# Medieval, Renaissance and Post-1950 Current Listening Commentary



## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

Welcome to _Current Listening Comentary_ thread.

The idea is to post and review on what you have been listening.

Rules are:


Only one piece per post
Must write something about it


You are encouraged to add to other's featured piece.

While praise may be entirely 'poetic', serious criticism is encouraged to be complete (good and bad aspects) and concrete (i.e. refering to the parameters of art such as unity, variety or to particulars of music such as harmony and counterpoint in the piece in question).

I chose these periods because I presume it is where this type of thread will be most useful.


----------



## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

A short, refreshing piece of mysterious charm. 


Shirley Apthorp said:


> Given Boulez's popular reputation as a composer of impenetrably complex music, Mémoriale shocks with its sweet sensuality. Emmanuel Pahud dominated the ensemble with playing that was at once virtuosic, precise and profoundly musical. His colleagues followed with delicacy and the kind of perfect intonation that makes possible the score's ghostly echo effects. Boulez demands that the horns pick up the flute's long notes and trail them so quietly that you find yourself looking around to identify the source of sound. The softness of the ensemble makes you lean forward and listen harder, as if to a sad but vital secret. These were seven minutes of sheer perfection, a gem-like tribute to a musical giant.







An arrangement of the originel section of ...explosante-fixe... but closer in atmosphere to Livre pour quatuor. At first glance the rhythmic development seems to be based on permutations and diminutions of a few cells and the piece can be divided in recurrent sections of similar writing.
I might eventually do a proper analysis, but alas my conflict between doing other stuff I have to do and lazyness. 
Like morning dew.


----------



## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

Since no one else is contributing...

Saariaho: Circle Map (from Horizon V, as it's called on AmazonUS, or Horizon 5, as it's called on AmazonUK; also on Youtube)

I'm not a fan of speech mixed in with music. That out of the way, I think the music can be pretty good, mysterious, dark, as usual for the kind of contemporary music that most appeals to me.

I'm not intimately familiar with it, as I'm not intimately familiar with pretty much anything beyond the Common Practice Period, but one impression I had was that Saariaho uses more repetition than is typical for classical composers - of short phrases and phrase elements, sometimes on the background, sometimes on the foreground. Repetition like this when used in such a sophisticated manner brings order into chaos without making that order sound trite or soulless (like too much sequencing would, as might too heavy use of too few motives). Of course, there's also sequencing and probably more motivic development than I picked up on (I don't usually bother paying attention to development - I have my ears full trying to follow the sounds as sounds, and I'm distrustful of a more intellectual approach to music anyway).

At any rate, I think this music might appeal to those who would ordinarily find atonal music too orderless.






If you don't like the beginning, well it gets better.

Here's commentary by someone who makes a living out of making people think you can say something meaningful about music (perhaps you'll prefer it to my commentary above):



> It's been said that reading a poem in translation is a bit like kissing a bride through a veil. Yet what a veil Kaija Saariaho has given us in her exquisitely drawn "Circle Map," a new work for orchestra and electronics that builds out - in many concentric circles - from six stanzas of poetry by the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi.
> 
> The Persian verse itself was of course translated, in the literal sense, in the program book for Thursday night's US premiere of this work by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Yet what Saariaho has done in her work was a deeper kind of translation, at once vaporizing these texts and making them strangely tactile.
> 
> ...


----------



## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

Helmut Lachenmann- Air






Composed in 1969. For large orchestra and percussion solo.

I'll write something short. This is a timbral piece consisting mainly of long point gestures. The point gestures used are sometimes a clear single pitch, sometimes a motivic fragment, sometimes a percussive "hit" sound, and sometimes a percussive "noise" sound. All of them are well incorporated, with particular focus on what the percussion can do. The orchestral instruments have their own syntactic variety as well, for example, a violin playing a pure note versus playing tremolo versus playing over-pressure with the bow.

There are huge contrasts and ebbs and flows. In places, the music is sparse and one can hear the individual attacks and individual voices. But at climax points, different voices aggressively come in to play, creating a kind of harmony, and wow, does this harmony have huge tension.


----------



## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

Panayiotis Kokoras- Superstrings






Composed in 2014. For electric guitar and electronics.

From the composer's website, his artistic statement:

"I define Sound composition the music that uses timbre as the main form bearing element. It controls and develops to a great extent the morphoplastic attributes of the sound objects used. An Ecriture du Son which is based on sound-to-sound structures, on transformation strategies from one to another as well as on functional classification sound models. The significance of the diatonic interval, harmony and melody ceases to exist.

Holophony signifies my intention to determine a rather general aesthetical frame for my work. Each independent sound (phonos), contributes equally into the synthesis of the total (holos). Thus, Holophonic musical texture is best perceived as the synthesis of simultaneous sound streams into a coherent whole with internal components and focal points."

This is very agile music. Motives from the guitar interact with sound structures from the electronics to produce as the composer states above, a grammar of sound structures, where one sound progresses to the next, following the principle of unity in variety. Unlike the Lachenmann piece I posted above, this is not pointillistic. It is much more so about evolving, complex sound structures.


----------



## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

Richannes Wrahms said:


> A short, refreshing piece of mysterious charm.
> 
> ...
> 
> ...


I would also like to add that that piece is an excellent demonstration of heterophony (please look at the Bach and Mozart excerpts in the wikipedia link to understand what I'm talking about!) For Boulez, the primary flute line is echoed in some of the strings. While the flute plays a fast, complex, melodic line, some of the strings echo a few of the notes at either the same time or "delayed". This dimensionality of music was utilized in Debussy's parallel sonorities, but not very much in second Viennese music. Boulez, I feel, was the first one to combine their strengths.


