Ian - I'm a bit confused here - on a thread yesterday you described goal-oriented music as masculine (well, I'm paraphrasing, but that was what I took it to mean - at least that is what gender-and-music studies appear to tell us). Now, Sorabji, writing the opposite of goal-oriented music, is hyper-misogynistic and eliminates the feminine!

Can you join the dots for me here?

edited - mod

I don't necessarily accept the view of goal-oriented music as 'masculine' (I was just saying what a particular type of feminist argument says) - that depends on a necessary mapping of the sexual act onto music, which is tenuous to say the least. Sorabji's music totally eliminates anything so feminine as emotion, ruthlessly so (edited - mod).

Recently, I was calling a tech guy because of a computer problem. After giving my name, he looked me up online and regaled me with lots of stuff about how he loved goth metal and also Sorabji, with rather pathetic talk about the dark, mysterious, other world, free from human concerns, it presented. I could imagine him being the type who likes occultist stuff to do with ritualistic dismemberment of women, as a rather sad way of releasing frustrations. You can find the same sort of outlook in various other musicians and artists that the ultra-right-wing clique of Sorabji fans gravitate towards (including most of those both pre- and post-revolutionary Russian figures - total hatred of women and of the wider masses was at the heart of their aesthetic project, and they made it explicit in their ideas and writings as well as it coming across loud and clear in their work. Same is true of a large number of British artists of the same period). This music provides solace for certain types of people who yearn for the return of an age where their type were granted automatic awe, deference, and mystical admiration, where women knew their place, and where a feudal system was absolute. If you read just a little of Sorabji's writings, you'll find these messages come through unequivocally. It's palpably clear to me how the music reflects this, and I felt that before I'd ever read the writings. But the displacement of human interests, feelings, wider society is endemic to a lot of writing about certain music, displaced in favour of fetishised technical and exoticist stuff. That speaks a lot about those who make a cult of certain guru like figures. I respect it about as much as I do those who stalk film stars, or who idolise celebrity. More to the point, the more I encounter such things, the more I'm convinced that feminist critics definitely do have a point in some respects. The cult around Stockhausen is little different; the redeeming aspect is the fact that his music does indeed exhibit some human qualities, by no means in line with the sort of dehumanised art that some would like to celebrate.

I defend modernist and late romantic work against feminist criticism. on the grounds that it does entail significant personal, social and political. The more I hear from those who defend it, in purely technical and formalistic grounds, hostile to any talk of the human or the social, the clearer it is to me the basis upon which such feminist criticism is not unreasonably grounded. Where I think that sort of criticism is mistaken is in assuming some innate link between gay artists and certain constructions of the 'feminine'. Sorabji was gay, but so was Ernst Röhm.


Let's not get into Wilde again.

I'd like to have more exchanges on Godowsky so I'll start a separate thread.

In the meantime a couple of observations/questions.

You'll notice that the Godowsky publications contain a load of fingering. I'm nowhere near being a virtuoso, but I have found it pretty rewarding playing through (at c.1/8th speed) Godowsky and feeling that I'm getting a free piano lesson into the bargain !

Quote from Ian - "To play Liszt's Feux Follets like Richter does it is one of the biggest challenges . . ." - which is probably the most crucial point made on this thread. Similarly I'd say that of all the versions (live and recorded) I've heard of Mazeppa, only a couple manage to present the tune - er - as a tune, as distinct to a clumsy line in long notes interrupted by a ton of obstacles. Leslie Howard's live account was particularly memorable.

Godowsky's left-hand transcriptions are pretty challenging as Ian says. Somewhere I have some Paul Wittgenstein Chopin etude transcriptions. I remember thinking that his Revolutionary Etude seemed considerably more difficult than Godowsky's, Do you know these, Ian ?

So - it's not just the notes - it's how you play 'em. Same goes for the counterpoint. If you want to be convinced that it is possible for any two tunes to be played simultaneously, study Godowsky. Having said that, counterpoint is part of many composer's artillery: I think it is actually no big deal to be able to produce music featuring several melodies simultaneously, especially those like Johann's which can quite easily be made to fit different harmonic situations . . .

Probably a serious amount in the last 40 or 50 years: not all of it is much fun to listen to. Unlike the Janacek Sinfonietta. One hilarious example does come to mind - a Renaissance dance played by very high double basses in Bernd Alois Zimmermann's "Musique pour les soupers de Roi Ubu". But this is the exception rather than the rule. I'll probably get roundly denounced for saying this, but I find the idea of writing "music that is meant to sound as though the performer is struggling to cope" yawnsome if that's pretty much the only reason that the piece exists. With the Liszt and Godowsky examples, it's of course (usually) infinitely preferable if that sense of struggle is not communicated in the performance - hence my highlighting of Ian's crucial comment concerning Richter and Feux Follets. There is of course music in which a sense of struggle needs to be communicated - but not with the technical challenges. An example is the first movement of Charles Ives' Concord Sonata (Emerson) which is not that difficult, in fact. Marc-Andre Hamelin, probably the ideal pianist for the Chopin-Godowsky Etudes, really fouls up on Emerson - he tosses it off like a powder-puff (just realised what I've written - horrible image !) - but this is straying off the point . . .

Roast Swan in Carmina Burana is normally sung by a counter-tenor isn't it ?

Also very much the case in Brahms's music; he regularly writes things for both piano and violin that are actually much more tortuous to play than they sound, so as to create a type of expressive tension that way. And of course in various pieces for left hand as well.

There have been performances of Carmina Burana where the swan has been sung by a counter tenor but the original intention was for a tenor. The range is comfortable for a counter tenor and that defeats the object. The swan is supposed to be suffering and the tenor will often go into falsetto.

It was written at a time when countertenors didn't really exist outside some church choirs, wasn't it?

I seem to remember José Carreras finding West Side Story virtually impossible...