I am still reading Jane Eyre, and I love it, but it means I will be referring to you all as "reader" for the foreseeable future. As for the title of the post, for those of you who have missed the pop culture reference this week, it is from the second album of one of my favourite bands, Noah and the Whale, who are set to be releasing a 4th album soon. YAY!
Today's blog post is brought to you from Emmanuel College, Cambridge. It is an unexpected and impromptu [and therefore hopefully, but unlikely knowing me, short] post, following last nights Sunday Recital of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132 (1825) by the frankly wonderful Smith Quartet in the Old Library.
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| The Clock Tower in Emmanuel front court last night |
I love Beethoven.
I was trying to work out when I first discovered Beethoven and, thinking about it, Beethoven has been in my life for has long as music has. I first started learning music at the age of 5, with class recorder lessons in school, and my dad teaching me to play piano at home. I have very fond memories of both of these musical experiences, but it was in those recorder lessons I first experienced Beethoven. Yes, it was in a very crude arrangement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, which was not designed for recorder ensemble, and is probably not the optimum way to experience it, but what I do remember is that I thoroughly enjoyed playing it. It's melody is rousing and joyful [hence, "Ode to Joy"!] and perfect for encouraging young children to play an instrument. Evidently it worked, as I went on to play the clarinet, and "End of the Century" was my favourite track on Playstation 1's Dancing Stage EuroMix Dance-Mat game. Yes, that too originates from Beethoven's 9th!
At secondary school I studied music at GCSE, AS and A-level, and Beethoven's 3rd Piano Concerto in C Minor featured as one of my set works at AS level. As with a handful of my literature set texts, and the set jazz works that I studied for AS level music, the intense and repeated nit-picking of these works often lead me to tire of, detest, or just become plain bored with them. Not so with the Beethoven. This piano concerto was his first in a minor key and it is, forgive me father for I have sinned in using a dreadful cliché, an emotional roller-coaster At times as brooding as Mr Darcy in a thunderstorm [Happy 200th Anniversary btw], and in other parts delicate as drops of light rain onto petals, the diversity of dynamics, texture and emotional impact are something I still, after many many plays, find very fulfilling and satisfying to listen to. This was something I was reminded of by the performance last night and something I wanted to attempt to explain as I have a tendency to say how much I love Beethoven, but never to justify that claim, and I hope by doing so to encourage those who may not otherwise choose to listen to his works, to just give it a try!
This is not going to be a review of the performance. Sadly I don't go to enough live performances to be able to write such a piece, nor to I consider myself a connoisseur on such matters. Plus, I play a wind instrument, so know very little of the idiosyncrasies of the string family, but it's something I would like to learn more about. No, what I want to write is about how this performance reminded me of just how much I love live music, and why.
Live music puts the "live" into "alive".
This is a very lame way of summing up something I find very difficult to describe without reverting to cliché. But I'll try. Sometimes music can be dark, as in Shostakovich's String Quartet No.8 in C minor. Sometimes music can be incredibly melancholy and can move you to tears, as in Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, or songs on the death of children. Sometimes music can even be so gut-wrenchingly beautiful that you feel close to the experience of heart-break just listening to it, as I often feel with Rachmaninov's 2nd Piano Concerto. But, however dark, depressing or heart-breaking music can be, the fact that it makes you feel, the fact that it has the potential to rouse you out of passive listening, into active feeling and participating is something very powerful indeed. It reminds you not only of the human potential to feel such a wide range of emotions, but beyond that, the skill of composers to communicate their own emotions through the language of musical notation, and beyond even that, the skill of musicians to interpret that with their own personal nuances, so that every time it is performed the listener is treated to something new and individual, through those idiosyncrasies and personal touches that performance permits.
Back to Beethoven.
In last night's performance of Beethoven's String Quartet No. 15 I heard expressed musically, a very diverse range of emotions, some providing themes for whole movements, others mere fleeting moments, but that made an equally lasting impression upon me. Now, having never heard this piece before, and being without notepad at the time of listening, I am unable to say which movements these excerpts refer to. But I hope you will understand me nevertheless.
In a quartet in which much of it seemed to be in counterpoint, a section which stood out for me due to its striking contrast in texture was a lovely segment in homophony. This means that all 4 instruments played the same rhythm, moving from one note to the next at the same rate, but in harmony, creating chords. This section was a little slower than previous sections and felt very smooth and warm, with some very pleasing harmonies and chord progressions. It came as a sort of relaxing "sigh" amidst the counterpoint, which in its nature has lots of different and contrasting harmonies going on at the same time and can be fast paced and complicated to listen to at times.
Beethoven is very good at creating rousing melodies, and this is something that was also apparent in the string quartet, especially in the short tutti sections, where all 4 parts play exactly the same. These parts were often marcato (meaning stressed, so like a less "short and detached" version of staccato) and loud! I find sections like this to be uplifting, but not cheesy, in the way that Jupiter from the Planets (by Gustav Holst) has the potential to be.
In addition to these moments musicaux there were episodes of sprightly, spring-time joy, with the highest melodic snatches almost emulating the trills of birdsong, so bright I couldn't help but break into a wide grin. But there were also moments of frantic agitation, where all players gathered pace in a frenzied headstrong dash towards the climax of not only the movement, but the entire quartet, towards the end of the final movement.
People experience music in different ways. I have a friend who sees different keys, in music, as different colours. I don't hear music, I listen to it. Perhaps I even feel music because, as opposed to experiencing it as a range of tones or sounds, I translate passages as being different emotions. To be given the opportunity to savour such a wide range of emotions, through their translation into a variety of combinations of contrasting rhythms, textures, harmonies, tempos, dynamics and more, in less than an hour is something that can be overwhelming, but is an experience which I am so glad to have because it makes me happy in a way which I don't think I could ever fully explain. And in listening to a performance live, that experience is heightened, by the atmosphere of the room, the fact you can almost feel the vibrations of sound in the air, the acoustics, and the way that you can see the musicians interact with each other to keep time and maintain the connection that is fundamental to the expressing of the work of someone who died almost 200 years ago, but whose emotions can be understood by us years later thanks to the language which, to me, is just as important as the spoken word- music.
I miss studying music, and I must apologise because, as you can probably tell, I haven't written about music for a long time and this piece was not at all researched, I just wrote what I thought, and therefore there are probably a bucketful of embarrassing errors. But please do tell me of them, because I like to learn from my mistakes! I'd like to get back into the swing of writing about music, because I listen to music everyday and its something I really enjoy.
I am currently really enjoying Tchaikovsky's ballet music and also Justin Timberlake's new single, Suit and Tie.
Sorry for rambling on a bit, again!
I hope to write a post on ACTUAL ART sometime soon, so watch this space
Thanks for reading!
Jennifer
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