Before it was Béla Fleck’s current tour, Throw Down Your Heart was a documentary film, an album, and the album’s title track. The subtitle on the film’s website is “Bela Fleck brings the banjo back to Africa.” What he got in return, apparently, is a wonderfully diverse group of musical interlocutors. Last week, thanks to Duke Performances, they joined Fleck, one or two at a time, on the stage in Page Auditorium. The long and idiosyncratic concert was a pleasure all the way through.

The musicians came from far-flung parts of the continent, and to some extent they captured the musical personality of their region. Toumani Diabaté, a 72nd generation griot who plays the kora, is certainly a West African classic. He came out last, wearing flowing golden robes—like musical royalty, a friend of mine said. Before him, it was South African Vusi Mahlasela, a powerhouse singer from the continent’s economic and vocal powerhouse, a man with a message and the personal magnetism to get it across. Before him, from the enigmatic island of Madagascar—fringe Africa, I guess you could call it—we heard an enigmantic guitar virtuoso named D’Gary with an utterly distinctive style. And finally, from East Africa, Anania Ngoliga, an impish blind man who sings like a chicken.

OK, OK, that’s not fair. Ngoliga and his guitar-playing partner John Kitime are wonderful musicians, and in fact Fleck has singled out Ngoliga for his formidable skills as an improviser. But it was funny (kind of sweet, even) how well the evening’s lineup fit with my feeling that East Africa is the poor stepchild of African music. Here’s a commonplace impression of African music, from an article I found when I googled Vusi Mahlasela (and incidentelly, it has some interesting things to say about Mahlasela and South African music, though I can’t vouch for its accuracy):

Music is as African as the Big Five, as much a staple of African life as maize meal. Music and song feature in celebration, in mourning, to uplift and to protest.

I don’t know Africa as a whole, or even East Africa as a whole, but I do know a bit about Kenya. The Big Five (the glamorous game animal club—lion, leopard, elephant, buffalo, and rhino) is very big in Kenya, especially with tourists and their guides. And maize meal is ubiquitous, as advertised. But “music and song in celebration,” etc.? Not so much, not in East Africa as I’ve seen it, anyway—it might be quite different in the part of Tanzania that Ngoliga and Kitime come from. But the Kenyans I know relate to music about the same way Americans do. They like their Congolese afropop, and I’ve known some to be big fans of international acts like Bob Marley and Dolly Parton. They rarely talk about music that’s indigenous in the way a South African or Malian or Zimbabwean would, and it’s even rarer to actually hear such indigenous music. I do sometimes hear ceremonial chanting from the Maasai, but only when they’re dancing for tourists.

If East Africa isn’t the most musical part of African, that just made it sweeter to hear Ngoliga and Kitime play their amiable, lilting music. And when Fleck joined them his banjo meshed beautifully with Ngoliga’s resonant mbira (or whatever it’s called in his neck of the woods). In a musical game Fleck played with several of the other instrumentalists, he would try to echo an improvised phrase that his partner had just played. Ngoliga had the most fun with it, trying to trip Fleck up with quick figures that were more idiomatic on mbira than banjo. Sometimes the effort showed, but Fleck usually nailed them anyway—what made it a really fun, for the musicians for the audience as well. The chicken song was really about one of Ngoliga’s past girlfriends who sounded like a chicken. It did sound chickenish at times, but the dead-on poultry imitations were actually by way of introduction. The song included one of my favorite musical moments of the evening, though, a line that climbed all the way up the neck of the banjo and then cascaded down with a mbira waterfall.

I’ve never heard anything quite like D’Gary’s intricate guitar playing, which I found both impressive and elusive (here’s a good sample from YouTube). It was when he sang that the music came into focus. At the end of their set, Fleck brought out violinist Casey Drieson and joked about exploring the very distant connections between bluegrass and Malagasy music. Fair enough—there’s a wide stretch of water between Madagascar and the continent (shark-infested water, according to the helpful guidebook I read before flying over it), and the closest relative of the Malagasy language is spoken in Borneo. But the fiddle is ubiquitous, and in any case Drieson’s crisp bowing was a great compliment to D’Gary’s scurrying guitar.

There are a couple of fine posts on zunguzungu about Throw Down Your Heart, including a sharp one about “the boxes that musicians get put into,” even by New York Times music critics with the best of intentions, when those musicians go to a place like Africa to seek out the natives. Fleck wasn’t doing ethnography, and he wasn’t in the market for an odyssey of personal transformation. Speaking to music critic Steve Hochman for an article in Spinner.com Fleck described his musical purpose this way:

I wanted to put the modern banjo in their music and make it sound like it belonged—not use them for a backup band but look for a home. Some places I can blow my brains out like with Djelimany Tounkara, the hot guitar player, or with Anania, the blind thumb piano player. But other places I could just be the backbone or look for a rhythmic place to fit in. My goal is to make it sound like it belongs. Doesn’t sound like much as a mission statement, but that’s everything I do.

It’s as if Paul Simon had gone to South Africa to sing in the choir, not to find new sounds to spice up the mix on his next album. For a soloist and bandleader like Fleck who’s dedicated to musical challenge and spontaneous improvisation, it’s a remarkable approach to take. For the tour Fleck must have chosen partners who, like Anania Ngoliga, offered more give and take—I think that, like Fleck himself, they’re the kind of musicians who appreciate a challenge and would want more from him than just fitting in. But with every combination that came on stage last week it was clear that the Africans set the tone and showed the way, with one exception that just highlighted the rule. At the end of Diabaté’s set, before the grand finale, Fleck had kora and violin join him on his composition “Throw Down Your Heart,” a piece he started writing before he’d even landed in Africa.

It makes sense that this role reversal happened with Diabaté. There’s a similarity between the sound of the kora and the banjo, presumably because of similarities in their construction. In Western terms the kora is a kind of harp—it has 21 strings, one for each note it can produce—but a harp that’s strung over a bridge that sits on a drum resonator, like a banjo. More important than the sound, I think, is the history of collaborations between American musicians and the griots and guitar players of West Africa. A landmark in that history is the 1995 album Talking Timbuktu by Ry Cooder and Ali Farka Touré. When I lived in Chicago in the early 90s I had the good fortune to hear a Gambian kora player, Foday Musa Suso, who’d been in the city since 1970. If I ever manage to clear off enough space to set up my record player, one of the first disks I’ll spin will be his fabulous duet with Herbie Hancock, Village Life. In 2003, Diabaté recorded MALIcool with freewheeling jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd. When the band came to Duke a couple years later the kora player was Toumani’s cousin Mamadou Diabate, who had recently moved to exotic Durham, NC (he’s still here, and last week Toumani called him onstage for a quick hello). Not that the Tanzanians and Malagasy have been living lives of splendid musical isolation—it’s very hard to do that anywhere in the world, these days—but they’re still more remote from the world of an adventurous American musician than Diabaté is.

Vusi Mahlasela is the one who breaks the mold. The other musicians in the show are primarily instrumentalists, and that’s how Fleck relates to them. Mahlasela is essentially a singer-songwriter, and he has a singer-songwriter’s relationship to his guitar—he’s not, by any means, a mere strummer, but his guitar playing is entirely at the service of his singing. One of his favorite effects, in fact, is to play in unison as he sings, à la George Benson. He’s an exceptionally dynamic performer, a “‘sterling voice’ filled with ‘as much playfulness as righteousness’”, to quote the program quoting the New York Times. There wasn’t a lot for Fleck to add to that, though the two played together nicely enough.

In South Africa they call Mahlasela “the Voice,” not just because of the way he sounds but also because of the message, which comes straight out of the crucible of apartheid. Speaking as an emissary of the South African trinity—Mandela, Tutu, and Ghandi—he admonished us that there is wisdom in forgiveness, and we should wear it like crown. If that’s not from a bible verse, it should be. Either way I’m sure he’s not the first person to put it that way, but it’s a wonderful image and he delivered it with an authority that made it stick. He also dedicated a song to the women of South Africa, and before he played it he talked about the police showing up at his house one night only to be sent on their way by his scrappy grandmother and a pot of boiling water. You can hear the story too, thanks to Ted.

I don’t know how Fleck put the lineup together, though I’ve been wondering about it. I’m sure there were lots of practical considerations in addition to the musical and personal ones. He chose people that he’d enjoy sharing the stage with—that much was clear all evening—and the wide geographical and stylistic range (musical and personal) can’t be a coincidence. He also seems to put a premium on playfulness. It came through when he was with Ngoliga and Mahlasela, especially, though with the South African it was more in the banter than the music. As the two of them were joking around, Mahlasela started talking about visiting a friend in jail who’d been working day and night on a song and wanted desperately to share it with the world. I thought he’d turned serious—he must have had plenty of friends who went to jail—but then he started scraping his guitar strings to make the sound of a file on iron bars. Mahlasela sings in six different South African languages, so naturally his large repertoire of vocal effects includes some of those famous South African clicks. He warned anyone tempted to try them at home watch out—“Don’t break your tongue.” It was a gleeful reminder of our linguistic impoverishment, and the richly rolled r just rubbed it in.

