Music Doesn't Mean Anything

 Not in the sense that words and images refer to specific things.

Of course, songs have words, so the melodies take on meaning based on the words: I Can't Give You Anything But Love.

In opera and musical theater in general, the words give the music meaning, but I often wonder whether, if you played someone a melody of a song unfamiliar to them, they would be able to guess what the song was about. Actually, I don't wonder at all. I'm 100% sure that they wouldn't be able to.

But music expresses emotion, or at least it arouses emotion in the listener. But whose emotion? At this moment I am listening to exquisite music written in the late 17th or early 18th century by Marin Marais. He is certainly not experiencing any emotions now, and we can only guess what emotions he felt when he wrote the music. The musicians who recorded the music certainly had emotions while they were playing it. However, as I know from my own experience, they were also concentrating on a lot of technical matters like playing in tune, together with the other musicians in the ensemble, and getting the phrasing and dynamics right. Strangely, keeping the mind and body active with those technical matters gives the emotions more freedom, because you're not paying attention to them.

Let's give the fine musicians credit. They made the recording in 1996, and by virtue of that, they're still alive (I hope they're alive and healthy now, too). 

Violin : Elizabeth Blumenstock Oboe : Gonzalo Ruiz Viola de Gamba : Roy Whelden & Steven Lehning Archlute : Michael Eagan Harpsichord : Byron Schenkman

But what is the connection between what they felt (which we can only infer) and what we feel when we listen to the music? There lies the mystery!

Distinctive Sounds

Today I was in a place where Spotify was deciding what music I had to hear, and  for a while it was playing Israeli popular music, not what I ordinarily listen to. The songs didn't sound the same, exactly. But the overall sound was distinctively Israeli, making me wonder, how did this culture develop its own idiom in such a short time?

Actually, these things have been happening very fast for a long time. Today my wife and I got together with a flautist friend, and we played two trios, one by the Swedish baroque composer Johann Helmich Roman, and one by the Flemish baroque composer, Jean Baptiste Loiellet. Though they lived at the same time, the first half of the 18th century, the atmosphere in the pieces was totally different. Roman sounded German to me, and Loiellet sounded French - two different musical worlds. Not that they were isolated from each other, and all the baroque composers listened to Italian music.

Classical musical styles evolved rapidly from 1700 on, and even more rapidly from 1800 on, and the same goes for popular music. Streaming stations offer selections from succeeding decades. After a while, this morning, Spotify decided to play American country music, which also has an unmistakable sound (which I don't prefer to the sound of Israeli pop; I never go out of my way to listen to either kind of music). A lot of listeners, myself included, are attracted to certain musical sounds - Broadway musicals, be-bop, classical piano trios, romantic symphonies - as much as we are to individual pieces in those idioms. Why does a Haydn strong quartet sound so different from a Ravel string quartet? Why do I enjoy listening to Indian classical music, even though I don't know much about it? It's the sound: the drone, the tablas, the sitar, the voice.

Composers and performers work within the sound language they are using. The great composers, along with creating individual works, create a sound of their own. But every creative person in every idiom starts within a universe of discourse, with givens, with predecessors and contemporaries, in a cultural context. Today, because so much of everything is so readily available to us, we don't have a specific cultural context anymore. On a given morning, Spotify made me hear Israeli pop, American country music, British and American rock, and I can't remember what else. If I'd been the one who put in the original search, Spotify would have taken us on a difference course. Has an algorithm become my cultural context?

Jazz (and other music) in our Living Room

 Last night the Tal Gamlieli trio payed in our house. Tal plays bass, the drummer was Amir Bar Akiva, and the pianist was Chai Bar David, all three accomplished young men. They played a couple of standards (Autumn Leaves and Just Friends) but mainly music composed by Gamlieli. Each of the three was interesting on his own, and the three together communicated beautifully. I was sitting closest to Amir, and could pay a lot of attention to his creative drumming, far beyond keeping time.

Performing as a trio, a rhythm section, without a horn, places a burden on each of the musicians, both to come out and carry the music and back off to accompany it. I don't think anyone in the audience missed a saxophone or trumpet soloist.

We had an audience of about thirty, each of whom made a modest contribution to the musicians. I don't know whether they make more when they play in a club. But they didn't play for the money. They played because in an intimate setting like a house concert, they have direct contact with the listeners, who really listen.

Our living room isn't huge. We could pack in about thirty-five people before the pandemic struck. Until people started being vaccinated, we didn't have any concerts at all, but we resumed in the summer with a group that played modern Turkish music outdoors. Then we hosted a recital by the world class flautist, Idit Shemer and Shira Shaked, a fine pianist. Yesterday Tal and his trio played, and we hope to host more concerts over the coming year.

We own an excellent Yamaha baby grand piano, that pianists enjoy playing on. With a fairly large living room with great acoustics and a fine piano, what's more obvious than hosting recitals? We began doing it in the 1990s when a lot of accomplished musicians came to Israel from the former USSR. A pediatrician and serious flautist, Geoff Greenfield, began to organize concerts for them in people's homes, and we got signed up. Without being pushed by him, we would never have thought of it. Since then, in addition to the "Russians," we have hosted classical and jazz evenings, including one performance by a totally eccentric free jazz pianist. Before Covid, on several occasions, every chair we owned was filled by someone. People like to hear music in an informal setting, and musicians enjoy it.

I would have thought that flautists of the caliber of Idit Shemer and Ransom Wilson (who played here with the brilliant young Israeli pianist, Benjamin Goodman) would be above playing in our modest venue, but, on the contrary, they played here as if they were in Wigmore Hall or the Carnegie Recital Hall. Ransom Wilson wouldn't even take a penny for himself (being on the faculty of the Yale Music School, he didn't need the small amount he would have taken in at our house). He was an engaging presence and played sublimely.

Of course we don't take any money either, though we also don't pay the musicians ourselves. My wife always puts out a selection of cheeses and other delicacies at the end, and people mingle and tell each other how much they enjoyed the concert. It isn't easy to organize the performances, and more than once every month or two would be burdensome. But it's always a high point in our lives to gather friends, as well as people we haven't met, who heard about the concerts, and share fine live music with them.

On one or two occasions I have asked to play. When Geoff Greenfield gave a flute recital at our house, in the end I played a Telemann canonic duet with him, and when a young jazz quartet who call themselves Friendy played here, I took out my tenor and played "Tenor Madness" with them at the end of their performance. But usually the musicians are so great that I wouldn't dare join them. Last night, listening to Tal, Amir, and Chai, I ached to play with them. They are so good you couldn't help playing well with them alongside you. Maybe I should have been more forward and asked them.

I play in a saxophone quartet, and I hope we'll get good enough to perform in our house. We were on a decent level before Corona, but we couldn't play together for a long time, and we're finally getting back to it. But we're still pretty ragged. When we invite our friends to hear us, they don't have the same high expectations they bring to the other recitals. They may be forgiving, but we have our pride.