BBCSSO/Volkov szymanowski/lutoslawski 17/01/13 19:30 HRS

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

something which haunts so many creators, the worry that all they have done may be worthless, forgotten by the future. (Surely even more true of post-war composers, with the fragmentation of means and open ends, the constant arguments about valid compositional methods, from the serialism, the "new complexity", to the current fad for the "accessible").

Sorry; called away, so didn't address this. Whilst it wouldn't surprise me if Artists weren't as prone as the rest of us to those long, dark teatimes of the soul where everything seems pointless, the ones I have met (Lutoslawski, Birtwistle, Carter, Ferneyhough, Barrett, Lachenmann, Norgard, Rebecca Saunders) aren't really worried about the future - they're too involved in the astonishing world of creation, working towards their individual vision, totally involved in the act of composition. Young composers, or those with no truly individual ideas of their own may well swept away by tidal bores of angst, but those who know what their work is going to communicate are more concerned with getting on and achieving it: that takes up quite enough of thier energies. As Elliott Carter once said "Once I knew what it was I wanted to compose, the point was to get the work done."

Especially since the time of Modernism, a work of art has always seemed a comment on what precedes it, especially within a given artist's oeuvre. That tension in Lutoslawski between the violence, the physical experience of disintegration in Livre or Mi-Parti, or the loose, orbiting fragments of the 2nd Symphony's 1st section, then the fading of its end; and the attempt to form meaningfully resolved structures like the 3rd Symphony,or narrative "Chains" in the classically laid-out Piano Concerto; isn't this conflict the classic modern dilemma - the undermining DOUBT that meaning can be found at all, whatever your creative choices or impulses?

No. I don't hear that at all: I hear the creation of meaning, not a failed attempt to "find" it. I hear violence balanced with lyricism; the drama of conflict, and the refusal to submit to repression. I can't hear the composer writing out his uncertainty - I hear his revelling in the expressive power of his materials and what they enable him to achieve.

I think that is why some of us enjoy it - because it seems thrillingly, ( ) uncomfortably, ( ) true ( ).
(Apart, of course, from the sheer, meaningless, sonic thrill...)

Absolutely: no doubt about it!

[jayne lee wilson]

The Hamlet thing is Ophelia, in Act 4 Scene 5. ("Good night ladies", etc...)

We differ essentially in two things here.
Beethoven scratching out and revising, Boulez endlessly revising, elaborating, enlarging, orchestrating, Paul Valery saying "a poem is never finished, only abandoned". Poor Bruckner's endless agonies of well-meaning friends, endless revisions.... I don't - in all honesty - see this as a confident quest for perfection, but something closer to, yes, "fail better" - that is, the feeling that it's JUST NOT GOOD ENOUGH. The worry that those "friends" or inner doubting voices, might BE RIGHT! I feel that is part of what drives the better creators to change what they do, to make it new.
(Look at Pop music, where success so often dilutes the creative impulse - one or two great, inventive albums.. then repetition to please the hordes of fans... no pressure to change).

Then with "What Then?", that final question, for me, is almost sardonic in its address to the poem's narrative of a "Great Artist" figure who has seemingly achieved all worldly and artistic acclamation s/he might want. The ghost says, "Yes, you've got all this, but what's it really worth? To YOU, oh Great Artist?" It's something akin to Eliot's "fools approval stings, and honour stains". At the end, you look back - what then?

But then we come together after all - your "too involved in the act of creation... of composition" is very close to my view of "the now", the intensity of MAKING, not worrying about what may become of the made. Its Alexander Goehr saying that he didn't like being at the beginning or end of a composition, but "where one wants to be is somewhere in the middle"...

Neither of us can really know how "satisfied" Lutoslawski or any composer is after a given composition is "abandoned" to publication and performance. Nor do I think any of his mature works are "failed attempts" to find meaning. But I also find it hard to believe that any creative artist, revelling in their powers or not, would feel that pressure to write, paint or compose, if they were truly satisfied with what they'd just done; didn't feel that urge to change it, better it, move on; it's often what distinguishes the "classical" from the "popular". To "fail better" needn't mean you've achieved nothing.
It might seem off-the-cuff for Mahler to say "when I'm gone, if anything sounds wrong, change it". But doesn't it suggest again that haunting feeling that, for all his efforts, it was never quite right? That uncertainty (doubt if you (or I) like) about the order of the 6th Symphony's inner movements, and all that percussion Alma so hated in the 5th...
Maybe symphonies are never finished, only abandoned...

