The purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness

Two contrasting responses from America to my post Third rate music on Naxos' American classics?

Flinging merde - 'Granted some of the stuff that Naxos has packaged in that series has been less than distinguished but operating in a cultural establishment where critics treat every cow patty ever dropped by the likes of Alwyn (above) and Bax and Finzi and Michael Tippitt (sic) as if it were fois gras, Clements is hardly in a position to fling merde' - from Sequenza21, and I'm sure Norman Lebrecht would approve of that misspelling of Tippett.


The true beauty of the effort - 'Personally speaking I expect listener reaction to concert music is heavily dependent on emotional mood and cultural/historical context . The concept of "ratings" and "tiers" for composers is pretty much an over-rated specialization of critics, which serves the purpose of puffery and closed-mindedness.

My father is the American composer George Frederick McKay (photo below), who liked to say that "if the criticism of a composer's music gets to be really sharp, then he knows he is writing some good pieces." He also once got a big laugh from hearing concert goers in seats in front of him commenting in reverent tones that he was dead.

His music is really like a big layer-cake; in other words, in his young life, he composed jazz-infuenced pieces and romantic songs. Later, his music became more socially aware and radical-- "ultra-modern" toward the end of the 1930's at a time when he mentored John Cage in Seattle both encouraging the younger composer musically and inviting him to the family home for dinner and philosophical discussion.

Following this, my father launched into a loving involvement with American folk-music, and completely cast aside the "opus' system, which he considered a rather crazy European artifact. As to making critics of his music "cringe," he probably would have enjoyed this, since he had a mischievous and rugged nature derived from his upbringing in the West. His music is far from simple, and in many cases has deep religious and philosophical meaning. Much is yet to be revealed, since he composed nearly 1000 various works.


It is doubtful that any of us will ever get to hear high-level performances of all his works, since most conductors are still under the threat of being pummeled by Symphony Society grannies if they get too far afield from the standard concert fare. We have a commercial radio station in Seattle that broadcasts a full month of Mozart works, with one Mozart piece every hour, which gives me the urge to say "give me a break, guys!" Also noted is the absolute repetition of Vivaldi's Four Seasons by glamour-puss groups of all stripes.

So with this rather subjective outburst, I have implicated myself forever as an indivdually thinking patriotic, and maybe not so clever commentor. I should add that, although I loved Mozart's music in context to the movie "Amadeus," he never will or would have the chance to equal the magic of George Frederick McKay's interpretation of Native American themes that most likely stretch back 10,000 years in human history.

This is the true beauty of the effort John McLaughlin Williams has made to create wonderful recordings of the legendary music of America, that many have forgotten. My father's initiative in his mature years was to merge his music with the natural music of his homeland and speak of international peace' - comment from Fred McKay on my Naxos American Classics post.

Any American readers who still think Michael Tippett is an English pastoralist should listen to my Future Radio programme on March 2 when I will be playing Tippett conducting his own Second Symphony; while this Tippett post with its world view brings this path full circle.
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Serial music - exploring the labyrinth

Several interesting points came out of my 'In Conversation' event with Alina Ibragimova before last night's Britten Sinfonia concert. One of them was that, following her CD of Karl Amadeus Hartmann's music, Alina's next recording will be the two violin concertos of Mykola Roslavets. In his excellent A Concise History of Western Music (CUP ISBN 0521842948) Paul Griffiths writes that 'The past is not a path we and our predecessor's have travelled but a labyrinth, and a labyrinth forever in flux', and Mykola Roslavets is an excellent example of how we are still exploring the labyrinth that is serial music.

Received wisdom tells us that Arnold Schoenberg originated serial composition, but did he? Mykola (Nikolai) Roslavets (left) was born in Ukraine in 1881. Although he was influential in the early years of the USSR as a champion of progressive Western composers, his music was politically suppressed at the end of the 1920s. Due to this he spent most of the remainder of his career as a ‘non-person’, and died in Moscow in 1944. But post-perstroika his music is having something of a renaissance.

