Violating a hive of bees

I've just had some dinner and am distracting myself from continuing an essay (due on Tuesday) analyzing the history of, and original source material for, Bach's Cantata BWV 17, by pursuing a much pleasanter writing assignment. Not that studying Bach's original manuscripts and deriving appropriate implications from them isn't interesting; it's just nightmare-inducing, whereas writing a blog isn't.

Time has flown by since I returned from a great few weeks in New Zealand, where I spent Christmas and New Year with family and then watched my sister get married in a beautiful ceremony in my home town, Dunedin. In typical Dunedin fashion, the weather did not rise to the occasion, but the rain held off even though it was cool and overcast and you couldn't have asked for anything more.

The day after the wedding I was yet again on the first of many planes heading halfway around the world. No trouble with flights or airports...until Los Angeles, of course, which has been the bane of my traveling life for the last few years. Six years ago, when I finished a two year degree at the University of Oregon, my status as a student was mistakenly recorded as "terminated" instead of "completed". Because of this error, made entirely by the university, I have since been flagged on the US immigration system as a 'student status violator'; hilarious when telling people about it (particularly musicians, who like to adapt it to 'violinator'), but not pleasant at all when having to actually go through LA customs. Each time I go through, they tell me I'm required to go to secondary inspection, where they question me about the issue and all is fine. My passport is stamped and off I go. An irritating waste of time, but nothing to get too fussed about. Until this time, that is, when the delay caused by the secondary inspection caused me to miss my next flight out of LA to Indianapolis, and I was made to pay to get on a new flight. And this was after I'd been told a few months earlier by the University of Oregon that it had all been sorted and I was no longer flagged on the system. Lies. So I emailed the university again after finally making it back to Bloomington, and they responded saying "This red flag was supposed to have been removed when your status was changed from 'terminated' to 'completed', however sometimes the system isn't 100% full-proof (sic)." Brilliant. So now I have to wait again, and I'll probably be told again that I'm finally off the system, and it'll probably all be lies again. After all this time I don't think I'll ever get off the system. James Andrewes - student status violator; this will be what defines me to US security for ever.

After that outrageous experience though, life has returned to normal in Bloomington and I am busier than ever. The cantata class that I'm taking is full-on, with two-week cycles of cantata analysis, performances and essays. Then I'm taking violin lessons, baroque orchestra and a class on classical performance practice. Add to that an upcoming performance outside university of Bach's triple violin concerto BWV 1064, a performance of Monteverdi's Vespers with the University Early Music ensemble Concentus, and a bunch of other performances throughout the semester, and I'm as busy as a hive of bees. Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention all the scanning work that I have to do for one of the music professors here. Tedious, but kind of fun getting to see all the different scores and articles that I hadn't previously known about.

All this while battling a rather chilly winter; temperatures have recently been as low as -11 Celcius, and I'm pretty much wrapped up in coat, hat, gloves and scarf most days. Brrr and grrr in equal measure.

You say tomayto...I say ANGER!!!

This is a rant about various abuses and mispronunciations of the English language that cause me to cringe inside so much that I have to consciously restrain myself from screaming out loud. I know that even writing about this stuff is going to be testing my nervous system to its limits.

1. Mischievious

...is NOT a word! The word is MISCHIEVOUS! If you can't spot the difference, look harder. You don't say "that boy is getting up to a lot of mis-CHEEF", so why do you say "mis-cheev-ious" as if it rhymes with "devious"? There is NO "i" in the suffix of the word, it has three syllables and the accent is on the first part of the word!

2. Mispronounciation

...is NOT a word, and makes you look really stupid when you're complaining about other people's mispronunciation.

3. Klu Klux Klan

...should be Ku Klux Klan, people. And Americans should really know this.

4. Nucular

Rrrrnghnghnghngh, ANGER!!!!! New-clear. New-clear. New-clear. It's not hard!

5. I heart...

Why the hell has this become so trendy? What's wrong with I love, for Christ's sake? Was it just that movie, I heart Huckabees? Or something else?

6. Mother and baby

...as in "mother and baby are fine". I guess this is a genuine phrase in itself and not really an abuse of the language, but taking out the 'the' before 'baby' (or should it be before 'mother'?) makes me shudder every time I hear it. There's something really unnatural about it.

7. Schedule

This one doesn't really cause me to cringe, and it's one that will provoke some disagreement, but I have always found its pronunciation of 'shed-jil' to be bizarre and unnecessarily complex for the mouth. I'm with the Americans on this one, with 'sked-jil'. Looking up the dictionary, I can find only one other common 'sch' word that is pronounced 'sh' (excluding Germanic words): schist, as opposed to school, scholar, schizophrenic, schooner, scheme etc etc etc. Perhaps schist should be changed too.