After four on-stage combinations, an intermission and a couple of solo interludes Fleck played on his own, it was a pretty long show. It seems to be de rigeur with these things that everyone plays together at the end, but I was kind of hoping they wouldn’t. It can be a risky arrangement, a feel-good, we-are-the-world gesture with no musical purpose. In this case it took a while for it to gel, but it did. To my ear it was the singing that made it happen. When they all came back for an anthemic encore, which was even better, I found myself focussing on Mario, the percussionist who accompanies D’Gary. His instrument is a shaker made from condensed milk cans filled with broken glass, which doesn’t seem like a lot to work with but somehow he always found the perfect groove. In the end, with everyone on stage and in full swing he was not only shaking but singing and smiling and looking around. Back home in Tulear he’s a fisherman, and it struck me how truly unlikely it was for him to have ended up on that stage. It must seem like a pretty wild ride.

Part of the reason my attention settled on Mario is that I passed through his home town back in 1994. My (future) wife and I were on our way to visit a friend who was doing research in one of Madagascar’s national parks, and to get there we flew from Antananarivo to Tulear. I don’t remember much about the city—it’s not a place you visit for its own sake—but I do remember asking around for transportation to the park, and pretty soon people with vehicles were showed up at the hotel, happy to help (for a fee, of course). The alternative was a long bumpy ride on a public bus with a transfer to an ox-drawn cart to get into the park, and our two weeks in the country didn’t leave time for that kind of adventure, wonderful as it might have been.

There were one or two four-wheel drive vehicles we could have chosen, but we went with the low bidder, a guy named Thierry with a fairly new Peugeot wagon. He promised it would get us there just fine, and it did. Every so often, though, there’d be an extra loud clunk and he’d stop in the middle of the massively rutted dirt road so the mechanic he’d brought along (for good reason) could step out to retrieve part of the exhaust system. They’d shrug and then we’d be lurching down the road again. Thierry had never actually driven to the place we were going, and as the sun was setting and we were really starting to wonder, the road in front of us disappeared into a lake-sized puddle. A person who happened to be walking by directed us to a nearby village, where someone kindly let us camp in their courtyard. In the morning, with a local guide to get us around the flooded-out road, it was a quick ride to the research camp. Overall it wasn’t a bad trip at all—Thierry was amiable all the way, despite the car falling apart, which must have cut into his profit margin quite a bit.

My world music experience in Madagascar was cruising along in Thierry’s bright blue Peugeot with “I Like to Move It” blasting from the stereo. Not only had I not heard it before then, I had no category to put it in, so in my mind it was music of Madagascar (rationally I knew it wasn’t, of course). A few months later we were back in the states, and thanks to Susan’s plush fellowship we spent a few nights in a room in one of Harvard’s residential houses while we were apartment hunting. The first thing that came blasting through the wall from the students next door was a track I hadn’t heard since I was on the road from Tulear, fruity bass line and all. That’s why they call it World Music.

My popular-culture crystal ball (such as it is) has never been as weirdly penetrating as when I pegged “I Like to Move It” as the music of Madagascar.

OK, I know, it’s Madagascar 2.

The negative reactions that I’ve come across tend to work the premise that we should have gotten a more original, ambitious, challenging, and/or grand work of art. To some extent this is a matter of taste and not worth arguing over. But it seems to me that there are unexamined assumptions behind that “should,” and those I’m inclined to question.

• The first critics to get my attention were commenters on The Edge of the American West. Here are some fragments from ninjaphilosopher, Ahistoricality, and a few others.

  I know it was cheesy and basically just an arrangement of the Copland, but I thought it was both nice and appropriate.

  [In response:] I think the Copland is basically just an arrangement of “Simple Gifts”.

  [T]his wasn’t Williams coincidentally deciding that “Simple Gifts” is the Quintessential American Melody, but Williams deciding to arrange a riff on Copland’s Quintessential American Symphony for that meticulously multiethnic quartet. There wasn’t an original thought anywhere in the piece, in conception or execution.

  I believe the announcer credited everyone involved with that performance except for Copland.

  I’m dubious as to whether or not John Williams has ever had an original musical idea. Don’t get me wrong, I think his movie music is fun and dramatic, but original? I don’t think so. A better idea would have been to pare down the original chamber version of the theme and variations, and not have Williams in the picture at all.

  [I]t would have been more appropriate to admit up front that it was a Copland schtick, rather than calling it a John Williams piece.

  Williams’ debt is undeniable, of course. Any chamber-music setting of “Simple Gifts” will call Copland to mind. Bring the tune in with a solo clarinet and it’s like a neon sign—C O P L A N D. Aside from the overall concept, the moments that strike me as especially Coplandesque are the wind-whistling-across-the-prairie spareness of the opening chords and solo violin and the crystalline brilliance of the tutti finale to “Simple Gifts” (explained and charted in part 1). But somehow the idea that Williams’ composition is derivative turns into the idea that it’s really Copland’s music. It’s not. As far as I can tell, anyway, Williams didn’t lift any passages out of anyone else’s music.

  I don’t think that the melody of the Air owes much of anything to Copland. I don’t think he wrote melodies like that, though I don’t have all of his work at my fingertips, so I could be wrong. But the Air on its own—and even more the Air in relation to the variations, which is the essence of the composition—is unquestionably an original musical construct.

• One thing that’s clear from Terry Teachout’s blog post is that he was not at all in sync with the celebratory mood on inauguration day. I know the feeling all too well from some other presidential elections that I’d rather not think about too much. With that in mind, it’s probably not fair to take too seriously his suggestion that what Perlman and Ma should really have played is Appalachian Spring. Copland’s composition needs at least a chamber orchestra, first of all, and it’s about 25 minutes long. It uses the full stretch of time to great effect—with the gorgeous crepuscular meditations at the beginning and end, it’s like a dawn to dusk experience. To carve four or five minutes out of the middle and arrange it for that “meticulously multiethnic quartet” would have been sad. I can’t imagine that Teachout would have approved of such a thing.

• The New Yorker’s Russell Platt describes the piece as “a touching little tribute to Copland’s ‘Appalachian Spring’” from “America’s best second-rate composer.” That’s about right if you consider Williams’ composition to be the setting of “Simple Gifts” and nothing else. But if you thought that you’d be wrong.

• Anne Midgett, writing for the Washington Post, thought “the music seemed awfully austere for an event that calls for at least some measure of celebration,” and apparently she would have preferred “a stirring film-score-type theme proclaiming a new beginning for Barack Obama.” Obama had a different plan, it seems, and all I can say is that I’m glad Midgett wasn’t in charge of the music.

• On the LA Times blog, Mark Swed marvels that “so momentous an occasion… would be signaled by classical musicians playing on the Capitol veranda.”

  We have reason to believe we have an arts president. So now, let’s get to business. Williams’ four-minute quartet struck an apt tone of seriousness and celebration. It was Americana through and through. Politics were served by a violinist born in Israel, a cellist of Chinese heritage born in Paris, a pianist from Venezuela and an African American clarinetist from Chicago. None is a stuffy classical player but likes to collaborate widely. That’s all to the good. But …

  Frankly, the Williams quartet was a bit hokey. For Obama to be an arts president he will have to think higher and even further out of the box. If he really wants change, he will have to have the courage to listen to artists who can’t be controlled, whose vision is greater than his and his handlers. We need artists not merely to sing our achievements but to communicate new ideas and to spread our voice through the land and the world. Obama must mobilize the arts to help him change the mood of our nation and raise our energy.

  I like the trick of declaring Obama an “arts president” in one paragraph and then in the next paragraph criticizing him for his shortcomings as such. Apparently his first order of business should have been to go out and find his Shostakovich.

  Now if I’d had anything to say about the music commissioned for the occasion, I would have turned first thing to just the category of artists Swed is promoting. I would love it if we’d ended up with a piece that had the uncompromising personality of George Crumb’s Black Angels or the cerebral brilliance of Elliott Carter’s Anaphora. Or, if those two greybeards are too old school for a Change president, then maybe some distinctive 21st-century brilliance from Radiohead. If the point was to highlight a significant American artist, there were an awful lot of people in line in front of Williams. But was that the point? I don’t think that it’s a foregone conclusion that it was, and I’m inclined to think that it wasn’t. A bit of high-concept, well-crafted movie music may well have served the day better than any number of highly original masterpieces. It’s unhelpful, in any case, to start out by sorting the artistic world into uncompromising visionaries on one side and on the other patsies controllable by the president (and his “handlers”—that was a nice touch).