Roslavets is of more interest than the many minor Russian composer of the period. He used a form of serial composition, and it may have pre-dated Schoenberg. The two composers approached the new tonal landscape from very different directions. Schoenberg used serial techniques to create a horizontal thread through his compositions, whereas Roslavet aggregated them vertically in a manner influenced by his countryman Alexander Scriabin. Roslavet's output included orchestral. chamber and piano music, as well as the two violin concertos that Alina Ibragimova is recording.

But Nikolai Roslavets is not the only pretender to the serial music crown. The Austrian Josef Matthias Hauer (below) was indisputably working ahead of Schoenberg. In 1919 he devised a proto-serial composition technique using twelve-tone rows with variable tone sequences. Hauer lived from 1883 to 1959, and his compositions were branded 'degenerate art' by the Nazis. In a link to another path Hauer is thought to have been a model for characters in both Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus and Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game. There is much unpublished music by Josef Mattias Hauer, and all his compositions after 1940 are described by him as Zwölftonspiel or Zwölftonmusik - twelve-tone song, or twelve-tone music. A recording project there perhaps?

Another piece of received wisdom worth revisiting is that serial techniques were the sole preserve Central European. In 1956 the English composer William Alwyn (below) developed his own take on the new tonalities in the Allegro of his Symphony No. 3. This uses an alternation of eight note and four note groups in a pattern suggested to the composer by Indian classical music quite sometime before Philip Glass and others made such fusions fashionable. William Alwyn may not have the cachet of his American and Central European peers, but his music certainly deserves greater recognition.

But in the end it doesn't really matter who invented serial music. As Paul Griffith explains history is not linear, but is a labyrinth where change is constant. Within the labyrinth several composers independently developed their own serial languages, and they are all worth exploring. Alina Ibragimova's CD of Nikolai Roslavets' violin concertos is being recorded with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, and will be released by Hyperion in 2008. And there is more on William Alwyn here.

* I am aware that 'serial techniques' and 'twelve-tone music' are terms that may not be familiar to all my readers. Here is a wonderfully lucid explanation from A Pilgrim Soul by Meirion and Susie Harris. Which also gives me an opportunity maintain the gender balance by linking to another English pioneer of serial techniques, Elisabeth Lutyens:

'Serialism, the twelve-tone method was a logical extension of the abandonment of tonality (the key system) which had begun long before the end of the nineteenth century. As music progresses towards dissonance and away from tonality, it became obvious that some other source of coherence would be needed, some alternative means of organising the material as effectively as the key system had done.

The key system gave automatic priority to certain notes in the scale; but to those using the serial method, all twelve notes of the octave, black and white, were equally important, and all were used as the basic material of any composition. In serial music the fundamental idea of the composition was presented in a series of the twelve notes in a characteristic order, with no note repeated until all the others had been used, to ensure that none had precedence. The whole piece was to be evolved from this basic set, by a process of continuous variation and development, so that every part of the work could in some way be related to the original idea.

Both the horizontal and the vertical dimension of the musical 'space' were penetrated by the basic idea, so that not only the melodies but also the harmonies were regulated by the order of notes within the series and the relationship between them. For variety, the series could also be played upside down, back to front, and transposed up or down the scale, as long as the order of the notes was preserved.

Those who used the serial technique felt it vital to explain that it was no more mechanical, no more a formula than the key system with all the rules it possesses. It was not a prescription, but a tool to help different composers express themselves differently, adapting the method to their own ends. 'I do not compose principles,' wrote Schoenberg angrily, 'but music'.'


Main images are, of course, by M C Escher. The header is Convex and Concave, the lower is Day and Night. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Artworks on internet radio

This is the sculpture installation Homage to Sir Thomas Browne created by French artists Anne and Patrick Poirier for Norwich city centre which I wrote about here last month. Tomorrow (Aug 10), at 10.00am British Summer Time I'll be talking to the cultural developement officer of Norwich City Council, who commissioned the artwork, on Future Radio.