8. Less

...when fewer is correct; as in, "there are less people in Dunedin than in Wellington". It's really not hard to learn that fewer goes with the plural, and less goes with the singular.

As far as American pronunciation goes, I've spent so much time over here that I've adjusted to many of the strange words, but some of them still make me twitch a little. Here are a few of those words which I don't think I can ever bring myself to say the American way with a straight face:

• oregano, with the accent on the second syllable

• garage, as though rhyming with mirage (although this is actually more French, which is appropriate)

• advertisement, with the accent on the first syllable. This one's easily resolved, though, by just saying ad.

• glacier, pronounced 'glay-shuh'

• vase, to rhyme with lace

• coupon, as if it has a y after the c.

• apricot, with the first syllable rhyming with map

• Aussie, with an s sound in the middle, rather than a z sound

If I eventually think of some more good ones, I'll add them in later. While writing this blog, I actually found an interesting page on wikipedia about the linguistic differences between American and British English. It's quite interesting - check it out!

Differences between American and British pronunciation

And now, I humbly submit this blog and await with interest the people who point out all the mistakes I've made within it's sentences.

Measuring oranges correctly

So, my last blog on unsatisfactory endings with reference to certain pieces of music elicited a quick response from my good friend Go. Before I respond, I just have to say that I thought my blog was fairly long, but his response takes about 5 hours to scroll down - he may have been influenced by the epic proportions of the Lord of the Rings movies, which we watched back to back in their entirety late last year. Incidentally, the Lord of the Rings is another example of something with an awful end - half an hour of Frodo's friends coming in one by one to his bedroom and either bouncing with joy on his bed or giving him deep and profound looks.

I digress. Go challenged my comments; in comparing my opinion of an ideal last movement to what Mozart wrote for his violin concerti, I was "trying to measure the weight of an orange with a ruler" (which technically can be done, if the ruler puts aside his country's needs for a few moments and picks up a pair of scales). He said that ending a movement with a graceful dance was part of the "spirit of the times"; Mozart merely writing within that spirit. "Think of the Chaconne", Go urged, which came at the end of a suite or French opera act in Baroque times. I'm not sure I entirely agree with his logic here. The Chaconne and other Baroque dances were part of suites, or large scale works that prominently featured movements clearly referencing dance styles, like Bach's Passions. The Chaconne worked so well as a final dance, because it was the grand culmination of other dances, and thus faithful to the whole work. In Baroque times, a composer would not have written a suite consisting of an Allemande, a Courante, a Sarabande, a Gigue, and then finished with a triumphant sonata-rondeau with five minute apotheosis. Even if they had that form, they wouldn't have chosen to finish with it - it would have been entirely inappropriate and out of style. So why is it appropriate that a Classical concerto, with a sonata form first movement and lyrical slow movement should end with a minuet? It just doesn't feel right (to me)!

As a third movement, a minuet is fine (there's nothing wrong with a minuet, by the way - it's how it's used in context that I'm talking about), but then a third movement minuet is typically followed by a fourth movement, in symphonic and string quartet form at least. It's this fourth movement that finally and satisfyingly completes the package. I will say that Mozart's fifth concerto is a slight exception - although the last movement starts with a minuet, he interrupts it with the awesome Turkish dance: in a way he combines third and fourth movement styles all in one. So Mozart's stock goes back up a little with the existence of the fifth concerto. He was starting to know what he was doing by this stage.

So then, let's measure the weight of an orange with a pair of scales, and compare Mozart's violin concerti with his piano concerti. I'm not familiar with all of the piano concerti, but the several that I do know - mostly the late ones in the 20s - end not with a minuet but with a fully elaborate sonata rondeau. In my opinion this is a much more satisfactory ending in keeping with the spirit of the music; because it's not so much the spirit of the times that counts for me as it is the spirit of the music. A minuet may have been within the spirit of the times, but placing it as a final movement, following on from such great first movements, does not do it for me.

I will admit to one thing, though. No matter how much one might consider a piece bad, when it comes down to it, any such piece can be taken by the hands of a phenomenal musician and turned into gold. Go also mentioned in his blog some of his favourite pieces - amongst them were Beethoven's Spring Sonata, Romance in F, Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Dvorak's American string quartet, works at which I cringe even to see them written down. But just because these pieces have been butchered by every twelve year old student round the world does not mean that they aren't really good pieces. Even the most overplayed piece by young violinists ever - Monti's Czardas - can be turned into one of the most brilliant pieces of music making I've ever seen:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-0sH720yYE

Dunny talk

Has anyone ever wondered why we call going to the toilet to urinate "a number one" and to defecate "a number two"? I mean, 'two' at least rhymes with poo, but 'one' does not rhyme with wees, or piss, or tinkle or anything. I propose we make a change. A 'number one' can be for diarrhoea. A 'number two' can be for taking a crap. And a 'number three' can be for taking a leak. Then you can say "I'm off to do ones, twos and threes, or runs, poos and wees."