When I hear Lutoslawski's 3rd Symphony, for all my admiration and pleasure in it, I often feel that the end is just too neat: those 4 big chords again, the "in my end is my beginning" structure, the containment (the taming?) of the ad libitum sections just too obvious. The 4th gave me great difficulty at first: couldn't make sense of it. Was it just a fading echo? Hearing it again now (in the stunning new Chandos/Gardner recording) it seems like a challenge to the closed circle of No.3 - it's off the leash again, open-ended with no firm conclusions - as you say, challenging and mocking of itself. The very end is - what? Impatient for any more, a dismissive crash (oddly parallel to the Concerto for Orchestra, which seems to head for a triumph but doesn't). Just a noise... emotionally angry... or neutral?

It's experiences like these, where one work seems to undermine the other, that make me want to include "doubt" or "creative self-doubt" in my vocabulary of listening, in the struggle to try to articulate the response to music. But, after all the reading, the thinking, the composers' explanatory notes - all I have is my intuition, my imagination, my ear and my heart.

[ahinton]

Mon Dieu! Lots of issues here, as well as interesting ideas about them, from fgh and jlw!

The entire business of the extent (if any) to which composers think about the future fate of their work, especially in terms of generations of listeners after their deaths, is inevitably a minefield. Composers have really only had any kind of opportunity to think about this phenomenon since the days when music of the past began to become part of the listener's aural experience in any case; since then, some will almost certainly have been more preoccupied with this than others and for at least as many reasons as there have been composers. Lutyens once answered a question about this kind of thing by saying that the only works of hers in which she retained any interest were the one that she was working on and the one that she'd just completed - but then she said all manner of things and one might well be wisely advised to take some of them with several pinches of salt! Elliott Carter has said that he's not concerned with such matters, which doesn't of itself mean that he has no expectation that his music will be listened to "in 50 or 500 years' time" (a phrase Elgar is said to have used about about the possible fate of his incomplete Third Symphony when speculating that someone might come along and complete it or write a better one). Composers can obviously revise their works only during their own lifetimes, should they so choose; Boulez has seemed to be in an almost constant state of revision since the 1940s whereas RVW once said that if a work is in sufficient need of revision it's probably best to write a new one). Speaking from t'other side of the fence, I've very rarely revised anything that I've written, but that doesn't mean that I'd write like I did 20 years ago; I have disowned a lot of earlier stuff (as many other composers have also done) but by disposing of it permanently rather than trying to improve it.

The cases of Mahler, especially the instance of his doubts concerning the best order of the middle movement of his Sixth Symphony, are interesting, but sometimes composers tend to make off-the-cuff pronouncements that tend to get misunderstood and sometimes it might have been better had they kept their own counsel. To Mahler's "when I'm gone, if anything sounds wrong, change it" I'd have retorted "when I'm gone, if anything sounds wrong, it probably is and may be beyond repair, but then it would have been just the same while I was alive and might be the performer/s fault anyway!" - OK, it doesn't trip off the tongue so well, but...

Bruckner's falling prey far too much to the suggestions of others was reflected in part in Rachmaninov's and Elgar's gripping self-doubt, depressions, confidence crises and the rest; ultimately, however, their respective works suggest (to me, at least) that Bruckner came off the worst of the three in this.

Ultimately, I think that "self-doubt" is a many-splendoured thing and a coat of many colours rather than a hard-and-fast, black-and-white, plain-and-simple, one-size-fits-all phenomenon and can and does connote different things at different times and to different composers. Sometimes, but not always, "self-doubt" can be broadly synonymous with "self-criticism" and sometimes either can be constructive and positive whereas at others it can be the opposite. And then again, jlw's responses to the close of Luto 3 can be and indeed have been influenced by the experience of different performances.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Neither of us can really know how "satisfied" Lutoslawski or any composer is after a given composition is "abandoned" to publication and performance.

I agree completely: I've should have made clear that I'd met the composers I mentioned in Public arenas. There's no way of knowing their deeper anxieties unless they choose to reveal them.

Nor do I think any of his mature works are "failed attempts" to find meaning.

Then I misunderstood your "the attempt to form meaningfully resolved structures" - your use of "attempt" I thought was implying a lack of success.

But I also find it hard to believe that any creative artist, revelling in their powers or not, would feel that pressure to write, paint or compose, if they were truly satisfied with what they'd just done; didn't feel that urge to change it, better it, move on; it's often what distinguishes the "classical" from the "popular". To "fail better" needn't mean you've achieved nothing.