On Sunday (Aug 12) at 5.00pm I'll be playing William Alwyn's Symphony No, 5 'Hydriotaphia', which is dedicated to Sir Thomas Browne, on my Overgrown Path contemporary classical music programme also on Future Radio.

Both programmes are available as real-time webcasts, click here for the audio stream, see below for more details. This is the future of radio.
Convert on-air times to your local time zone using this link. Windows Media Player doesn't like the stream very much and takes ages to buffer, WinAmp or iTunes handle it best. Unfortunately the royalty license doesn't permit on-demand replay, so you have to listen in real time. If you happen to be in the Norwich, UK area tune to 96.9FM.

Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Brain music

Art works in public spaces, and my photos show 'Homage to Thomas Browne', a site-specific artwork that was installed here in Norwich last week. The controversial installation was created by the French husband and wife team of Anne and Patrick Poirier, and there is a musical connection. William Alwyn's Fifth Symphony was first performed in Norwich, and is dedicated to the memory of Sir Thomas Browne, with each section of the symphony headed by a quotation from Browne's best known work, Urn Burial.


Physician, philosopher, botanist and writer Sir Thomas Browne lived in Norwich, close to the site of the sculpture, from 1636 to his death in 1682. Among the authors influenced by Browne's writings are R.D. Laing, W.G. Sebald, E.M. Forster, and Jorge Luis Borges. Browne's major works are notable for their extensive references to America less than 150 years after Christopher Columbus' voyages of discovery.

In 1658 Browne published his Hydriotaphia, Urn Burial. Inspired by Bronze Age burials in Norfolk this discourse reflected on funerary customs of the world, and touched on a 21st century preoccupation, the transitory nature of earthly fame and reputation. Among the writers expressing admiration for Urn Burial were John Cowper Powys, James Joyce and Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the same year Browne published The Garden of Cyrus which examines the quincunx, a five-pointed diamond shape which he believed existed throughout nature.


This quincunx pattern determines the geometry of the artwork, with the marble eye and brain, which are seen in my photos, forming two of the points of the diamond. The work comprises twenty pieces of sculpture and twenty-two lights, and the sculptures are designed to be sat on, touched and used as furniture. Anne and Patrick Poirier are internationally renown both for their gallery installations and their public works, and they have also worked with composers of electronic music.


Composer William Alwyn was born in 1905, and lived in Blythburgh, near Aldeburgh, from 1960 until his death in 1985 . His musical style was a unique mix of romanticism and modernism, he used dissonance extensively and developed his own Indian inspired alternative to serialism which divided the twelve semitones of the scale into two groups.

Alwyn's Fifth Symphony was commissioned by the Arts Council for the 1973 Norfolk & Norwich Triennial Festival, where it was premiered with Alwyn conducting. Although the symphony is dedicated to Sir Thomas Browne and quotations from Urn Burial are used in the score the work is not programmatic. It compresses the traditional four-movement into a concise one-movement work lasting just 16 minutes.

We are very fortunate to have Anne and Partick Poirier's 'Homage to Thomas Browne' here in Norwich, and we are also fortunate to have a first-class recording of Alwyn's Fifth Symphony in the catalogue. It is available in Richard Hickox and the London Symphony Orchestra's 3 CD set (audio samples available via that link) of Alwyn's complete symphonies on Chandos. Producer Brian Couzens captures remarkably vivid sound in All Saints Tooting. This Chandos Alwyn set is highly recommended, as is the Lyrita recording of his opera Miss Julie. For budget buyers, Naxos also have Alwyn's symphonies in their catalogue, and their new release of his chamber music and songs has been well reviewed.


Now follow this path for more evidence that art works.
All pictures copyright On An Overgrown Path. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk