Is ‘Less’ Really ‘More’?

[Serial_Apologist]

In music, repetition is interesting. The finales of such as Arnold's 6th or DSCH 5 hammer on and on, but you would never say a note was wasted in both intense, concise structures.
Was the Beethoven 6 (i) proto-minimalist development prolix? Surely not.

Stravinsky was quoted as saying "If I had my sway, I would do away with the development sections in Mozart symphonies - they would be fine then"; which would leave just the expositions and recapitulations, reducing sonata form back to its binary origins. No sooner have you entered the house by the front door when you are facing the back door. It has often been said that composers used repetition because, in the ages before recording was invented, hearing the material or tune would quite probably for concert goers be the first and only time. This might suggest an alternative explanation to unequivocal "and they all lived happily ever after" or "life would never seem the same again" endings for recapitulations and cyclic forms.

How do you decide, or feel, that just-so-many repetitions become too many? If you find a minimalist work devoid of meaning in its varied or unvaried repetitions you probably haven't understood it.

That would depend on how one interpreted the meaning and intention of the composer, wouldn't it? What was innovative and attention-sustaining in early Minimalist works such as Reich's "Drumming" was that the gradual processes of rhythmic and metrical transformation brought about through varying the pacing of the parts, combined with the harmonic stasis, brought about a sensation of removal from chronological time in the listener and quasi-Buddhist sense of identification with music that was "not going anywhere" - one that had become rare and mainly siphoned off into the slow sections of otherwise formally narrative/goal directed music in the post-Renaissance Western tradition, which now identified with the new spirit of being on top of things (nature included) upon which capitalism only could bring "success". Later Minimalism tended to revert to narrative- enharmonic-directed desiderata, which is one of the reasons some of us choose not to understand it!

[Serial_Apologist]

I've certainly read about jazz musicians who suggest the silences in the music are as important as the played notes. I guess this would fit with the ethos of less is more.

In jazz, while clearly there are various musical signs and conventions governing the parameters within which improvising jazz musicians think creatively, I would argue that there is always a tacit expectation of what comes next carrying forward the direction and energy of the music so far, and if within that expectation lies some hope that that next thing could be unexpected - not in the Beckettian sense of needing always to be prepared for disaster to descend, but in the relatively safe sense that needs the music to renew itself if it is to be emblematic of change for the better in general - then one is to an extent on tenterhooks. In those silences lie possibilities encouraged by intimate critical listening, celebrating creative interactivity and conviviality. I think that is always there in the "best" jazz, although in some high energy forms it can become highly compressed in a forging crucible of discharged conjoint energies in which release takes on a primacy over second-by-second minutiae of detail, and the listener "trusts" in the authority he or she has already invested in these particular musicians to lead the way safely through unknown territory. The idea that spontaneity needn't be at odds with intelligence and coherence is of deeply spiritual significance to those who entertain it, even though it is probably at odds with the Western Judaeo-Christian ethos of physical and emotional sublimation - up to the advent of Pentecostalist practices, that is. But that is another subject!

[jayne lee wilson]

Stravinsky was quoted as saying "If I had my sway, I would do away with the development sections in Mozart symphonies - they would be fine then"; which would leave just the expositions and recapitulations, reducing sonata form back to its binary origins. No sooner have you entered the house by the front door when you are facing the back door. It has often been said that composers used repetition because, in the ages before recording was invented, hearing the material or tune would quite probably for concert goers be the first and only time. This might suggest an alternative explanation to unequivocal "and they all lived happily ever after" or "life would never seem the same again" endings for recapitulations and cyclic forms.



That would depend on how one interpreted the meaning and intention of the composer, wouldn't it? What was innovative and attention-sustaining in early Minimalist works such as Reich's "Drumming" was that the gradual processes of rhythmic and metrical transformation brought about through varying the pacing of the parts, combined with the harmonic stasis, brought about a sensation of removal from chronological time in the listener and quasi-Buddhist sense of identification with music that was "not going anywhere" - one that had become rare and mainly siphoned off into the slow sections of otherwise formally narrative/goal directed music in the post-Renaissance Western tradition, which now identified with the new spirit of being on top of things (nature included) upon which capitalism only could bring "success". Later Minimalism tended to revert to narrative- enharmonic-directed desiderata, which is one of the reasons some of us choose not to understand it!

