Searching for A Musical Voice of My Own
More Thoughts on What Matters in Music?
And on What is There to Sing About?
Eric Paul Nolte
A couple musical matters have been on my mind recently.
One is the question that dogs me now: what is there to sing about? This moved me to write an essay recently, but I have more to say.
Also I've been thinking again about M. Zachary Johnson's Dancing With the Muses, and how, from my experience of working at music for many years, I feel that Johnson illuminates and integrates many matters that, for me, were stuck in a rather murky state. What really matters in music? I especially appreciate Johnson's explication of Rameau's wooly-headed but portentous, dire and cognitively destructive attempt to begin a student's musical education with instruction in four-part harmony, long before there has been any discussion of the more fundamental matters bearing on melody. This is like trying to learn algebra without knowing arithmetic or how to handle common fractions. Rameau's book was published in 1722 and its message of beginning music theory with learning four part harmony has dominated music pedagogy ever since.
It has personally taken me years to sort out my grasp of harmony and counterpoint, and truly begin to figure out what I believe matters most in music.
While I was genetically doomed to be musical, given that my parents were accomplished symphony string players who set me to playing the violin and the piano at five, I did not work very hard at music as a child, and the music bug never bit me until I was in my mid-twenties. At that point I contracted a virulent case of it.
In my late twenties, after the Army, I had been a pilot for two wobbly commuter airlines, and when the last one of these went bust, I went back to school, enrolling at New College of Florida, at Sarasota.
Arriving at New College, I knew I wanted to study music, but I had it in mind that I was a musical failure because I had flunked out of the North Carolina School of the Arts as a piano major, a few years before.
(Footnote: all right, in fairness, I did very well during my first semester at NCSA. I studied with Marjorie Mitchell, learned a Beethoven piano sonata in E, Opus 14 Number 1, which I performed in master class with Claude Frank, and a Mozart piano concerto in A, K.414, which I also performed in master class. Neither of these were huge virtuoso knuckle busters, but they were hard enough. Then at the start of the second semester, my draft board wrote me to say, in essence, "Boy, you know that college deferment we gave you? No more. We'll kindly let you finish out the year in which you're enrolled, but this is to remind you that your ass belongs to us, and we expect you to present it to us at your local induction center in June!" Thereafter I was incapable of so much as cracking a book. I even flunked piano. Eight years later I was admitted to New College on academic probation.)
So, at New College I wanted to study the psychology of what makes it possible to learn how to make music at a high level. This was maybe a self-deluding strategy for trying to get around my own perceived failure at music.
What I found instead was Gray Perry, then an 83 year old concert pianist and pedagogue extraordinaire, who had a musical pedigree that on one side went back to Beethoven, and on another side went back to Chopin. Gray had studied in Paris in the 1920s, at the American Conservatory at Fontainbleau, where Nadia Boulanger taught.
I went to Gray because I'd made friends with one of his students who suggested that I approach him. When I told Gray that I thought I was a musical failure but that I still wanted to study piano, he listened to me play for a while, and then he gently growled at me, "Son, you're not a musical failure. You don't know enough to be a musical failure!"
I was taken aback until Gray continued and said, "Now... here is how you can go about mastering this thorny figure in this little etude by LeCouppey...." What he meant to say was a kind nudge in the right direction and to point out that I simply had not worked long and intelligently enough to know what kind of goods I might have!
Gray gave me a stunning insight that amounted to a profound shift in focus. Where I had felt paralyzed by doubt about if I could learn to play the piano at a high level, Gray blew away my cloud of doubt with a much better question: don't ask if you can do something, instead ask how do you do it? How can I figure it out? How to unravel a knot? How to take a problem apart and put it back together? And the answers were forthcoming. Gray gave me a tool kit full of powerful ideas on how to build one's powers at music, intellectually and physically.