The most informative review I found is from Anthony Tommasini, writing in a New York Times blog:

Mr. Williams came through with a stylish and appealing four-minute work, “Air and Simple Gifts.” In high-minded contemporary-music circles Mr. Williams, the most successful film music composer in history, has endured much condescension for his work in Hollywood. But the best of his film scores are skillfully, artfully and even subtly composed. And he is a comprehensive musician who knows how to write for all orchestral instruments.

He got the mood right, I thought, in this contemplative occasional piece. President Obama, it turns out, has a fondness for the music of Aaron Copland. So Mr. Williams fashioned a work that evokes the melancholic, calmly affirming, harmonically open-hearted world of Copland.

Alex Ross brought his usual clarifying touch to the occasion (and I picked up most of these other critics’ reactions from his links).

Indeed, it’s no Quartet for the End of Time [(the WWII masterpiece by Olivier Messiaen for the same four instruments)]. But I liked several things about the work and its place in the ceremony. 1) The quiet, almost bittersweet ending—a welcome change from the grimly bombastic Williams film music that marred Obama’s victory speech in November. 2) The gesture of homage toward Aaron Copland, whose Lincoln Portrait was pulled from an Eisenhower inauguration event in 1953 at the insistence of a Red-baiting congressman. 3) The look of delight on the face of the president…. 4) I liked most of all the diverse picture of the classical world that the performers presented: an Israeli-born violinist, a Chinese-American cellist, a Venezuelan-born pianist, and an African-American clarinetist from the South Side of Chicago.

I’m with him on all four counts. But for me there was more to the visual aspect than the appealing diversity. The body language of classical chamber musicians is especially rich in signals of interdependence. In musical styles that settle into a steady groove, the body language tends to convey immersion and emotion (here’s a couple of wonderful examples). There’s an element of self-expression in all music making, and a social aspect and a degree of coordination in any ensemble playing. But classical music is especially intricate in its entrances and exits, its tempo changes, and its shifts from one texture to another. I especially enjoyed Yo-Yo Ma’s expressiveness as he looked and leaned left and right, and looked forward with a different kind of awareness than I’d expect at an ordinary gig. It was a good day to see four people thriving on interdependence.

[I was just googling and came across a post on aworks with a slew of critical reactions, mostly on the snarky side with respect to the composer.]

[Tonight I ran across a much more personal reaction on zunguzungu. It’s fine reminder of the limits of analysis—what you get out of a piece of music depends on what you bring to it, or, as he says, “We’re all responding in our own ways right now.” The back story is lovely, too.]

What with the bungled oath and all, Stephen Colbert officially welcomes our 44th president, the man who happened to be on the TV screen at noon on January 20th, Yo-Yo Ma!

I had been paying enough attention to know that I’d be hearing Rick Warren and Aretha Franklin, but the “unique musical performance” of “a composition arranged for this occasion by John Williams,” to quote Diane Feinstein, caught me by surprise. My heart sank a little at the composer’s name, but still. There, on the screen, four freezing, windblown musicians with ridiculously old-fashioned instruments were playing their hearts out. At the moment he officially became president, Obama was listening intently to the music. Like most anyone who’s dealt with string instruments and the people who play them, I was astonished to see Itzhak Perlman and Yo-Yo Ma sawing away, not even in overcoats. And it sounded pretty damned good! I thought maybe they’d rigged up some way of flooding the area with warm air. It didn’t occur to me that they might be playing to a recording. It may be a sign of just how much of the Kool Aid I’ve drunk that I really don’t care. I’m glad to know what was going on, though—everything makes sense now. (See the New York Times for a fairly thorough article about the decision to use a recording, or this shorter piece on the BBC.)

I was delighted by the performance, and on balance I liked the composition, too. My immediate reaction was about the same as Carl Wilson’s: “Musically, John Williams could have been far worse—there was dissonance! Yo Yo Ma looked so ‘Yo yo yo!’” Low expectations were a factor for me, as well (I’m not quite sure about the “yo yo yo!” part but I think I’m with him on that, too). I probably wouldn’t have thought much more about it, but that evening I came across some criticism that led me to call the thing up on YouTube and listen again. I found that the piece (my sense of it, really) holds up pretty well under repeat listening, and it also holds up pretty well under analysis. The analysis addresses some of the criticism, so I’ll see how much of it I can get across without getting too technical, and then get back to the critics.

This clip, out of many choices on YouTube, skips Feinstein’s introduction but gets all of the music (the one that found its way into a lot of the early reviews cut out the first few seconds of the performance). It’s the clip I’m referring to when I give time points. If you use a different one you’ll probably have to adjust by a few seconds. For audio only, here’s a blog with an mp3 recorded off the radio.

INTRO |AIR            |SIMPLE GIFTS                                               |CODA (AIR)
+-----|---------------|transition---|variation 1---------|variation 2-------------|----------+
pn     vn       vc     cl   (tempo)  vn         vc        pn      trading  tutti
:06    :16      :54    1:26 1:44     2:09       2:24      2:39    3:09     3:18    3:44
(pn=piano, vn=violin, vc=cello, cl=clarinet)

For listeners who liked the piece, the things that seem to stand out are (1) the plaintive theme in the Air, played beautifully by Perlman and then Ma, (2) the familiar Shaker song (according to Wikipedia, it’s not a hymn) and the evocation of Aaron Copland’s gorgeous setting of it in Appalachian Spring, and (3) the dramatically somber ending, which brings back the music and mood of the Air. Taken on its own, Williams’ setting of “Simple Gifts” is unremarkable, though it’s not as indebted to Copland as some listeners seem to think. The Air is more original, but neither part stands on its own—the contrast between the two is integral to the composition. And it’s not just a matter of bookending the cheery song with something more serious. From the beginning, when the violin’s first line rubs against the piano’s placid opening chords, there’s interaction between two different kinds of music, and at the end those interactions are intense and dramatic.

A good place to start is with the contrast between tonalities. The Air is sort of minor, but really it’s modal (specifically Dorian, on A). (The links are to Wikipedia, and I’m not sure how helpful they are. There are some little musical examples, anyway.) Modal melodies tend to have folk- or world-music connotations (think Scarborough Faire, the second line—“Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme”—and especially the second syllable of “rosemary”). In a major or minor key, there are deeply ingrained relationships between melody and harmony. It would be hard to find a more straightforward, stripped-down example of major-key harmony and phrasing doing what comes naturally than “Simple Gifts.” It manages to be graceful and appealing and at the same time utterly conventional—in a way, the message of the song is built into its musical structure. Williams’ Air, like most modal melodies, is more free-standing. The introductory chords and the sparse counterpoint are nice, but the melody line conveys a great deal on its own. That’s a real asset in a piece that’s meant to reach a huge mass of people milling around outside in the middle of winter.

Halfway through the Air the violin and cello switch roles. The cello plays the same tune as the violin up to the last phrase, and then there’s one change. When the violin ends its statement of the melody, there’s a stepwise descent—G-F-E-D (0:43 in the recording). We’ve come to expect F sharps, so the F natural stands out. It stands out even more when the cello plays it, though. Instead of stepping down the line skips up to the F an octave higher (1:20), and with that change the last phrase turns into a series of three dramatic upward leaps, landing on an ethereal high A, played as a harmonic. Williams’ melody is remarkably for its economy, clarity, and eloquence. I guess that’s why he makes the big bucks.

Other aspects of the music reinforce the contrast of tonalities. In “Simple Gifts”, the first thing the bright major-key melody does is to climb cheerfully up an octave. The dark, minor-sounding Air starts by going down, and throughout it, descending lines alternate with wide skips up and down.

The introductory chords place the dorian melody in relief. They belong with the key of the song, not the Air. The piano says C sharp, but the violin says C natural, and says it emphatically—it’s the apex of the first half of the tune (0:26). When the clarinet enters with “Simple Gifts,” some of the brightness comes from the return of C sharp. Between the clarinet entrance and the violin taking the lead (2:09), which is when the music settles decisively into D major, there’s a chaotic back and forth. Phrases of the song, rising up through C-sharp, are answered by fragments of the Air, descending through C natural.

One thing worth noting about Williams’ setting of “Simple Gifts” is the shift from a texture that features one player at a time to more intricate, conversational interplay. The second variation starts with the strings exchanging brilliant flurries of notes while the piano plays the song. Then the melody is broken up into fragments and passed from instrument to instrument (3:09). Finally, everyone comes together for the big tutti. The effect is expertly orchestrated (in both the musical and metaphoric sense of the word), and though music enacts these dramas of cooperation and cohesion all the time, it had special resonance on that particular day.

Though the final tutti seems to be heading for a grand cadence, the music withdraws as it reaches the last note. We hear the first fresh harmony since the music settled into D major, and the ground shifts. There’s nothing unprecedented about the way it’s done—now and then you’ll hear the same chord used in roughly the same way in a pop song—but in addition to absorbing the energy of the tutti, it’s an effective bridge back to the tonal world of the Air.