In conclusion

In an earlier post, I mentioned my irritation at certain pieces of music having (in my opinion), less than satisfying conclusions. A certain friend of mine disagreed with some of the choices I made, calling me a douche! So I rise to the challenge of explaining myself a bit further, so as not to come across as making sweeping statements backed up by no reasoning. 

"Every story should have a beginning, middle and end", goes the famous quote. And if any of those three elements aren't up to scratch, you've lost your reader. A bad beginning means the reader is not hooked and the book is put gently back on the shelf. A bad middle means the reader's interest is not sustained, resulting in a big yawn and the book being somewhat disappointedly put aside. And, worst of all, a bad end results in either a groan, cry or angry scream and the book is violently thrown at the nearest wall. I speak from experience. I will reveal the book shortly. This fundamental principle of the three elements of storytelling applies to many art forms: novels, poetry, movies ... and of course music. When all three are achieved to perfection then whatever it is, be it book, movie or music, is almost guaranteed to be remembered. 

So, time for some examples, both positive and negative. Let us begin with the aforementioned book (plot spoilers follow), which ended its poor life with a broken spine at the foot of my bedroom wall. The unfortunate novel is Jodi Picoult's "My Sister's Keeper", which, to my disbelief, won a rave following around the world and was turned into a movie. It is even regarded as her best book by many people. In this book, a young girl, Anna, is intentionally conceived, through in vitro fertilization, to be a donor for her older sister, who suffers from leukemia. Throughout her childhood years, Anna has had many operations in order to keep her sister alive, and eventually, seemingly fed up, decides to sue her parents for the right to her own body, so that she can opt out of donating her kidney. This thorny moral issue, viewed from many angles, is the central premise of the book, and is sufficiently gripping to sustain the reader's interest throughout. So far, so good - until we hit the final couple of chapters. As with many of Jodi Picoult's novels, a tense court case results in a controversial verdict - in this case, Anna wins and is no longer legally required to aid her sister. To me this was highly satisfying and an appropriate conclusion to the case, given all the arguments. Then, Picoult makes her appalling mistake - in a shock twist, Anna is killed in a car crash, resulting in her kidney being donated to her older sister anyway. After all that, after 500 or so pages of compelling debate and of really warming to the characters, Picoult completely cops out, chickens out, wimps out of following the implication of the verdict through to its organic conclusion (the older sister's death) and instead delivers the most cheesy, pathetic, sob-into-the-hanky ending you could possibly dream of. In another twist it is also revealed that the older sister in fact told Anna to sue her parents in the first place, because she didn't want Anna to go through with the kidney donation; thus the ending is doubly outrageous because it betrays both main characters. In a slightly happy footnote to this sad tale, the movie version altered the book's ending, and concluded properly, with the older sister's death. I say 'slightly happy' footnote, because the rest of the movie was plain awful. 

So, what's an example of a really satisfying end? Let me use a movie to illustrate: The Vanishing, a Dutch film made in 1989. In this movie, a young couple are travelling through Europe and stop at a gas station for a break. The woman, Saskia goes in to get a couple of drinks while her partner, Rex, waits. Saskia never comes back; she has mysteriously vanished, and no one knows what has happened to her ... apart from one man; her abductor, Raymond. We learn of her abductor right from the beginning, though we have no idea what he's done to her, or whether she's dead or alive. Rex begins, without any leads, an obsessive search for the truth. Three years later he's still clueless, but can not let go. At this time, Raymond, the abductor, contacts Rex, admitting that he's the one who took Saskia, and asking to meet Rex to explain. Eventually they do meet, and after outlining how he took Saskia and why, Raymond says that he will only reveal what happened to her if Rex drinks some drugged coffee: when he wakes up, Raymond promises, he will learn the truth by experiencing it himself. But if he doesn't drink it, he will never know the truth. Rex drinks the coffee, because he simply has to know - he is prepared to take the consequences, whatever they may be, for the love of Saskia. You'll have to see the movie to find out what happens when he does indeed wake up, but it's one of the best endings I've ever seen: completely truthful to the characters and the themes of the movie. Like a Shakespearean tragedy, the characters are undone by their own flaws, and in Rex's case, his obsessive love propels him to his fate. 

So, I guess in my opinion, a good ending is one that remains true to the beginning and middle that came before it. It stays in character, it is organic and natural. It doesn't cheat, take shortcuts or leave you with a bad taste in your mouth.  