I guess "understanding" can be a difficult word with music.... clear enough with say sonata, but it isn't so much the creator's intentions I'm thinking about, but if and how I perceive the sonic structure, the sound in the air, before me.... can I feel or discern, structurally, dynamically or otherwise, some shape or form or movement, or the meaningful lack of it? Eliane Radigue's Occam Ocean series speaks to me, but not in a way I could easily articulate.

Interesting from Stravinsky. Schubert and Mozart especially wrote anti-developments - brief passages between lengthy elaborate expositions and recaps.
The Schubert 2nd with the expo repeat can seem like hearing three vast highly eventful expositions, you get to the recap and think "did I miss something here?"
(The development is there, but blink and you'll....) But Schubert still doesn't sound to me like "too many notes"...

Yet he created richly eventful developments in his 8th and 9th, as Mozart did in his later Symphonies too.... I don't think Igor would have sacrificed those.

[Padraig]

....

I thought I heard eighthobstruction say, more or less, " enough is as good as a feast"

[Serial_Apologist]

I guess "understanding" can be a difficult word with music.... clear enough with say sonata, but it isn't so much the creator's intentions I'm thinking about, but if and how I perceive the sonic structure, the sound in the air, before me.... can I feel or discern, structurally, dynamically or otherwise, some shape or form or movement, or the meaningful lack of it? Eliane Radigue's Occam Ocean series speaks to me, but not in a way I could easily articulate.

One is still in the act of interpreting the composer's intentions, though, I would have thought: why did Beethoven suddenly modulate up a semitone in the finale of his Eighth Symphony and hammer away at it before suddenly returning to the tonic and continue hammering on towards his excited conclusion to the work? One could find better examples, but here I feel he was having a game, teasing us listeners who feel somehow disconcerted without knowing why, and then realising with Beethoven's punchline that we'd been in the "wrong key". I think much if not most musical appreciation arrives at broad consensus by way of conventions and circumventions of this kind, and "successful" composers work on this premise, so that when they don't they risk misunderstanding and rejection; we may need to surmise our ways more deeply into what their motives may be, or have been - which for me is very difficult with "old music" as I've said previously here. Many of our generation (yours and mine if I'm not mistaken) had to adjust to changing realities around us by way of seriously uncompromising confrontations with received opinions we may have taken as truths, and these within the sixty or seventy years of our own lives: how much more difficult to identify with the complexes of convention-challenging intellection that made, say, a Monteverdi or a Josquin (to cite the present COTW!) An educated young woman living in Afghanistan today would have a better understanding than me, I think! I tend to go with the profound insights of Roberto Gerhard, someone closer to my own age, where he wrote (in 1961):

"Whether there is communication and, if so, what it amounts to, is evidently very much a matter of speculation. But in that case, what is meant by rapport between composer and listener? [...] [A]ny phenomenon that is bound to the péripatie of a given temporal cycle or life-span and has, therefore, a beginning, a period of growth and an end, can be said to be dramatic in essence: the life-cycle of a blade of grass, the course of an avalanche, the impact of a drop of rain on a sheet of water, no less than the life-span of a tune or of a symphony. The 'drama' is, of course, in the mind of man, the beholder. This is the level at which the listener's mind must be engaged. I believe in plunging the listener straight away in medias res and keeping him there. In other words, the vital affair for me is to hold his attention. This is my life's life-line. The moment it snaps, my work dies.

...

"Until the work of music come alive in the mind of the listener, my score is but the possibility, the promise of a work. In order to arise in the mind of the listener it must become, eventuate, actualise in time. It is never there all of a piece, since it only comes into being as a temporal succession. In order to achieve its particular kind of existence and wholeness, the work has therefore got to be lived through in its total life-span. As long as the listener's attention is held the composer may do anything he likes: the one thing he cannot afford to do is bore his listener and lose him on the way. Because the moment his attention lapses, be it only for a few bars, there is no knowing what ruin this may cause in the sequel, how many bars may be irretrievably blotted out in the listener's consciousness, as a result of that momentary eclipse of attention.