The two tonalities are brought into their sharpest juxtaposition in the coda:

(GIFTS)------------------|CODA------------------------|--------------------|--------------------------+
tutti   cadence  harmony  Air                 D major  Air       False      Last...three...chords
                 change   phrase 1  phrase 2  scales   phrase 2  ending     Bright   middle   final
                          vc        ens                again     Eb...............            (bare)
                                                                 in middle  on top
3:18    3:39              3:43      3:53      4:00     4:05      4:10       4:20               4:25

The final efflorescence of D major, when Williams has the musicians run up the scale three times, is one of the least inspired moments in the piece. But it serves its purpose, and on the whole it’s a striking coda. The Air returns, transposed so that it’s based on D. The cello plays a phrase, the rest of the ensemble joins for another phrase that comes to rest on D, which in turn blossoms into those flamboyant scales. The second phrase is repeated, and this time the D it ends on is the basis for a simple, subdued rocking figure (4:10). Listening to piece for the first time, I thought that was the end. But Williams has introduced a new pitch, E flat, at just this point (of the two quick notes, it’s the upper one). The highest, most prominent note of the emphatic dissonant chord at 4:20 is E flat. The unorthodox final cadence is partly about that E flat sinking to D—yet another receding effect. At the end there’s no bright major chord, just the single pitch D.

There is a movie music sensibility at work here, for sure. That’s not what I’m looking for when I sit down to some chamber music, but in this instance I’m not convinced it was such a bad thing. The pulling back and shifting gears at the end of “Simple Gifts” strikes me as especially cinematic. It’s music guiding the emotional response to the turning point in a story, cueing the reflection that’s supposed to follow the exaltation. I don’t know to what extent Williams was writing on spec. I doubt that he had detailed instructions, but he may well have been given some guidance about the tone he should set. For whatever reason, intentional or fortuitous, the cue fit President Obama’s message remarkably well.

Continued in part 2, because everyone’s a critic.

It was a big surprise—a nice one—when I was asked to teach the class. It came with a special obligation, though, a personal debt to the music that changed my life and made me have to become a musician, and to the jazz musicians I’ve known for their amazing warmth and generosity. The only way I could see to do the subject justice was to make it a serious, challenging class. At the time I started teaching it the course had a long-standing reputation as one of Duke’s easiest, and I’m afraid it was the reputation instead of the music that attracted many of the students. Even without that history I probably went in with too little experience and too many big ideas for anybody’s good, but at first there was an especially stark contrast between my enthusiasm for the subject and the students’ interest level.

The class could be frustrating but the material was always a pleasure.

I was lucky that resources for networked access to digital media were becoming available, so instead of using a wimpy CD anthology I could put together my own required listening list and give the class easy access. I had to write a lot of listening guides, but that turned out to be a great way to immerse myself in the music. There are some fantastic old films of jazz musicians playing, too, and I worked them in as best I could. A while ago I wrote a little about my all-time favorite, Armstrong’s “Dinah,” which illuminates all sorts of musical details and relationships and at the same time shows how completely and joyfully the music animated the man and vice-versa. Though I had the students buy a book (Ted Gioia’s History of Jazz), I tried to make the listening list rather than a textbook the primary material of the course. In practice this meant that the students’ constant ongoing assignment was to listen to music, and as much as I could I organized lectures, quizzes and tests around the assigned listening. If nothing else this was my way of making it clear that it was, first and foremost, a listening-to-music class, not a reading-about-music class.

I’ve never taught a course in which it was harder for me to tell what reasonable expectations were. The first problem anyone teaching a music class to non-musicians has to face is how deep into the music to go. What I really wanted was for the students to end up hearing at least a little like jazz musicians, which meant, for instance, feeling the form of the music as it played, and hearing the musicians feeling the form. I didn’t really think I’d get that many students to reach that point, but I did expect them to have an easier time with the quizzes, in which they were supposed to name one of the assigned listening pieces when I played an excerpt (standard practice in music appreciation classes). To some extent (but how much?) this was because they ignored my advice not to put off listening until right before the quiz. Listening to great jazz has to be one of the least onerous of college assignments, but developing an ear for the music is a hopeless thing to cram. There were always some diligent students who listened and listened and still found it very hard to hear the difference between, say, Sonny Rollins on “Pent Up House,” John Coltrane on “Oleo,” or Cannonball Adderley on “So What.” I did my best to make it possible for those kids to do well in the course—often they’d signed up hoping to get over a feeling of musical inadequacy, and I hated the thought that I was rubbing it in. But it wasn’t only with musical issues that I had a hard time gauging what to expect, it was the same with basic academic skills and workload. It was especially hard to know what to make of the revenue athletes, whose papers were as distinctive as their physiques but in the opposite way. They weren’t the only ones turning in poor quality work, though. I ended up feeling like I was was asking too much and asking too little—I didn’t want to teach a class for kids who wanted some extra sleep, but didn’t want to give work that a lot of the students would resent and do poorly on.

Coming up with good assignments for a class like this is difficult enough (for me it is, at least) even under ideal circumstances. I guess the usual thing to do would be a term paper, but my experience has turned me against term papers in entry-level survey classes. Students at Duke (and most other colleges, I imagine) can easily pull together 5 or 8 pages of vague generalizations and clichés into the academic equivalent of Wonder Bread—a triumph of form over content, with very little digestion required to get from one end to the other. I hate reading papers like that, and I’d rather not give students the impression that that kind of writing has any value. Since I wanted the course to be music-driven, I decided to try to design more structured projects based on critical, analytical responses to recordings.

In the most successful of these projects I had the students compare Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” to a number of blues and blues-form pieces they’d studied. It’s funny how the idea came up. The song is on a “rock for kids” anthology my daughter liked to listen to in the car. It took I don’t know how many times through the tape before I registered that it’s in 12-bar blues form with a rickity-tickity version of a jazz swing feel (this shows how little attention I’d paid to early rock and roll). It is so not a blues though. The obvious problem is the theme of 24 hour fun fun fun but what’s more telling is the absence of the loose musical dialog that’s essential to every kind of blues I know of. Unlike a typical blues lyric, “Rock Around the Clock” leaves no space after each line for a response. The spontaneous interplay that jazz rhythm sections of that era were developing, another manifestation of the African American penchant for musical dialog, is also absent in Haley’s recording. Comparison with “Rock Around the Clock” highlights the musical sociality of the blues, something that contributes tangibly to the music’s communicative power and broad appeal and to the improvisatory richness of jazz as well. I didn’t fully appreciate the nature and importance of dialog and interplay in jazz until I taught this class, and I think it’s a hard thing to convey without presenting a clear alternative—one of many reasons not to habitually divide music classes up by genre.

As a way to compare black and white music without falling back on cliches about rhythm and “soul,” I thought the project worked well. The students who rose to the challenge wrote unusually thoughtful essays, sometimes touching perceptively on the music they knew best. Students who didn’t do as well typically had a little bit to say about everything. It seemed to me that settling on an interpretation and selecting the most relevant facts to support it should have come more naturally to more of the class. I complicated things, though, by packing too much into the assignment—by slipping in the part about modernism, for example. I may also have been expecting too much in terms of musical experience and intuition. And with such a small and arbitrary selection of music I don’t think I should have highlighted the issue of white appropriation of black music as much as I did. In spite of that, the emphasis on listening closely and responding to what they heard kept most of the class from writing broad-brush treatments of the underlying racial issues—something that comes all too easily to Duke undergraduates.

The project I assigned at the end of ever semester was similar in structure but different in tone, since it involved more controversial music and readings with some rhetorical bite—a review in which Stanley Crouch blasts Miles Davis for selling out in the late 60s (an epic controversy in the jazz world) and excerpts from Miles’s autobiography. After reading both texts, the students listened to some of the music Crouch objects to. To wrap it up they had to write two short essays—one with their own conclusions about whether the music supported Crouch’s claim of sellout, and the other with their opinion of his review. Crouch’s review is brilliantly written and persuasive, but it doesn’t take a highly trained ear to hear the discrepancy between what he’s claiming and what’s happening in the some of the music that he dismisses. Though he characterizes it in more metaphorical terms as well, Crouch repeatedly invokes the literal, commercial sense of “sellout.” “Miles Runs the Voodoo Down,” the first track included in the project, is a rambling 15-minute-long free improvisation with nothing you could call a hook. The other track, “Thinkin’ One Thing and Doin’ Another,” is roughly 7 minutes of acerbic avant-guarde abstraction. Miles recorded a lot of very polished, commercial music in his last few decades, so Crouch isn’t even close to dead wrong, but he ignores the more challenging music in order to make the most damning case—not a hallmark of fine criticism.

