Originality, Banality, Forgery, and Authenticity

 I recently read an article about the German art forger, Wolfgang Beltracchi, who produced paintings in the style of well-known artists and sold them as originals, making a fortune until he slipped up. Now, according to the interview, he sells paintings under his own name for hefty prices. It got me wondering. Suppose Beltracchi, undoubtedly a talented and skillful painter, as well as an intelligent analyst of the styles of other painters, instead of forging the signatures of other artists, had produced paintings by Beltracchi in the style of X? Would anyone have bought them?

A counter-example is that of the Israeli composer, Elam Rotem, an expert musicologist and performer of baroque music. He has written several brilliant works in baroque style, with Hebrew texts, which, in my opinion, raise puzzling issues. Does their acknowledged excellence depend on their fidelity to eighteenth-century norms? Suppose another musicologist, expert in the baroque period, found an inconsistency in Rotem's twenty-first century compositions, something that no baroque composer would have done? Would that disqualify Rotem's work?

On the other hand, suppose a genuine eighteenth-century manuscript by a known composer of the era, suddenly turned up, containing departures from the idiom of his time, harmonies, let's say, or rhythmic figures, that don't fit into our understanding of baroque music? Such a discovery would force musicologists to modify their understanding of the baroque style.

Rotem's works stand on their musical quality, their interest, their ability to move the listener. They are not banal exercises in the baroque style. Recently, for about a month I was working on the the first violin part, arranged for flute, of Bach's double concerto in D Minor, a splendid work, too difficult for me. The challenge of learning Bach's music, even though I couldn't play it adequately, was valuable. As I worked on it, I kept wondering how Bach did it. Why are the sequences of notes that he wrote so deep and moving?

To take a rest from Bach and play something closer to within my reach, I've started working on some pleasant Kuhlau duets for two flutes, and the more I play it, the less I find in them. I wouldn't have the temerity to call the music banal, but does anyone mention Kuhlau and Bach in the same breath?

Getting back to Beltracchi, the paintings he did in the style of artists who were well-known, but not among the pioneering geniuses of twentieth-century art (at least so I gathered from the article), would probably have been considered banal if he had signed them in his own name. When they were taken to be authentic works, their value depended on the solid achievements of the painters they were attributed to.

Bach and Kern

I've been studying the first violin part of Bach's double concerto in d minor on the flute in preparation for playing it as a duet with my teacher. It's a very demanding piece. My teacher kind of apologized for assigning it to me. But it's inexhaustible. It doesn't matter how much you practice it, because you'll always notice something new in it. I'm happy to play it over and over again.

I also decided to go back to "All the Things Your Are" and memorize the chords again. I have no problem playing the melody. I've played it dozens of times, but I don't hear how the chords fit in under it. I've started playing the chords on the piano and putting the melody in over them, and it's making more sense to me. Obviously the only way I'll ever start hearing the changes is by doing this kind of work with them.

What's the connection between those musical endeavors? When I play the Bach I try to be aware of what's going on harmonically as I play, as he modulates between keys and adds and takes away accidentals. (Oddly, the first version of the concerto that I was playing was arranged for soprano recorder, and for some reason the arranger didn't include the key signature of one flat in his version of the first and third movements. That troubled me.)

Seeing and hearing what Bach was doing when he wrote the concerto should help me understand what Jerome Kern was doing when he wrote the music for "All the Things Your Are," and vice versa. One web site I saw credited Kern with Bach-like harmonic sophistication. I'll buy that.

As I was writing here I began to wonder whether Kern wrote the music before Hammerstein wrote the words but I couldn't find an answer.

Thoughts About the Challenge of Improvising

 For quite a few years I stopped trying to improvise, because I realized that the music written by composers such as Bach, Telemann, and Mozart was much better than anything I might come up with. Recently, however, I joined a gradually growing big band that rehearses not far from my house, and I've been improvising again on the baritone saxophone. The director of the band encourages us to give it a try and it's an enjoyable challenge. But it doesn't come easily to me.

There are many types of improvisation. In the baroque period musicians were expected to be able to add ornamentation to pieces, and keyboard players were expected to improvise accompaniments to a melody from a figured bass line. Jazz keyboard players are supposed to be able to do improvise on a jazz standard based on a lead sheet, giving the melody, with chord symbols written above the staff. It's also possible to improvise without specific reference to a given melody.

