Counter-Reformation II

Pope Benedict XVI, in a recent address to clergy, signaled his intention to steer Catholic liturgical music away from folk masses and other contemporary (aka "happy clappy") material, and back to Gregorian chant and the polyphonic repertory of the Renaissance and baroque eras.

This follows the pope's restoration of the Tridentine (Latin) Mass, and is interpreted as another sign of his desire to return to traditional components of worship, Malcolm Moore reports in The Telegraph:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/20/wpope120.xml&CMP=ILC-mostviewedbox

Moore quotes Monsignor Valentin Miserachs Grau, director of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music: "Due to general ignorance, especially in sectors of the clergy, there exists music which is devoid of sanctity, true art and universality."

During the 1990s chant craze, I sat in as a group of Catholic lay people learned to sing Gregorian chant. They got the hang of it fairly quickly. (Being traditionalists, they already had some command of Latin, which gave them a head start.) Later, more elaborate repertory is another matter: Imagine the local parish choir taking on Josquin, let alone Lassus or Palestrina.

A counter-reformation of Catholic (or, for that matter, Protestant) church music would take a generation – and would require seminaries and churches to put new emphasis on music education.

Then there's the question of universality. Can, and should, the Vatican impose antique European musical forms on congregations in non-Western societies? Would worshippers in, say, Mozambique or East Timor hear "true art" in Gregorian chant?

And closer to home, would Pope Benedict, reputedly a Mozart man, hear the works of two of the most devout European composers of his generation, Messiaen and Penderecki, as "true art?"

No Music Day

Today is No Music Day. Details, such as they are, at:

http://www.nomusicday.com/home.html

If you are observing No Music Day, you have not turned on your radio, television or sound system, failed to visit many Web sites, won't go shopping, and had better avoid contact with others, who are probably non-observant.

If, like John Cage, your definition of music includes noise, you will spend the day in a sound-proof enclosure; but even then, you cannot escape the sound of your pulse, which is musical.

Tomorrow is St. Cecilia's Day, saints day of the patron saint of music. Your mission will be to listen to saintly music. Bonus points for subtlety if you listen to something that doesn't end in "amen."

Tone roads

Japanese engineers develop road surfaces whose grooved asphalt produces musical tones when vehicles are driven over them, BBC Music Magazine reports:

http://www.bbcmusicmagazine.com/newsRead.asp?id=36021&scrollCount=1

"Optimal listening speed," it seems, is 28 mph. So much for using Larry Williams' "Slow Down" as a signature tune.

2008 and out

Alfred Brendel, the 76-year-old Austrian pianist, long rated as one of the most authoritative interpreters of Mozart and Beethoven, has decided to quit performing at the end of next year, John von Rhein reports in The Chicago Tribune:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/music/chi-pianist_personalsnov17,1,6351799.story?track=rss

(No word on whether the introduction of musical asphalt figured in Brendel's decision.)

Levine and the lay listener

James Levine, who has treated Boston Symphony audiences to Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter and other tough stuff, talks modern music with a layman, The Boston Globe's Observer columnist Sam Allis:

http://www.boston.com/news/local/articles/2007/11/18/making_music/

"The BSO has never sounded better," Allis observes. (The experts agree.) But he doesn't make the connection between the orchestra's performances of difficult contemporary music and the improvements in its sound.

The higher one's performance level, the more essential it is to face challenges, to be forced to detour from the routine. The lay listener may not enjoy the detour, but should be made aware of the payoff: Babbitt builds better Beethoven.

Review: Baltimore Consort

Nov. 17, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond

The Baltimore Consort, one of the pioneer explorers of the common ground where European early music and Anglo-American folk song meet, returned to Richmond after an eight-year absence to present "Adew Dundee: Early and Traditional Music of Scotland."

The ensemble’s longtime members – viol players Mary Anne Ballard, Mark Cudek and Larry Lipkis and lutenist Ronn McFarlane – were joined by a guest soprano, Danielle Svonavec, filling the role formerly played by Staunton’s Custer LaRue, and by flutist Mindy Rosenfeld, rejoining the group after a hiatus of 17 years.