(A while back I was admiring Alex Ross for dwelling on the innate qualities of the music he writes about instead of ranking it. Crouch has a tendency to do the opposite—he writes about Miles, in this case, in order to put the man in his place. He does the same thing with Ellington, though it’s deification instead of demonization. In both cases the music and musicians seem to be less important than the box he wants to put them in. He’s always worth reading but he’s at his best when he sets the pigeonholing aside, as in this more recent essay on Miles.)

My feeling is that students at an elite university should be able to write a clear and concise analysis of what Crouch means by “sellout” and how well the charge is born out by the music, paying some attention to this simple and obvious question: Does the music sound like it was written to sell? I always got some excellent papers but it took an awful lot of guidance to get more than superficial answers from most of the class. Much of the guidance was meant to bring out the strongest counter-arguments to Crouch, and it looks uncomfortably like I’m leading them by the nose to the “right answer,” but if that was my goal I didn’t do a very good job of it. The split in opinion between sellout and not was pretty even, with a number of different justifications given for each one. I made it a point not to penalize students who didn’t have the musical intuition or experience to come up with a good premise—a good essay based on a faulty premise could still get an A. But since the deck was stacked the arguments for sellout tended to be the weaker ones. Some insightful cases for sellout were made, but mostly they came down to a feeling that the two fusion tracks sounded a lot different than earlier Miles and used rock instruments, so Crouch must be right. And despite the heavy hinting, as when I had them sketch “the balance between commercial and artistic concerns” in the music of James Brown, Sly Stone, Ornette Coleman, and Karlheinz Stockhausen (cited by Miles as influencing On The Corner), quite a few students making a case against sellout didn’t mention the glaring lack of mass appeal in “Thinkin’.” I still find that surprising.

In earlier versions of this project the final essay question was more open-ended—I asked them to respond to Crouch’s critique, using the two assigned tracks as their primary evidence, and suggested several approaches they could take. In that form, most of the students would make a few vague comments about the music and then devote their attention to the more provocative parts of both the texts, finally taking one side or the other. Opinion heavily favored Crouch as I remember, but either way it was mostly a matter of which point of view resonated, not what was gleaned from the music. What seemed to make the biggest difference was giving them a template topic sentence, which not only focussed them on the music but also encouraged them to skip the vacuous preambles and cut to the chase: “If Davis [was/was not] a sellout, I [would/would not] expect to hear ________ in the music, and I [do/do not] hear that.” I assume that part of the problem was the unfamiliarity of building an argument on features of a musical recording, but I suspect that the magnetic pull of opinionated rhetoric and it’s power to shape the way the students heard the music were also factors.

Not all of the differences between the first and last set of papers I got for this project were due to changes I made to the instructions—I may have let myself be too influenced by the jarring experience of the first semester. One thing that is clear to me in hindsight is that I was trying to give seminar assignments to a lecture/survey class. A lot of the guidance I had to build in was in place of the more incremental process and the feedback that would be part of a seminar. Writing about all this I got curious enough to look around Duke’s University Writing Program web site. I should have consulted with them when I was teaching the course. Things that were on my mind—treating the writing process as a reasoning process, careful, critical consideration of sources and of ones own biases and conclusions—seem to be integral to the UWP’s program. Looking over the UWP web site, and the web syllabus of a Writing 20 section on oral culture and literacy in the american south I still wonder about the emphasis on a longer papers. For a writing course to include a 15 page research paper and a 5 page term paper along with a number of shorter assignments makes sense, I suppose. The 5 page paper in that case is the culmination of a semester’s worth of work. But what about the 6 or so page paper that stands on its own in another class? Papers like that are necessary for academia to reproduce itself, but how much inherent value do they have beyond that? There were students in Intro to Jazz who could of done justice to such an assignment, but it seemed to me there were also quite a few who couldn’t.

It would make all the difference if genuine interest could be made a course prerequisite (better yet, and even more far-fetched, an admissions requirement). It was depressing to see so many students who looked at Intro to Jazz as just a few more hoops to jump through—that of all subjects. As in every class I’ve taught at Duke, there were wonderfully enthusiastic and engaged students, and if I was a more inspiring lecturer I’m sure more would have risen to the occasion. College students shouldn’t need to be cajoled into engagement, though, certainly not at a place like Duke. My reservations about longish, open-ended essay assignments may come down to the simple fact that the more they have to write the clearer it becomes when they’re just going through the motions and filling up the pages they’ve been asked to fill. All the more so if they had to sift through a body of literature to find and frame the issue or research topic, something that presumes genuine engagement. If the reality of a particular class is a lot of students who are motivated by requirements and grades, it seems better to give shorter, more constrained assignments and expect in return clear thinking and effective writing.

The music was right on target for the story—unapologetic pop but with signs of real craftsmanship, especially in “Way Back Into Love,” the song that’s at the center of the plot. What stood out for me was the way the two-bar intro riff is turned into the four-bar hook—the note that the riff lands on is displaced, forcing the phrase to continue and sucking the listener into that continuation. Maybe that’s a case of craftsmanship that’s a little too obvious, but it seemed like just the right thing in a movie that’s about songwriting.

If you’d like to get a peek into the mind and life of a songwriter without a trace of Hollywood fluff, rush out and get Jimmy Webb’s book Tunesmith. He’s the real deal.

I’ve never had much sympathy with the point of view that puts classical music above and apart from other music. Over the past 9 years I’ve taught songwriting and a couple of music appreciation courses, one about jazz and the other quite eclectic. I’ve also taught the introductory theory and composition courses a few times. And I’ve ended up quite convinced that classical music has no special claim to make in the university classroom, at least not in courses of the kind I’ve taught—introductory classes, music appreciation, and history (setting aside theory, though—it’s a separate issue I’m not going to get into). It’s not that I’m disenchanted with the music—I’m as infatuated as ever, and I hope it always has a prominent place on college campuses, just not as the perennial prima donna.

The fat lady sings on, though, no matter how false the pretenses. And it tends to be pretty alienating. Listen, for instance, to this vociferation from blogger A.C. Douglas…

As I’ve elsewhere on this weblog noted, classical music is not “merely ‘one of [music’s many] streams’…, but music’s very apotheosis; the one instantiation of music that alone is capable of subsuming and transfiguring all of music’s other instantiations.”

That’s not a classical music fanatic’s wild-eyed rant, nor is it the rant of a cultural snob. It’s a demonstrable, objective fact. There was a time not long past when acknowledgement of that fact was implicit in the music section of the arts pages of almost all mainstream publications. When the term music was used alone it meant always classical music, all other musics requiring an identifying qualification (e.g., rock music, folk music, pop music, etc.). Today, the opposite is the normative case. It’s classical music that always requires the identifying qualification.

For a classical music critic to even by implication suggest, in an attempt to make it appear more accessible, that classical music is other than what I’ve above described it to be is to do classical music further, even irreparable, harm in the present cultural marketplace…

In the good old days Douglas evokes, classical music was even more explicitly the music of the university than it was of media. Until recently, the term “musicologist” unambiguously referred to a scholar of European classical music, and the association is still strong. The idea that classical music exists on a higher plane was self-evident to many generations of musicologists, and it’s a safe bet that a few still feel that way. I suspect that through force of habit if nothing else the idea still carries some weight in the rest of the university (in some universities, anyways—the focus and tenor of music departments varies wildly between institutions). Any half-decent musicologist who cared to could make a better case for the preeminence of classical music than the one I’ve quoted, but the premise doesn’t stand up well under close examination, in my opinion.

What I get most clearly from what Douglas says is how much music he doesn’t care to listen to and/or how little he gets out of most of it. Apparently he hears and understands music quite differently than I do. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I think it’s foolish of him to make a claim about something as subjective and diverse as music that effectively dismisses experiences unlike his own. I’ll happily save my breath and send you to Alex Ross for the more eclectic, less heirarchical point of view, both in his response to Douglas and in this autobiographical New Yorker article, which may be my all-time favorite piece of writing from a music critic (the problem with Ross, in fact, is that I end up wondering if there’s anything I can say about music that he hasn’t already said more eloquently).

On most any page of Ross’s criticism you’ll find confirmation of a principle I’ve arrived at in my teaching—there’s always something more useful, interesting, or enlightening to say about a piece of music (or genre or composer or whatever) than what it’s better or worse than. With that in mind, I’ve talked effusively (at least that’s how it’s felt to me) about music from Beethoven, Monteverdi, George Crumb, a whole raft of jazz greats, The Carter Family, Mississippi Fred McDowell, The Beatles (endlessly), Nirvana, Fleetwood Mac, Sheryl Crow, and many others. I expect that my over-the-top admiration for some of the classical and jazz standouts has been obvious, but I hope I’ve made each one seem worthy because of the specific things it had to offer, not more or less than anything else. I don’t think any self-respecting music professor is going to beat their class over the head comparing the Timeless Greatness of the Eroica with the silly triviality of “Satisfaction,” so I’m probably belaboring the obvious. But the message can seep in, especially if there’s a conscious or unconscious effort to convert the students (which is not the same thing as trying to spark their interest).