"Whereas in the experience of a work of music 'communication' must remain, probably for ever, an unknown quantity, attention can be directly 'observed'; if it were necessary, it would perhaps even be measured. Is is therefore a much more objective datum on which to base and to gauge one's rapport with the listener. But it is far more than that. Attention - deep, sustained, undeviating - is in itself an experience of a very high order. There seems to be a direct relation between the quality of a work of art and the quality of the attention it elicits in the perceiver. We know that it is the works which have held our attention most strongly, that we can bear to experience most often. The work to which I can listen time and time again with ever renewed freshness of approach and a seemingly inexhaustible sense of discovery, is also the work which seems to prove my capacity for inexhaustible attention. This is indeed a happy match, and not a little mysterious.m I certainly do not profess to know what it takes to achieve this rare captivation. Yet I have often thought that, when it does occur, it is as if the listener in his turn had been able to achieve a degree of detachment in the act of perception matching that of the composer in the act of origination. The listener's mind is emptied of all the petty preoccupations of the day; on exceptional occasions it may even succeed in temporarily suspending that feeling of separateness which we call our individuality. Detachment in the composer, matched by detachment in the listener, thus results paradoxically in the strongest bond between the two.

"The social side of man has been defined as that part of the person which is entirely 'made up of other people', in other words, of borrowed patterns of behaviour, mostly unconsciously imitative. The feeling of being different - an oppressive feeling at most times - is perhaps what drive some people to become artists. Yet in that stage of perfect detachment which a great work of art can induce, both originator and perceiver seem, on the contrary, to find access to that part of ourselves where we are all essentially the same, but where the common ground lies far beyond the plane of superficial social conformity. I believe that this is one of the major aims of every true work of art". (Gerhard R, The Composer and his Audience, in Twentieth Century Music - a Symposium, Ed Rollo Myers, Calder, London 1960, PP52-54).

Apols for any unrecognised errors, not writing "sic" after all refs in the text excluding the female half of humanity (such was the norm in them days) and to Mr Gerhard for any misrepresentation through truncation

Interesting from Stravinsky. Schubert and Mozart especially wrote anti-developments - brief passages between lengthy elaborate expositions and recaps.
The Schubert 2nd with the expo repeat can seem like hearing three vast highly eventful expositions, you get to the recap and think "did I miss something here?"
(The development is there, but blink and you'll....) But Schubert still doesn't sound to me like "too many notes"...

Yet he created richly eventful developments in his 8th and 9th, as Mozart did in his later Symphonies too.... I don't think Igor would have sacrificed those.

By the time we are getting onto Mozart's and Schubert's last symphonies etc were are both inaugurating and anticipating the much greater organic continuity between formal sections which would dissolve all such sectionalism in those of Brahms. The latter would probably have interested Stravinsky less even than Beethoven's - Igor was what has been described as an "additive" composer, who just starts composing - at one stage writing on score paper pasted around the walls of his studio, diverting from time to time to pianos at each end of the room for checking purposes, regarding the work as finished on re-reaching the entrance door, and leaving form and overall shape to the inspiration of the moment. From jy own experience of Gerhard's later, much less Stravinsky-influenced sound-world, an use of serial techniques, that he (like Schoenberg) had reached or grown into a stage of truly "inhabiting" his own musical universe to the extent of living and breathing it; but we have to have very lofty ideals of how far the creative imagination can function spontaneously through such disciplines, and meanwhile just keep "taking the music!".

[jayne lee wilson]

Fascinating read, SA, thanks - I hadn't seen that from Gerhard before.

But I don't hear Brahms as "dissolving all sectionalism" - simply because his forms are still recognisably classical and their foregrounded Brahmsian structures meaningful against those backgrounds. So in 4(i) it sounds like we're going into an exposition repeat - but the music dives off suddenly into a very dense & eventful development.
His expositions are indeed very fluid, and based on several themes and motifs - yet there is often a recognisable 2nd-subject function somewhere within them....
Slow movements are again, often highly elaborated and dramatised songforms.....or Brahms appeals further back to the earlier music of which he was a great scholar, and uses a Chaconne for the 4th's finale, but with a brilliantly conceived sense of sonata-reprise, climaxing and conclusion...a multi-layering of classical and earlier forms, if you will.

Perhaps one could evoke this finale as an example of "more-is-more" ..

***
OK! Off to settle down for the Prom now...

[Keraulophone]

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In ‘Wolf Hall’ (BBC2) …

Lesser is More.


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[edashtav]

Let’s take two contemporaries who were born in 1866: Satie and Busoni.

I imagine that we might all agree that Satie offered less and that was more, and that any more would have meant less.

But what of Busoni? Early on he wrote his piano concerto, almost the definition of more equals less and then he added double octaves in Mozart Concerti and claimed that more was correct; yet later his avowed aesthetic espoused the principle that less was more, did it not?

[Braunschlag]

Mahler- less is definitely more