Improvisation on a jazz standard for a melody instrument (a "horn") or for the right hand on a keyboard, requires a lot of skills that never came naturally to me. First, the improvisor has to bear in mind the form of the tune, usually a 32 measure piece consisting of an eight measure presentation of the tune (the A part), which is repeated, followed by an eight measure bridge (the B part), and completed by a restatement of the initial melody. In short: AABA. Gershwin's "I've Got Rhythm" is the archetypical tune with that form. Sometimes, though, the form can be ABAB or ABAC. And sometimes songwriters depart from the typical 32 bar form.

Second, of course, the improvisor has to know the melody.

Third, the improvisor has to know which chords that the composer placed beneath his or her melody (the "changes").

Fourth, the improvisor has to know how the melody can be reharmonized by substituting chords for the ones the composer provided, which one musician I once knew called "movie chords," because they're often less sophisticated than the ones that jazz musicians came up with as they played the tune over the years.

Finally, with all the foregoing in mind, the improvisor has to play an interesting, exciting melody while the rhythm section of the band - the drums, bass, guitar, and piano - play the form of the tune. A good improvisation is in dialogue with the other musicians in the ensemble, and it's also in dialogue with the song the ensemble started off with. 

Different Kinds of Musicians

 My wife and I just spent a week in Malta to attend a baroque music festival. The music was sublime. The musicians were international professionals. The venues where the concerts were held were all picturesque. The appeal of baroque music has stood the test of time. It's less sentimental and bombastic than romantic music, clearer and more abstract. I admire the skill of the performers as well as the erudition of musicologists who edit the scores and study the performance styles of the time, as well as the waves of influence between Italy, Germany, Spain, France, and England.

One performance we saw was of English song from Purcell on, performed by Kate Semmens, a soprano, and the English harpsichordist Steven Devine. Halfway through the concert Devine "confessed" (as he put it) that the accompaniment he had been playing wasn't written out, and he was improvising over a figured bass. That's a skill I admire, one that classical pianists d on't necessarily acquire.

Last night we heard an unusual jazz trio: the singer Julia Feldman, the guitarist Steve Peskoff, and the keyboardist Richard Samuels. They improvised, of course, over the chords of the songs, and the result was fascinating. I admire the skill of jazz musicians, which I mostly lack, more than I admire the skill of musicians who sit in an orchestra and read notes, which I can more or less do.

I Don't Like Opera, but ...

Last night we saw and heard Medea, the opera by Cherubini, performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. I was absolutely overwhelmed by every aspect of the production, from the superb musicians of the orchestra, through the brilliant staging and costumes, to, of course, the astonishing vocal performances, especially by Sondra Radvanovsky, who played the hugely demanding title role.

The main reason I'm not an opera fan is that I find operas too elaborate, too long, and too artificial.

I just looked up Cherubini now, a Florentine composer who lived most of his long adult life in Paris. A list of his operas is available on the Internet. I imagine that most of them are never performed these days.

I have to think more about the mystery of Medea: a Greek myth, turned into a tragedy by Euripides, rewritten in 17th century France by Corneille, turned into an opera in revolutionary France (1797), and now performed in New York (and watched in Jerusalem). What a trajectory!

Practice will Never Make Perfect

This is the dilemma: is it better to work on something difficult, that you'll never be able to master, or to stick to things at your level? My answer is implicit in my approach.

The Mozart duets for two flutes that I've been working on for quite a while are too hard for me. I'll never be able to play them well enough to perform them. At best I'll be able to make my way through it with my teacher, stopping now and then when I stumble.

But I'm working on great music.

Runs - Embodied Mind

Recently I watched a very instructive video clip on Youtube featuring a saxophone virtuoso named Ben Wendel, who described an exercise that is very simple in appearance but very deep in its reach. It got me thinking about the connection between virtuosity and musical cognition. 

Recently I've been working on Mozart duets for two flutes (originally for flute and violin), which are beyond my ability but still almost within my reach, and the pleasure of playing Mozart outweighs the frustration of not playing his music as well as I ought to.

Not only was Mozart a brilliant composer, he was also a virtuoso keyboard player and violinist. The connection between his ears, his mind, his fingers, and the rest of his body was apparently perfect. Not everyone who can play fast and expressively is also a great composer, and not every great composer was a great performer, but there's something powerful about the extraordinary connection between body and mind in music. In discussion of musical cognition, that's something that has to be addressed.

From the other direction, playing music certainly must strengthen the body-mind connection in the performer.