we go into details of Birtwistle’s compositional methods; but taking a cue from the program notes, let us touch generally on these. The author of the program notes sets great store, at one point, by Birtwistle’s not being like “Schoenberg and his heirs.” Only the first argument with which, will be this undiscerning conflation of Schoenberg, with the use to which he was put by the post-war avant-garde.

But what shall we say of Schoenberg? He found himself motivated to write music whose pitch-world could not be ‘accounted for’ in the traditional terms of Common Practice; and he came up with a method of organizing pitch which he found serviceable. One can praise or criticize this or that piece of music that Schoenberg composed (and some of his music is beautiful), but his organizational methods aren’t the music.

We repeat: The organizational principles are not the music, whether we speak of Schoenberg, or Bach.

Birtwistle has worked by his own methods, based to whatever degree on models which he found artistically serviceable, models to which he has applied his own musical thought. The curious thing about the program note ‘assuring’ us that Birtwistle has no truck with Schoenberg, is the implicit value judgment, which is dubious of itself, and which has ultimately little to do with the actual music. Of Schoenberg’s organization methods and Birtwistle’s, I don’t know that either is necessarily better, or more musical, or easier for the listener to perceive, than the other. An artist may not get ‘extra credit’ for reinventing the wheel; still, an artist may certainly find it a fruitful exercise to work up a proof that the wheel is a circle, e.g., for a reason. Birtwistle deserves the artistic freedom to work by a method he finds commodious; and in the end, it is by the music, not by the methods ‘behind the scenes,’ by which the composer will be (or ought to be) judged.

But this comment in the program notes notwithstanding, and remembering a lesson that Yvar Mikhashoff taught last century, when I listened to Birtwistle’s fascinating Shadows of Night at Symphony Hall on April 30, I did not find it any great stretch of the imagination, to envision a very similar-sounding piece, written by ‘an heir of Schoenberg.’