Gray was the only piano teacher I had ever known to speak with depth and sophistication about the problems of piano technique and how to develop it. He brought with him a sensibility of music steeped in the golden tone and long line of melody and structure, purveyed during the golden age of such piano virtuosi as Rachmaninoff, Josef and Rosina Lhevinne, Joseph Hoffman, Artur Rubinstein, etc. I studied with Gray for three years and progressed enough to learn, for example, a few of the Chopin Etudes. He was a dear soul to me and taught me so much that was wonderful! He very kindly always made me his last student on my lesson day, and while he only charged me for an hour, he always gave me twice that and often more! He was the closest thing to a mentor I ever had, and I was bereft at his loss so soon after I left New College.
Marc Silverman, also a student of Gray's and another graduate of New College, who went on to become chairman of the piano faculty at the Manhattan School of Music, told me that Gray was the only teacher he ever knew who spoke so effectively about piano technique. All the other teachers were "expression coaches."
My theory and composition teacher at New College was the late Ron Riddle, a curious and wonderful combination of things. He was a serious-minded composer, a jazz pianist who had studied with Oscar Peterson, and an ethnomusicologist who studied with Bruno Nettl at the University of Illinois at Urbana. Ron had become a specialist in Chinese opera, if you can fathom this vocal taste that screws the voice into the sound of something like mating cats in a dark alley in Beijing. But Ron was an excellent teacher, and at New College all my classes with him were tutorials or small group tutorials in which Ron himself played and commented on every note I wrote! This intense attention was illuminating. He taught harmony from Roger Sessions' Harmonic Practice, the Bach chorales, and species counterpoint from Knut Jeppesen's book. We studied modal counterpoint, then tonal counterpoint, leading up to fugue writing and analysis. In short, I came by something like Johann Joseph Fux's perspective on learning music, and this helped me to find my way to the beginnings of a voice of my own.
However, I always felt that I was missing something, so some years later I began running laps through other harmony and counterpoint textbooks, including those by Walter Piston and even Arnold Schoenberg's book on harmony, which I found surprisingly thorough. I seriously worked through every page and exercise in Hindemith's books on harmony and his Elementary Training for Musicians (which was vastly more comprehensive than its title might suggest.)
But I felt that I still needed something more. At the time, I felt that Hindemith's book on harmony was the best of the lot, but the man simply did not believe in this harmony of the common practice period, the harmony he taught in his book. He felt that this conventional formulation of harmony and tonality was obsolete. He had deep ideas of his own, which he explained at length in his books on The Craft of Musical Composition. But what I liked about Hindemith's book on harmony was that it was written by a deeply accomplished and original composer who brought a composer's sensibility and perspective on what he chose to include and call important.
Still I felt that what I needed was the work of another accomplished composer who seriously believed in tonality, so I turned then to the books by Tchaikovsky, which I found surprisingly derivative and lacking, and finally to the one by Rimsky-Korsakov, which I liked very much.
One book that saved my sanity, early on, in an age in which the whole world seemed to have fallen off a cliff, was Henry Pleasants' Serious Music and All That Jazz. Pleasants asserts that serious art music of the 20th century had become something of an aesthetic train wreck, far removed from the ability of audiences to grasp or love it. The composers of serious art music had become effete, inbred, and haughtily wrote only for each other, not for the regular audiences of classical music. He believed that jazz had become the only voice of truly serious music in the 20th century, and while I did not agree with this assertion, his book nevertheless helped me to feel more confidence in my own voice and my own ability to make good judgments about music.
When I moved to New York after New College of Florida, I spent two years studying at (what was then) the New School for Social Research, in the workshop of Aaron Frankel, author of Writing the Broadway Musical. I was paired off with a collaborator, John Benedict, the editor at Norton who created the various Norton anthologies of literature. John wrote the book and lyrics for a children's show about an adolescent niece he dreamed up for Sherlock Holmes. She yearns for exciting adventures of her own, like those of her illustrious uncle, but falls into deeper and deeper trouble before she eventually pulls herself out of the fire. Sadly, John died after we had written a couple dozen songs, and all my work there made its way into yet another one of my portfolios of musical orphans.