After teaching a traditional chronological, single-genre introductory class (Introduction to Jazz) and one that was neither chronological nor genre-specific, I’m sold on the value of shuffle mode. It has it’s risks—I’ve certainly made a mess of it a number of times—but it also opens ears. Here’s a quick example of a juxtaposition that worked well. As an exercise in focussed listening, my colleague Kerry McCarthy and I (the class was co-taught) assigned the students to listen to Schubert’s Erlkönig and “What Makes You Happy,” by Liz Phair. The connection is that in both cases the singer is channeling several characters. We asked the students to write a little about how the music conveyed dialog, character, and drama. The students seemed to hear the inherent qualities of both songs, but certainly of the Schubert, better than they would have without the pairing. I think the contemporary song helped ease Schubert’s into their natural listening space. Perhaps Schubert led them to take Phair more seriously, which is all to the good—her song wasn’t thrown in to sweeten the pill, it was there on its own merit. It also helped that we didn’t give them any build-up or background on Schubert or Phair—it’s too easy to tap into the tired, patronizing cliches that are the main impression many kids have of classical music. Much better to get out of the way and let Jessye Norman’s hair-raising performance make the case, which it does!

I cringe a little every time I write “music appreciation class.” It sounds both lightweight and patronizing, certainly a vestige of the classical-music-is-good-medicine school of thought. One reason that I haven’t been the best teacher for those kinds of classes may be that I can’t accept appreciation as an end in itself, and insist on building assignments around some deeper question of identity or values or whatever (the more glaringly obvious reason is that I’m not a particularly organized or animated lecturer). But naturally, whenever I teach a class I’m hoping that the students are more curious, engaged, open-minded listeners at the end of the semester than at the beginning. That’s more or less the essence of music professorhood. And from that perspective, what I’d most like to say to those worried about where classical music is going as other kinds of music make a greater claim to the curriculum is, let it out of the box! It will do just fine.

I’m not suggesting that eclecticism is the one and only, or a substitute for every class that focusses on a particular genre or era. Nor, when it comes to teaching, are all genres created equal. One of the most enlightening things for me about teaching Intro to Jazz was how rich a topic the blues is. It’s wonderful, appealing music that’s not hard to grasp in musical and formal terms, illuminates and humanizes some pivotal American history, has had a deep and palpable influence on the whole range of contemporary popular music, and comes with a challenging but vivid critical literature. I don’t know what more you could ask for. As a general humanities seminar topic for undergraduates it’s outstanding—for me far more promising than any kind of classical music. Classical music may be more sophisticated in formal terms and more cerebral, but for undergraduates I think the blues is a much better basis for intellectually challenging reading, analysis, and writing. That’s ultimately a personal preference—I’m not claiming it’s the perfect material and everyone should take it up. But anyone who’s worried that college courses on the blues or popular music are a sign of pandering or declining standards should be assured that, in intellectual terms, they can easily leave many an old-fashioned music appreciation course in the dust.

Not that it’s a competition.

People who dislike HIP tend to see it as the musical version of PC. It’s true that the more zealous and simpleminded HIPsters can be preachy, can come at you with a moralistic sense that it’s their duty to correct the bad habits of the uninformed by foisting onto them a laundry list of dos and donts (this bow, those strings, that tempo, these ornaments, etc. etc.). But the idea that HIPsters have a unique claim to authenticity was punctured a long time ago. Deflating claims to authenticity has become a cottage industry with academics and high-end critics. I’m not that hep to the HIP literature, but everyone knows Richard Taruskin’s “The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past,” almost 20 years old now, in which he showed that the “historically informed” sound grew out of Stravinsky’s aesthetic much more than Bach’s. That’s why they stopped calling it “authentic performance” and switched to “historically informed.”

It’s odd to see people still talking about HIP as a kind of fashion police and debating it as a monolith—it’s a well-established, diverse part of the music world that’s way past its heady, revolutionary days. Yet even OC seems to think that it takes courage and “powerful allies” to stand up to Harnoncourt and HIP, which looks to me like a touch of Imusitis, a disorder that makes people conjure up a PC gestapo in order to make whatever they’re saying sound better. It’s a mild case, but still a little disappointing in the face of her usual sly intelligence and enthusiasm. It’s the peanut gallery that takes up the theme and runs with it, turning it into a low-grade flame war. It’s interesting to me as an example of the bad habit people have of talking about taste in moral terms, and of writing as if it’s possible to browbeat someone into changing the way they hear music.

[As I get ready to post, after a delay of a day or two, I see that there are more comments on OC’s site, including more moderate ones from darahbee. I based what I wrote here on the comments through May 23, and I’m going to leave it that way but attach a postscript]

Most of the commenters are reasonably civil. There are only 3 who are conspicuously negative, and of those it’s darahbee and Benedict who stick around for a fight. Darahbee uses his opening line to suggest that he’s probably dealing with dilettantes then briskly moves on to insult OC as “just an opera fan.” Benedict invokes the Rolexes in the audience at Salzburg in his own gesture of anti-dilettante snobbery and shows that he, too, is deft at putting people in their place by declaring that “musicologists belong in the audience,” not on the podium. At times it might as well be a couple of five year olds shouting “no, you’re the poopyhead!” at each other. Even when it’s more substantive, points are made in a spirit that’s uniformly contentious and argumentative.

To be fair, darahbee’s primary interest is to tell OC off for being disrespectful, and since he’s dealing with simpletons (aka opera lovers) and dilettantes, he doesn’t seem to expect or want much of a discussion. It’s hard to reconcile with the high musical ideals he alludes to, or with his admiration for Harnoncourt. He has nothing to say that might draw a person to listen to Harnoncourt’s music, and I don’t think it does any service to the man to leave the impression that’s he’s a great favorite of the holier-than-thou.

The only person who has the grace to own his taste is claviclaws. He “loves[s] the sound and love[s] the feel” of HIP. And it’s not just the musical feel but also the communal feel—“the passion and commitment of the musicians”—that he loves. This is not only an realistic and honest take on the roots of his preference, it’s an invitation to a conversation instead of a fight.

The only music forum I can think of that can sustain long substantive discussions is Sequenza21. A few weeks ago, a review was posted that drew in some angry newcomers, and it had a striking effect on the quality of the discussion, shifting it in the direction of the Harnoncourt flap I was just talking about (an additional factor that fanned the flames was the misguided suggestion that the newcomers were spamming). A quick point-counterpoint sums it up.

Point (David Salvage):

Cipullo’s music can veer into syrupy Lydian-land, but the first act holds up relatively well. The second act unfortunately sacrifices musical and dramatic continuity for applause-nabbing solo arias, and the show ends up lacking impact despite its loaded subject matter.

Counterpoint (Marley):

The dramatic morphology of Glory Denied is a brilliant and succesful grappling with the problematics of translating Phillpotts double narrative of Thompson’s life into an opera. I think Mr. Salvage should attempt to understand a work before he derides it.

Salvage was bothered by the way the opera was broken up by solo numbers with applause. It’s meaningless, not to mention insulting, to respond that he didn’t understand—he doesn’t know what continuity is? His ears aren’t connected to his brain? He’s wrong to be bothered by things that bother him? There’s no answer to be made on a musical level. Marley falls short in another respect, very familiar to me as a teacher. Salvage is writing about things that are concrete and meaningful whether you heard the the opera or not, but “brilliant and succesful grappling with the problematics of translating Phillpotts double narrative…” is nothing more than the overwrought opinion of a complete stranger who I know nothing about—another dead end.

[Darahbee (who must be conductor David Alexander Rahbee) posted a long, more diplomatic and informative comment after I stopped reading and started writing. It’s familiar stuff to anyone who’s looked into HIP—the kind of thing that should induce open-minded people to give it a listen, though I think for the most part it’s defeated by the pointlessness of telling people how they should hear things. All the less likely after the tone he had coming into the discussion. It’s to his credit that he stepped back and gave it a shot, though.]

You make it hard
You make it hard
You make it hard
You make it hard for me
You make it hard for me

It was a doo-wop number, with backup vocals played from a recording, so the double entendre had a playful, guileless feel that’s infinitely more innocent than the stuff you’ll find on top-40 radio these days. Since my 9-year-old daughter was with me, I was glad for that—she thought Charley was great, and so did I. (The thing that really got the little wheels in her head turning was the graffiti in the women’s room.)