Indeed. But this raises the question as to why people create in the first place - it does seem to be a widespread if not universal instinct in children that is exorcised by others putting doubts into their minds, belittling their achievements. Those who continue making new works seem to be those for whom this instinct - and the pleasures derived from it - outweighs such bullying. The sense that they can "do better" is often/always there, but so is the sense that they can "do more", that "this is what I do": when one work is finished, the impulse/instinct to start the next is as much a spur as the sense that the one just finished is in some sense lacking.

But this is, I still believe, very different from the real "self-doubt" experienced by Ives, Elgar or Sibelius. This is the sort of crippling lack of self-belief that just leads to silence, to unfinished sketches, to burnt fin(n)ished Symphonies. From your use of "creative self-doubt" (which I think is a lot closer to my preferred "self-criticism" than without the positive qualifier), I think we're not that far apart in this respect.


(Oh, and the end of Part Two of The Waste Land is what prompted my association with Ophelia.)

[jayne lee wilson]

It's tangential, but just a point about Shelley's Ozymandias - surely Time mocks both the Tyrant's boasts, and the Art that the sculptor left behind, which now lies in ruins, and serves only to memorialise the artist's hated patron. Art and power locked, once again, in a corrupting embrace. (Its contemporary relevance is luridly obvious...) Art isn't seen as superior in the poem...

...but 200 years later the poem comes alive, every time we read it...

[teamsaint]

Just in case it didn't get discussed,(can't see it anywhere) Lutoslawski's Chain 2 got a run out on afternoon on 3 yesterday, BBCSO /Edward Gardner/Tasmin Little.
A captivating introduction to the composer for this listener .

[teamsaint]

It's tangential, but just a point about Shelley's Ozymandias - surely Time mocks both the Tyrant's boasts, and the Art that the sculptor left behind, which now lies in ruins, and serves only to memorialise the artist's hated patron. Art and power locked, once again, in a corrupting embrace. (Its contemporary relevance is luridly obvious...) Art isn't seen as superior in the poem...

...but 200 years later the poem comes alive, every time we read it...

[B][/B

it's an interesting comparison. I read the poem as being somewhat ambivolent about the artist. The remains of the work still show the artist's ability to demonstrate something of the personality of Ozymandias, so all the work was not in vain, and the artists talents and achievements are still, partially , there for us to see. The remaining parts of the work, in their degraded state now seem, ironically, to show the tyrant in his true colours, and a possibly a closer representation life than they were originally.

The poem is also an extraordinary comment on how so much of what we do is circumscribed by, or affected by the language we use around it.

[johnb]

Just in case it didn't get discussed,(can't see it anywhere) Lutoslawski's Chain 2 got a run out on afternoon on 3 yesterday, BBCSO /Edward Gardner/Tasmin Little.
A captivating introduction to the composer for this listener .

The Gardner/BBC SO/Chandos recordings of all the symphonies together with various other works are being broadcast throughout this week on Ao3. For those of us whose knowledge of WL's music is slim this is a fascinating opportunity.

[teamsaint]

[QUOTE=johnb;253026]The Gardner/BBC SO/Chandos recordings of all the symphonies together with various other works are being broadcast throughout this week on Ao3. For those of us whose knowledge of WL's music is slim this is a fascinating opportunity.[/QUOTE

Thanks Johnb, I missed that. I'll try to catch some more. Chains 2 was a great introduction for me.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

it's an interesting comparison. I read the poem as being somewhat ambivolent about the artist. The remains of the work still show the artist's ability to demonstrate something of the personality of Ozymandias, so all the work was not in vain, and the artists talents and achievements are still, partially , there for us to see. The remaining parts of the work, in their degraded state now seem, ironically, to show the tyrant in his true colours, and a possibly a closer representation life than they were originally.

The poem is also an extraordinary comment on how so much of what we do is circumscribed by, or affected by the language we use around it.

Indeed, Jayne's view is perfectly valid, and her pointing of the Napoleon connection is particularly powerful (as is the way this reached forward closer to our own time - DSCH and Stalin perhaps mosts resonantly for Musicians - in ways that Shelley could not have exactly imagined). But the sonnet is large: it contains multiples of significance; how powerful Art is, that even from fragments of an artefact an entire culture can be reconstructed in the imagination - the Beaker peoples, the poems of Sappho, pre-Socratic Greek sculptures. Imagination: the highest means known to the human psyche of getting into contact with the ultimate realities. (RS Thomas)


Apologies for the delay in replying: particularly heavy day yesterday.