(Footnote: I rewrote some of these pieces, echoing Mendelssohn's title, Songs Without Words, as my own "Songs Shorn of Words," and I transcribed some of these pieces for brass quintet because I had a friend who played in one. Speaking of my portfolios of musical orphans, I also have the sad remains of an hour's worth of music for an orchestral score I wrote for the offbeat, feature length film created by Jonathan Sherer, who was then a young, recent graduate of the School of Visual Design. The project died when he ran out of money in post production.)
Where Henry Pleasants' work stimulated me to think about the weird direction that musical composition had taken in the 20th century, Ayn Rand's work introduced me to some foundational philosophical ideas that allowed me to begin to make sense of the crazy aesthetics of modern art in general. While Rand did not write very much about music per se, her thinking about philosophy in general, and aesthetics in particular, gave me some tools with which I could begin to have a deeper understanding of how and why we got the serialism of Schoenberg and the aleatory music of John Cage, et al. Pleasants and Rand's works helped me to develop more intellectual independence and confidence to judge the musical ideas I came across.
So I come back to Johnson's book again. Dancing with the Muses shines a strong and intelligent light on what is truly important in music. I have come to feel that I can see more clearly than ever before what deeply matters in music, why it matters, and how, in the last century, so much music by so many otherwise talented but misguided composers came to be so ugly and nihilistic! In this regard, once again, let me praise Stephen R. C. Hicks' illuminating and important essay on "Why Art Became Ugly."
Johnson's discussion of the importance of melody above that of harmony makes the very important point that melody, or line, has primacy in music because it comes first, developmentally, or psychologically, and harmony emerges from the interplay of simultaneous voices, or lines, or melodies. Melody is the horizontal line which, when played together with more than one line, creates the vertical dimension of harmony.
Notwithstanding this primacy of melody, I come back to the idea that since the publication in 1722 of Rameau's Treatise on Harmony, it is Rameau's view that dominates the teaching of music theory.
Now, knowing that Rameau admired Descarte's rationalism, we are not surprised to see that Rameau begins with some mathematical formulas and somewhat arbitrary axioms and proceeds deductively to spin out implications that are deaf to inductive experience and blind to observation.
If you've read David Harriman's book, The Logical Leap, on the matter of inductive inference in physics and philosophy, you would know of Descartes' disastrous book on physics, which was an exercise in rationalistically spinning out the implications of crazy, arbitrary axioms he dreamed up, divorced from observation and experience, with results that are as similarly misguided as Rameau's theory that teaches the primacy of harmony in four parts before teaching melody. Indeed, as a matter of theoretical system, he teaches in Part One of his 1722 (which is the deep theoretical and mathematical section) he teaches that melody is derived from harmony. Tell that to all the peoples of the world, whose music everywhere begins with melody and nowhere develops anything like a system of animated harmony, except for the music of Europe, and there only beginning around 500 years ago! (Well, okay, to be completely accurate, there have been some cultures around the world who have employed the occasional drone of two steady tones like the interval of a fifth or a fourth.)
Manfred Clynes' work comes to mind here too. I've mentioned him before, but his conclusion about the nature of music, reached after decades of scientific inquiry, is worth saying again. Clynes is a neurosurgeon, an ethnomusicologist, and a concert pianist (if you can wrap your mind around all those accomplishments!) who has done research into the music of many of the far-flung peoples of the world. You will not be astonished to learn of Clynes' conclusion from these studies.
Clynes found that, yes, there are vast differences between the music of all these peoples, differences in such elements as the choice of vocal timbre and in the particular division of the octave into their scales, but whether the scale is divided into five, or six, or more notes, these tones are invariably chosen from among the first several harmonics of the overtone series, and not by some artificial, rationalistic division.
To the point here, Clynes' conclusions from studying all these peoples' music is twofold:
The music of all the peoples of the world, prior to that of the 20th century's effete and pixilated academics (my pejorative adjectives, not Clynes...), is rooted in the physics of sound.
The defining characteristic of music everywhere in the world is ... melody.