Ranging through two dozen songs and dance tunes, the consort steered well clear of the familiar or stereotypical. No one said or sang "Scots wa hae!" William Wallace and Robert Burns went unmentioned. Aside from "Gypsen Davy" (aka "Gypsy Davy") and "Lord Ronald" (aka "Lord Randal"), both well-known numbers from Francis James Childs’ ballad collection, none of the selections would rate as more than vaguely recognizable to those who haven’t closely studied Scottish traditional music.

Most of the pieces dated from the 17th century or earlier, and many resembled chants, ballads and consort works heard around the same time in England and France – a reminder that pre-British Scotland was more cosmopolitan than popular lore would have it. "Our Father God Celestial," a version of the Lord’s Prayer, was set to a French tune not far removed from medieval chant. "Remember me my deir," from Robert Edwards’ "Commonplace Book" of the 1630s, was audibly related to Elizabethan English song.

Scottish "snap" – the juxtaposition of short and long notes producing a lilting kind of swing – was more pronounced in dance pieces such as "Whip my toudie" and "Remember me at evening."

Cudek, playing cittern (a mandolinish ancestor of the guitar), injected some markedly modern-sounding rhythms to several numbers. Rosenfeld’s flute and recorder often decorated folk tunes with baroque-style ornamentation. Authentic? Who knows?

Svonavec’s light tone and precise diction may not have been the qualities one immediately associates with Scottish folk vocalization – her unaccompanied rendition of "Lord Ronald," for example, cried out for more pathos; but her straightforwardness and clarity proved helpful in projecting lyrics such as, "Disdaine my desyris, so strangeness me feir is, deceir out of weir is, adew I fare."

Review: Richmond Symphony

Nov. 16, Second Baptist Church

Jacques Houtmann, a former music director (1971-86) revisiting the Richmond Symphony during its 50th-anniversary season, is a conductor the likes of whom few of the orchestra’s present members have encountered: a practitioner of the nearly lost art of old-style romantic symphonic interpretation.

In the manner of now-distant historical figures such as Wilhelm Furtwängler, Vaclav Talich and Jascha Horenstein, Houtmann favors broadly paced, highly rhetorical, temperamentally high-strung music-making. He doesn't craft crisply articulated, briskly metrical readings (which he likens to “slicing salami”), but strives to make every melody, turn of phrase, dynamic shift and silence integral to the larger context or "long arc" of a work.

His beat is often imprecise, his cues abrupt, his gestures intense and wild. He’ll stretch a tempo close to the breaking point if that creates the desired expressive effect. He gives orchestral soloists unusually wide latitude. He inspires ensemble playing rather than whipping it into shape.

The result can be unruly at times, but ultimately transcendent, especially in the 19th-century Austro-German repertory that is closest to this conductor's heart. (Houtmann is French, but from Lorraine, an eastern border province with historical and cultural ties to Germany.)

Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the “Eroica,” the main course of the program he serves on this visit, receives the kind of interpretation that listeners would have heard 100 years ago. Houtmann paces the symphony almost as if it were one of Bruckner’s. (Nowadays the “Eroica” normally runs about 50 minutes; last night’s performance lasted nearly an hour, and that was without the first-movement repeat.)

Very broad tempos brought a yearning quality to the immense first movement, which sounded more like a tone poem than an exercise in sonata form, and darkened the brooding of the second-movement funeral march. Deep silences framed solo passages (oboist Gustav Highstein exploited these to great effect). Houtmann freely stretched phrases and manipulated dynamics, and the orchestra responded with emotionally charged, seemingly improvisatory playing.

Last night’s audience was as sensitized as the musicians to this extraordinary conception of a familiar score. Nearly 800 listened in the kind of silence that comes with concentration.

Houtmann uncorks two vintages of champagne in the first half of his program, leading measured but sparklingly detailed readings of Mozart’s “Cosí fan tutte” Overture and Ravel’s “Le Tombeau de Couperin.”

The symphony’s winds paced the Mozart, which sounded blithely songful rather than skittishly energetic. Houtmann mined a deeper, darker lyrical vein in the Ravel, whose brightness and animation were tempered with an especially bittersweet nostalgia.

This Masterworks series program repeats at 8 p.m. Nov. 17 at First Baptist Church, Boulevard at Monument Avenue in Richmond, and 8 p.m. Nov. 19 at St. Michael Catholic Church, 4491 Springfield Road in Glen Allen. Tickets: $20-$50. Details: (804) 788-1212, http://www.richmondsymphony.com/