It’s an odd thing that I ended up teaching this class. When I was in high school and should have been basting myself in rock I listened almost exclusively to jazz—my father’s Miles Davis records felt like a life raft in those days. I was completely alienated from my peers and so there wasn’t much to draw me to their music. It’s amazing how much of it seeped in anyways—thinking back, it feels like Rod Stewart’s voice permeates the whole depressing era, but at the time I’m not sure if I could even have told you who it was singing those songs. I grew more receptive to mainstream popular music as I went through my 20s and 30s, but it never developed into more than an incidental, haphazard interest. But what really mattered to Duke was that they wanted to hire my wife and knew they could seal the deal if they came up with something for me to do as well. Luckily the couple of people in the music department who could have taught songwriting had other things to do, and I guess they figured I couldn’t do much harm with it.

Whoever originated the class (I think it was a graduate student, but I’m not sure, and I’ve never seen the original syllabus) had the inspired idea of calling it “Songwriter’s Vocabulary,” making it clear that it’s about musical materials and techniques, not about the ineffabilities of self-expression. I followed the lead of my immediate predecessor, John Ferri, in structuring the class as a non-traditional introduction to music theory. We make our way through rhythm (approached as prosody), melody (scales, phrases), harmony (chords, progressions, voice leading) and form, but the assignments are mostly exploratory and composition-based. There’s a weekly lecture-assignment-workshop cycle in which I say, in essence, here is some stuff (e.g., scales or chords), here is the terminology, here are some examples of how it’s usually used, now go out and do something with it, and next week we’ll see what you come up with. The looseness of the assignments makes the students feel like they’re at sea sometimes. I try to present the theory not as rules but as guidelines, tendencies, and expectations, and for me the effort has been enlightening, though I still don’t get it across to the class as well as I should. Music theory is only as good as it sounds, and when we go over the assignments in class the theory is almost always borne out—when a student “breaks the rules” it sounds awkward. Sometimes it sounds inspired, though, and I can’t think of a better way to learn about both the usefulness and the limitations of theory.

My ideal has been to make the class accessible to anyone who has some musical facility and wants to write songs. There are a lot of fine musicians on campus who fall through the cracks in the music curriculum because they aren’t very comfortable reading music. Many students have told me that one of their goals in taking my class is to improve their reading and writing, and half or more of the typical class reads quite well, so I use staff notation on the board and in handouts all semester. But I suggest more informal and intuitive ways for them to write down their own ideas—imprecise notations that are precise enough to get the job done, especially if they’re supplemented by a recording or in-class performance. And even when they’re writing abstract musical fragments for an assignment, I urge the students to work with a lyric, no matter how ridiculous or incoherent. Words can’t convey rhythm unambiguously, but they can go a long ways towards pinning it down, both for the student who writes them and for me or my TA when we read them.

It’s been pretty easy to reach the students who sing and play the guitar, who have a rock band, or are in one of Duke’s many a cappella groups. There are plenty of students with a traditional background, from piano lessons or playing in school bands or whatever, who want to try their hand at songwriting, too. I settled into a comfortably loose amalgamation of traditional theory, graphic notation, and composition projects some years ago. In the past few semesters I’ve had several students whose orientation was more towards hip-hop than rock, and they’ve shaken my complacency. In line with most music theory classes, I put a lot of emphasis on chords, and for a vast swath of popular music that makes perfect sense—chord progressions, whether simple, complicated, explicit or implied, are the structural backbone of most every song. But the hip-hop model leans much more on rhythmic and melodic patterning, and if I was to teach the class again it would be high time to work that into the mix. As much as anything else, I’d be doing myself a favor. I’ve spent a whole lot of time talking about harmony—it’s endlessly fascinating but also well-worn ground, and another trip around it isn’t likely to do me that much good. To get myself to the point of being able to say something useful about how a hip-hop song is put together, I’d have to get out of my comfort zone and learn something.

In terms of the musical models I use, I haven’t had to venture into unfamiliar territory nearly as much as I expected when I started. I have about a dozen Beatles songs that serve as textbook examples, and I draw on some other rock classics (not quite the same thing as Classic Rock, but there’s plenty of overlap)—the students don’t seem to find them terribly old fashioned (except, maybe, for Annie Lennox). When I ask the class to bring in music they admire, they often show up with old stuff, too—from the past few years I can recall some Beatles, Springsteen, Neil Young, Led Zepellin, and Velvet Underground—and in technical terms most of the newer songs they like are in the same ball park. What I have had to do is listen more closely and objectively, even to music that’s familiar—something I’ve had to do for other classes I’ve taught, as well, and it’s always led me to a richer experience of the music. My appreciation of music that is simple and direct is definitely more genuine than it was 10 years ago. There was even some evidence at the coffeehouse that I’m conveying that to the class. Introducing his song, called “Simple,” James said that it was inspired by a comment I made, while talking about a song in class, that “simple is good.” Out of that, James came up with a classic guy-with-acoustic-guitar kind of love song that sits right on the line between simple and simplistic up to a beautifully conceived bridge that transforms it and gives it real depth. Ironically, the polish on the song and James’s self-assured performance made it obvious that he was one of the most experienced and sophisticated musicians in the class.

It’s been fascinating and heartening to hear the 100 or so students who’ve come through the class get up on stage and sing their piece (and I don’t think there’s been a single student who hasn’t been able to take part, which is pretty amazing—there may, of course, be a case or two that’s slipped my memory). The big revelation for me has been the ones who feel their way tentatively from assignment to assignment and then show up at the coffeehouse with a couple of verses and a chorus that are not only a real song, but their song—an unpolished little gem that’s both conventional and personal. There’s no denying that if I wanted to claim some credit as a teacher, it’s these kids I should point to, not the well-developed talents like James. But the only thing I really feel I can take credit for when the session is over is that I insisted that they all write a song and show up to sing it. The rest is theirs, and it feels like a window onto a musical creativity that’s disentangled from technique, where originality arises naturally from personality. It’s a great thing to remember when I get lost in the intricacy and abstraction of my own music, when I need to be reminded what the means are and what the ends are.

He has a commission from the Met to write a two-act opera. I wonder what will come of it. Will he string a bunch of songs together, or will he take to heart the example of the composers he admires and write every little transition and interlude and background figure, so the music animates the story and vice versa, and while he’s at it write some real oboe music, real cello music, real trombone music, etc. I’m pretty sure he’s capable of it. He says (in the same interview in Harp magazine where he talks about Janacek) that he’s prepared to fail. I hope that’s modesty and not a way of keeping his foot in the exit door in case it all turns out to be too much trouble.

Henry Mollicone’s Face on the Barroom Floor, which I heard in Greensboro a few weeks ago, is a case study in operatic composition stripped down to its essentials, and a lesson in how to write an piece that has legs, and a small footprint as well. It’s an odd little whirlwind of a mining-town opera that uses three singers and three instrumentalists, plus a fourth cast member who doesn’t sing. Twenty-five minutes long and the soprano is shot dead twice—that’s got to be some kind of record. To get everything across in such a short time, Mollicone has to be able to turn on a dime, musically-speaking. I particularly enjoyed the quote from La traviata that he spliced into the barroom boogie early in the piece—a bit of characterization, since the soprano is playing a soprano (an opera singer, that is, which is a funny coincidence—Wainwright’s opera will also be about an opera singer). I admired the way he cut from broad-stroke tonality to swirling chromaticism the first time the girl was shot, too. This is not, by any means, the only way to approach an opera but it does bring into focus how different writing an opera is from writing a song, even an “operatic” song. As I’m posting this, a few audio samples are still available on the Greensboro Opera web site.

The piano was onstage, since no self-respecting mining country saloon can be without one, and the not-to-be-shot piano player was the composer. He was also music director for the production, so he’d been in Greensboro for several weeks. I don’t know if he planned the opera around the idea that he could travel around to direct and play in it, but it’s a great idea, and I have to say I’m jealous—not only is he deeply involved in preparing and performing his own music but he doesn’t have to cram the rehearsals into the usual couple of days.

I was glad to see the Greensboro Opera Company in action again. The three young singers (Elena DeAngeles, who I heard in February as Gretel, baritone Jeffrey Carlson and tenor Jeffery Maggs) sang their parts with confidence and style, and since it was a small venue, seating a couple hundred I guess, it was good that they were convincing actors as well. I enjoyed talking to them all afterwards, and also to some of the folks behind the scenes. David Barnwell, the managing director, filled me in about some of the problems and promise of opera in Greensboro. Mollicone and I traded notes about our stints at New England Conservatory, which were about two decades apart—if ever there was a place where things change and yet stay the same, that’s it. And then there was Elena’s mother, visiting from New York and a little unnerved after watching her daughter get shot twice (and adding insult to injury, the baritone is her son in law). Mostly, though, she was proud, and rightly so.

Bourland had only one thing to say about the “Going to a Town,” in reference to its refrain, “I’m so tired of America”:

I guess Rufus is tired of America. Hmm, well I say people act like people no matter where you go.