Music is exactly the same, and here we come to the reason I started this blog. I often find that composers use their best, most beautiful and most powerful ideas for the first movement and slow movement of a large scale piece, and then fizzle out at the last movement, tossing off something trite in a seeming effort to get the piece finished. For me a good example is ... shock, horror ... the Mendelssohn violin concerto. The last movement just doesn't cut the mustard for me. The piece is so well known that you couldn't imagine anything else as the third movement, but still, it seems to me a superficial movement compared to the first two. I feel similarly about the third movements of Mozart's violin concertos, although I just re-listened to number four, and didn't feel so strongly against the last movement as I used to. They're charming and put a little smile on your face, but there's something about that that's vaguely unsatisfying. Perhaps it's that they're unashamedly happy and carefree. I remember Monica Huggett saying in a masterclass that she can't stand relentlessly happy music. I concur. 

By the way, I've been staring at the screen for the last two hours, trying to figure out how to conclude this blog, so I'm starting to understand how difficult it is to finish something. Aha, I know - I'll just toss it off with something trivial, like this: 

FINIS

No douchey minuets for me, thank you very much

Each year on New Year's Day, New Zealand's national classical radio station counts down the top 50 pieces of classical music, as voted for by the public. Here were the top 10 for this past year:

10. Elgar: Cello Concerto

9. Allegri: Miserere

8. Beethoven: Symphony No. 6

7. Bach: Mass in B minor

6. Beethoven: Piano Concerto No. 5

5. Bruch: Violin Concerto No. 1

4. Strauss: Four Last Songs

3. Handel: Messiah

2. Mozart: Clarinet Concerto

1. Vaughan-Williams: The Lark Ascending

Pretty standard stuff, which doesn't change much from year to year; the Vaughan-Williams has been number one for most of the last 10 years that they've done the countdown. But this list has caused me to ponder what my choices would be. The top 10 pieces of classical music ever; surely an impossible task! The ten on the above list are certainly all masterpieces, perhaps with the exception of the Allegri, which is beautiful, but nonetheless based on repetition, and pretty much never performed with the divisions/elaborations that would make it more interesting. 

I think, instead of passing judgment on music and coming up with the top 10 pieces, I will endeavour to list some of my favourite pieces ever, in a variety of genres: Here goes!

Symphony

Shostakovich 11, which really has to be heard live to appreciate fully. I remember hearing it for the first time at the Aspen Music Festival in 1999. Halfway through the second movement, as it builds to the shattering evocation of the 1905 Bloody Sunday massacre at the Winter Palace, St Petersburg, the entire percussion section stood up as one, moved forward to their instruments, raised their sticks ... and then launched into the musical violence. It was unbelievable. 

Mozart 41. Brilliant and exciting from beginning to end. 

Concerto

Saint-Saëns: Piano Concerto No. 2

Bach: Violin Concerto in E Major

Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 2

Shostakovich: Violin Concerto No. 1

Mozart: Piano Concerto no. 23 in A Major

Sibelius: Violin Concerto

Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 4

Hmm, I'm rather biased towards violin and piano! One of the main irritants in concertos (and in fact any music) for me is the lack of a satisfying last movement. Which is why none of Mozart's violin concertos, with their douchey minuets, make the list. Nor the Beethoven violin concerto, with its annoying rondo. 

Chamber Music

Beethoven: String Quartet Op. 132

Haydn: String Quartet Op. 76 No. 2 "Fifths"

Schumann: String Quartet Op. 41 No. 3

Tchaikovsky: Piano Trio in A minor

Chausson: Piano Trio in G minor

Again, these were chosen because they're beautiful, powerful, and complete packages - not just a piece with a great first movement or a great slow movement.

Sonatas

Bach: Sonata for solo violin in D minor, BWV 1004

Beethoven: Piano Sonata in F minor "Appassionata"

Brahms: Violin Sonata in G Major

Enescu: Violin Sonata No. 3 in A minor

Choral/Vocal Music

Bach: St Matthew Passion

Pärt: Stabat Mater

Lasso: Prophetiae Sibyllarum

Monteverdi: Lamento della Ninfa

Lotti: Crucifixus à 8

Schumann: Dichterliebe

R. Strauss: 'Morgen'

Tavener: Song for Athene

There are of course, hundreds of other individual arias, movements, cantatas, character pieces which are so amazing and beautiful and should be on any list. But I'll stop there. It's so damn difficult to narrow it down. I'm listening to the Lark Ascending while I'm writing this, and really, it should be on my list too - as should most of the pieces on the New Zealand list. Some of them, like Messiah, and the Bruch violin concerto, are so overplayed that they become nauseating, but the fact is they're so popular because they're so good. TOO MUCH GOOD MUSIC IN THE WORLD - AAAARGGHHH!