[teamsaint]

Indeed, Jayne's view is perfectly valid, and her pointing of the Napoleon connection is particularly powerful (as is the way this reached forward closer to our own time - DSCH and Stalin perhaps mosts resonantly for Musicians - in ways that Shelley could not have exactly imagined). But the sonnet is large: it contains multiples of significance; how powerful Art is, that even from fragments of an artefact an entire culture can be reconstructed in the imagination - the Beaker peoples, the poems of Sappho, pre-Socratic Greek sculptures. Imagination: the highest means known to the human psyche of getting into contact with the ultimate realities. (RS Thomas)


Apologies for the delay in replying: particularly heavy day yesterday.

And that is without looking to (usefully) employ critical methods other than the close reading that most of us default to !!

It occurs to me that looking at literature is like looking at a sculpture...looks different in different lights,on different days, from different angles. Been back to this poem a time or two, and the "multiples of significance" are indeed a great part of the fascination and the beauty.

Hope today was not so heavy, Ferney.

[jayne lee wilson]

The Gardner/BBC SO/Chandos recordings of all the symphonies together with various other works are being broadcast throughout this week on Ao3. For those of us whose knowledge of WL's music is slim this is a fascinating opportunity.

The Chandos series is very good, so far I've heard the 2nd and 4th Symphonies and the Piano Concerto as 24-bit downloads. No.2 gets the performance of its life, superbly dramatic in "direct", with great density of tone. The recording... just stunning, tonally beautiful with a detailed, wide and deep (!) soundstage. The pps are at vanishing point yet miraculously clear. Wow!
The Classical Shop is probably the best source for Luto just now, with a wide range of lossless/hires downloads available, many titles whose CD availability is patchy at best. The Naxos Polish-sourced CDs are still about though.
Volume 3 in the Opera Omnia series (Accord) has the Preludes & Fugue plus the Oboe&Harp Concerto, highly recommended & great sound again, bit expensive on disc, £10 for the lossless flac.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Yes, Gardner's recordings are part of a great tradition (going back to the composer's and Wit on NAXOS) - they've reawakened my keenness for the composer.

For anyone wanting to start a Lutos collection at budget price there's this (form the man himself):

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lutoslawski-Symphonies-Concertos-etc-Witold/dp/B001BJ84BG/ref=sr_1_1?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1359060910&sr=1-1

... also available repackaged here:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lutoslawski-Polish-RNSO-Witold-Lutoslaw/dp/B001MUJSXM/ref=sr_1_4?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1359060910&sr=1-4

And, with some duplication, but with a fantastic performance of the 'cello Concerto and the String Quartet as well as the Preludes & Fugue jlw mentions:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lutoslawski-Polish-RNSO-Witold-Lutoslaw/dp/B001MUJSXM/ref=sr_1_4?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1359060910&sr=1-4

These were the first recordings I ever bought of WL's Music: a 5 LP EMI set. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive; to be young 'twas quite expensive!

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

Especially since the time of Modernism, a work of art has always seemed a comment on what precedes it, especially within a given artist's oeuvre. That tension in Lutoslawski between the violence, the physical experience of disintegration in Livre or Mi-Parti, or the loose, orbiting fragments of the 2nd Symphony's 1st section, then the fading of its end; and the attempt to form meaningfully resolved structures like the 3rd Symphony,or narrative "Chains" in the classically laid-out Piano Concerto; isn't this conflict the classic modern dilemma - the undermining DOUBT that meaning can be found at all, whatever your creative choices or impulses?

I think that is why some of us enjoy it - because it seems thrillingly, uncomfortably, true.
(Apart, of course, from the sheer, meaningless, sonic thrill...)

this is surely contradictory in that tiresome logical way that we pragmatists dislike so much ... is all we really say is that it works for me? ...

or did it work for me? in recent work i have been attempting to develop my understanding of the meaning of a life [summat older geezers are prone to consider] and find the remarks about self doubt and self criticism very pertinent; also the recurring reconstruction of why or how one has a had an effect of worth or not would seem to me a product of any aware mind in any field of endeavour .... and i know not which is more disconcerting ... the little worth of one's impact or the impossibility of knowing any meaning at all reducing the conception of worth to a vacancy in understanding/apprehension


in general i must say that i find relativism is ultimately a deeply depressing approach

[jayne lee wilson]

You call the views "tiresome" yet seem sympathetic to them... and I'm not sure precisely what it is you're calling "contradictory"... is it a contradiction to thrill to the physical impact of an orchestra, but still think about what the experience may represent in a wider context?

"Relativism" would seem inescapable now, in cultural terms and much else. Where can you escape it - in Religion or its parallels, perhaps? And look what's happening to THEM...

"Do I contradict myself? Very well,
Then I contradict myself. I am large,
I contain multitudes."
(Walt Whitman)