I completely agree with Bourland about people acting like people wherever. From that point of view, it’s reasonable to wonder why the refrain isn’t “I’m so tired of humanity.” If Wainwright wants to make a statement about religious hypocrisy and homophobia, why not take on the Iranian practice of hanging men thought to have engaged in homosexual acts (the example comes to mind because I recently read about a young opera composer who has done just that)? In comparison it’s hard to see how even the worst hypocrisy of America’s homophobic fundamentalists is much cause for complaint, especially from someone like Wainwright who enjoys a tremendous luxury of choice and of self-expression, including the luxury of being out of the closet. The refrain is nothing if not a complaint, and I wouldn’t blame anyone for finding it to be a pretty egocentric one.

In the context of the song it doesn’t strike me that way, though (and I’m not claiming it strikes Bourland that way, either—the line I quoted leans in that direction, but it’s just an offhand comment). The only problem I have with the lyrics is that the first two verses, especially, are too obscure. I’d like for such a forthright refrain to be backed up by more than vague allusions. But “Going to a Town,” as I hear it, is a falling-out-of-love, gotta-pick-up-the-broken-pieces-and-move-on song about Wainwright’s relationship with a country. I’d call it his motherland if his mother wasn’t Canadian and I’d call it his fatherland if the word didn’t have creepy fascist connotations—the parental metaphor is complicated in his case, but it still applies. He’s writing about being let down in a relationship that is deep and irrational, so of course the song is one-sided and unfair. The trick in this genre is to complain, criticize and caricature without sounding too whiny or self-indulgent.

[I was browsing a few hours after I first posted this entry and came across a post on vilaines filles—the guy attracts high-end fans!—that referred to Wainwright’s MySpace page. Not only is this song up on his player (so listening is free at the moment), there’s a commentary track where he says “it’s like a breakup song from a lover who you once were entralled with and then were somewhat cheated on…” I guess I was stating the obvious.]

It’s obvious, I hope, that the meaning of a song doesn’t necessarily come from the words alone. With different music this particular lyric could be turned into something more cynical, more satirical, more strident, or more equivocal (and the list could go on). If Wainwright is saying something, he’s saying it with both the words and the music, and neither stands on its own. What the music adds in this case is the impression of an experience. Based on how the words are placed in the music, it’s a story of alienation and resignation yielding to insight and resolve—a classic breakup-song trajectory. I’m sure Wainwright is editorializing with the lyric, but he absorbs the complaints and criticisms into the texture of an experience that he conveys quite beautifully. That’s my personal reaction, of course, and there’s nothing definitive about it. I’ve had reactions to America similar to his, so his criticisms don’t get under my skin in the first place. But I think the song makes a good case for itself that’s independent of the politics.

A really odd thing about the song is that after 3 minutes of fine stylish songwriting, Wainwright seems to fall under the spell of an ambitious idea that never quite works out. For all the good things I’ve found in the song, it was the strangeness of the ending that got me to pull out my keyboard and work out what’s going on in the music. At the level of musical technique the song makes a fascinating study from start to finish—in the first part it’s wonderfully communicative in ways that can be analyzed pretty clearly, and in the last part it’s strange and awkward, again in ways that aren’t too hard to articulate. It’s a remarkable package—I haven’t come across anything quite like it before. For anyone inclined to read on, I’ll try point out the musical features, both the effective ones and the strange ones.

I’ll admit right off that dissecting music in order to get at its meaning is highly subjective and probably little more than a parlor game. It’s a game I like to play, though—it’s a great way to get up close and personal with a piece of music, and it helps me clarify and refine what I’m trying to do as a composer. If, by putting it up, I can provoke anyone to respond with their own impressions, or a critique of my analysis, or any other kind of constructive comment, that would be icing on the cake.

After playing the video a few times, I went over to iTunes to get the single—I believe it’s an iTunes “exclusive.” That’s the version I’m writing about—the only significant differences with what’s on that video are the lack of a rhythm section and other instruments and the poorer fidelity. Here are the lyrics.

I’ll try to make my musical points without getting into a lot of specialized lingo, hoping it will make sense even if you don’t have musical training. If you know some music theory, though, you should probably read the more technical, nuts and bolts version of my analysis.

~ ~ ~

The verse of “Going to a Town” uses the same chord progression as the durable old standard Autumn Leaves, a French song written in the 40s (you could think of the style as Tin Pan Alley with an accordion and a beret). It’s a pretty generic progression, so the connection could be fortuitous, but I’m inclined to think that it’s not, since the similarities go beyond the chords (just to be clear—there’s nothing wrong with using someone else’s chord progression). In both songs the melody is based on a simple melodic figure that is repeated, but starts one note lower each time (in music theory this is called a sequence). In “Going to a Town,” the sequence is the first 3 lines of the verse, so the repetitive phraseology of the lyric (in most verses to some extent, but especially the first one) goes hand in hand with the melodic repetition. The chords, grouped into pairs, track the melodic sequence as well. The sequence makes the lyrics of each verse seem to march with a kind of clockwork inevitability down to the refrain and the minor chord that supports it—both musically and lyrically, a downhearted conclusion. The way the progression shifts away from major towards minor on the third line gives it some extra poignance. The sense of resignation is especially strong in the first verse, with its passive, gloomy listing of “already beens.”

The chords in the verse are not only strung together in a progression that is typical of jazz standards (i.e., the harmonic world of Tin Pan Alley, more or less), they have a thickness or complexity that is more typical of jazz than of contemporary pop, which in this context gives them a world-weary sheen (it’s especially notable in the second line of each verse). At some level, conscious or unconscious, Wainwright was clearly drawing on this older repertoire—no big surprise coming from a man who’s done a whole show of Judy Garland songs. My sense is that he’s specifically invoking “Autumn Leaves,” which has two layers of wistfulness—one that’s integral to the song and another it gets as a stylistic representative of days gone by.

On the scale of pop-song choruses, this one is pretty subtle, but in comparison to the verse it’s focussed and to the point in the way choruses usually are. It’s faster-moving than the verse and at the same time more static—for the first 2 1/2 lines, the harmony rocks back and forth between two chords, but the chords and lyrics go by twice as fast. The big event, where Wainwright cashes in on the simplicity and predictability of what’s come before, happens on “to lead” in the third line of the chorus. There is a fresh chord, and the harmonic pace slows so he can dwell on a few key words. He diverts the chord progression at the last minute, so the chorus comes to rest in a different harmonic “place” than the verse. On the single there is swell of glacial strings in the background that permeates and transforms the sound. The emotional core of the song is this line, repeated at the end of the chorus—“I’ve got a life to lead”—which comes across as a realization and a moment of clarity.

Aspects of that clarity and resolve carry over into the verses that follow. Where the first pair of verses is vague and passive, the second pair is more engaged and impassioned. Wainwright reaches out with questions, highlighted by repeated rhetorical “tell mes” that introduce an element of call-and-response dialog. It is utterly conventional for the later repetitions of a verse to be more developed or elaborate than the early ones, but in this case it’s not just a matter of musical logic, it conveys something integral to the song. It’s a technique that opera composers use to great effect—nice to see, since Wainwright has apparently been commissioned to write an opera.

The second verse seems to unfold like the first, but in the third line Wainwright tries to pull another rabbit from his hat. He seems in this case not to be a double-rabbit-capable composer. On the word “lead” there is an unexpectedly bright chord and the music suddenly takes on a new character. What happens from this point to the end is, in musical terms, a coda. It starts out well enough. The drawn-out, emphatic feeling of it seems a little excessive to me, but it’s not a bad way to consolidate at the end of a song. The first few chords are fresh and effective, too, but they lead to a cul-de-sac, and it takes some odd chords and awkward phrasing to get back out. It looks just like corners I’ve seen students write themselves into when they’re being too clever, and Lord knows I’ve done it to myself often enough, too, stubbornly developing an idea that’s too brilliant and impressive to let go of, even when it turns into an endless time-sucking labyrinth. One of the odder signs that Wainwright may have been casting about for fancy harmony is the idiosyncratic appearance of a special chord called a Neapolitan sixth that, as far as contemporary forms of music are concerned, crops up in intermediate college-level music theory and nowhere else—I haven’t come across it outside of classical music.

The treatment of the lyric is awkward, too. The words that are most emphasized and drawn-out are “life,” “soul,” “dream” (excellent so far), then “own” (not so great but ok), then “be” (weak, but at least is scans) and finally “to” (really weak). The last line…

I’m  going  TOOOOOOOO  a  town   thaaat  haaaas  AAAAL-REAAA-DYYYY,
BEEN   BURNED   DOWN

is especially strange—oddly parsed and, especially at the very end, oddly grandiose. It’s strange at the level of meaning, too. Suggestive an image as it is, the town that has already been burned down never comes into focus for me—it’s an effective start but a mystifying end. This may just show how dense I am, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the other points I’ve made do the same thing. I do realize that Wainwright has far better pop song instincts that I could ever hope for, and probable better musical instincts across the board.

Still, that’s what I make of it. I’d love to hear about some alternatives.