Blessed melody! Surprise!
Tell that to the gangsta rappers and the vulgar hip-hopsters!
Now, before I close up shop here, let me turn back to the question I posed in the subject line of my recent essay by the same title, namely:
What is there to sing about?
In some profound way, I owe this question to my wife, Terri, who, once upon a time made her way through the lesser diva circles as a soprano in New York City, singing many leading roles with lesser companies. Her name then was Teresa Hoover. She won a couple big, international opera competitions, one of which, that of the Center for Contemporary Opera rewarded her in 1990 with a full solo recital at the Weill recital hall at Carnegie Hall. On another occasion (as Josephine in a production of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, HMS Pinafore at VLOG, the Village Light Opera Group, in 1989), she received a review from the New York Times's James Oestreich, who called her singing "excellent."
(Footnote: this production of HMS Pinafore at VLOG was infused and tweaked with a little original material written by Isaac Asimov--yes, that Asimov, the famous science fiction author--who was a big fan and supporter of the VLOG, and this production was actually billed as USS Pinafore.)
What is there to sing about? It was Terri who opened me up to understanding the power of the human voice to drill down into the deepest core of our heart, soul, and mind. I'm a believer! Hallelujah! Hosannah! Well, of course, as a longtime student of Ayn Rand, to put it this way may sound perilously close to the unreasoning epistemology of faith, but I hasten to add that I try to believe nothing in the absence of evidence, and I try to hold all my beliefs in a context that is open to rational revision in the light of new evidence.
(Footnote: yeah, yeah, ... of course I know that not everything is available to revision, given the self-evidently axiomatic realm, where Rand points out how we find that the concepts of existence, identity, and consciousness are at the base of all knowledge, and, moreover, we find that these ideas are genuinely axiomatic because they show themselves to be impervious to rejection or revision, in that one must employ these concepts in any attempt to reject them.)
So, a few years ago my wife got me to audition for a 30 voice a cappella choir, Charis Chamber Voices, in Westchester County, then under the direction of Scott Turkington, with whom we sang for a couple years. We performed a piece I wrote for them too. In recent years we've been singing with Collegium Westchester, Eric Kramer's lovely group, where my wife once sang the soprano solo with orchestra for Barber's Knoxville: Summer of 1915.
These experiences with vocal music and the daily presence of a glorious singer under my own roof at home have radically transformed my appreciation of what the human voice can do in song.
So, here it is, in short: I am devoting the rest of my life to writing vocal music. My projects from now on will be shaped by this question of what there is to sing about.
We live in a time that is largely pixilated by crazy aesthetics and driven into mental vertigo by incoherent philosophy. Ayn Rand's work gave me something even more important than the insight to dismiss the crazy aesthetics of Schoenberg's serialism and John Cage's aleatory music: her work gave me the power to begin to embrace my own vision, to hone and trust my own power of reason above that of any Authority (since who else is there to try to make sense of the claims of so many Authorities who are clamorously asserting contradictory and mutually exclusive propositions), and she led me to the wider philosophical, and specifically ethical conviction (and the arguments rooted in facts by which to defend the idea) that one's own happiness is of the most crucial importance to a human life. It is morally right, to pursue our own happiness.
Happiness matters. And whether my music is good or bad is not the point. The point is that my study and practice of music bring me joy and contribute greatly to my sense of meaning and purpose in life. What greater possibility does an activity in life offer?
What the world needs now is reason, sweet reason! And song! But so much of what people find to sing about is neither exalted nor inspiring.
Not heavy metal music for me (although I would not sneer at you if this brings you joy) ... how about "heavy mental" music? (as Jana Stanfield, a motivational speaker/singer/songwriter, puts it... I don't know her music, but I love the term!)
We have work to do, those of us who love the glorious power of the human voice rising in song with words and music, and I suspect that there are audiences hungry for work of a more exalted and uplifting nature than so much of what came to us in the dizzy 20th century!
E P N
2014.1223
revised 2015.0428