----------



## Guest (May 4, 2016)

Richannes Wrahms said:


> While praise may be entirely 'poetic', serious criticism is encouraged to be complete (good and bad aspects) and concrete (i.e. refering to the parameters of art such as unity, variety or to particulars of music such as harmony and counterpoint in the piece in question).


I'm fairly bad with technical terminology. Should I refrain from posting?

Thanks for posting that new composition, Septimal. Hadn't heard him before  Not only was it solid stuff, but it kinda made me wanna play guitar again.


----------



## regenmusic (Oct 23, 2014)

Marcabru is one of the earliest troubadours known. I didn't know much about the troubadours, thinking them a Medieval version of a hair metal band with populist lyrics. But it seems they are deeper than that, which this video gives a great description of because it translates the lyrics (in the description), which are basically spiritual. Wikipedia mentions that Marcabru sometimes wrote lyrics that even contained obscenity but he did so to prove the folly of lust. Not much is known about Marcabru. He lived around 1130.


----------



## Chordalrock (Jan 21, 2014)

regenmusic said:


> Marcabru is one of the earliest troubadours known. I didn't know much about the troubadours, thinking them a Medieval version of a hair metal band with populist lyrics. But it seems they are deeper than that, which this video gives a great description of because it translates the lyrics (in the description), which are basically spiritual. Wikipedia mentions that Marcabru sometimes wrote lyrics that even contained obscenity but he did so to prove the folly of lust. Not much is known about Marcabru. He lived around 1130.


I'm past bedtime, in that quasi-hallucinatory state that sometimes follows, and for a minute there I thought I was listening to Marcabru himself singing it... Funny.

Anyway, I think the accompaniment could benefit from more involvement. Apparently a lot of music back then was treated something like jazz today. At any rate, I find it hard to believe that the smart people who were our ancestors would have been so modest with the accompaniment and the music they performed.


----------



## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

A John Bull gem, handpicked by yours truly and played by Pieter Jan Belder(he recorded it and I like it). English keyboard music is not well sorted through by most classical music listeners, but I have found the ones I like. Gloria Tibi Trinitas XLIV, these pieces are developed from plain chant melodies but are basically contrapuntal galore, continuously developing and gaining momentum. This one in particular really picks up at a certain point and showcases succinctly how imaginatively virtuosic Bull's writing can be. Heavy metal guys would dig it as a good "solo" and display of rhythmically driving virtuosity. I intend to learn it on the piano and emphasize this:


----------



## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

nathanb said:


> I'm fairly bad with technical terminology. Should I refrain from posting?


Just refrain from negative commentary.


----------



## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

Ligeti- Melodien






Composed in 1971. For Orchestra.

This piece is a great example of Ligeti's micropolyphony. There are showers of motives. Often these are in canon. The different instruments playing in the canon give a really cool timbral variety. There are also prolational canons (at least from what I can hear), where the motive is played at different speeds in different instruments: this gives a huge dimension of richness. Indeed, there are certainly other linear part-writing procedures that provide a glue that I have missed... but definitely the micropolyphony is very complex, and the sum of the parts, unlike in common-practice music, gives something quite qualitatively different as a whole.

I also liked the distinct parts and sections in the piece, and how they begin and end in simplicity. This gives each section an "arc" shape of polyphonic tension, but without chord progressional heirarchy like in Mozart, Chopin, or Schoenberg.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

I've decided that I'm going to listen to all the recordings Björn Schmelzer has made with graindelavoix, and try to understand what he's up to. I was extremely impressed by his Alexander Agricola CD, and intrigued and confused by some of the things he's said in interview about Agricola's blindness.

Has anyone heard their new Machaut? I haven't - I'm waiting for it to appear in qobuz streaming.


----------



## premont (May 7, 2015)

Mandryka said:


> Has anyone heard their new Machaut? I haven't - I'm waiting for it to appear in qobuz streaming.


I have ordered it (and their Chantilly CD) and got a message yesterday, that they have been shipped. So I look forward to receive them in the course of the week to come.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

clavichorder said:


> Heavy metal guys would dig it as a good "solo" and display of rhythmically driving virtuosity. I intend to learn it on the piano and emphasize this:


That's a particularly tough and spiky performance by Belder. I agree that it's interesting. No one else plays it remotely like that on record that I know - not Cuiller and not Feinberg. It reminds me of a Wlasingham Variations (Byrd) by Leon Berben which used to be on YouTube.

Another Bull thing you may like is the 9th in nomine.


----------



## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

I'm listening to In Nomine 9 right now on youtube. I heard it before because one upload comes up high in Bull keyboard music searches. I think I'm going to find a good recording on Naxos now. Thanks for calling my attention to it, it's definitely an interesting piece.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

clavichorder said:


> I'm listening to In Nomine 9 right now on youtube. I heard it before because one upload comes up high in Bull keyboard music searches. I think I'm going to find a good recording on Naxos now. Thanks for calling my attention to it, it's definitely an interesting piece.


You'll find there are tons of recordings, including Pierre Hantaï and Bob van Asperen. I'm keen on Joseph Payne too, on organ on Naxos and on Vox, and on harpsichord for BIS.

These big pieces of imitative counterpoint for keyboard that were so fashionable in the 16th and 15th century. What I search for is a sense of breaking free from the rails at the climactic end. I sometimes wonder if there's a religious reason for their popularity - a theological meaning to do with God's order and man's freedom.

By the way that recording by Belder on YouTube you posted made me think of this performance of Byrd's Walsingham Variations by Berben, because it's also a bit unexpectedly spiky and intense. Maybe appropriately given the context of Catholic persecution and the iconic status of Walsingham Abbey.


----------



## premont (May 7, 2015)

Mandryka said:


> You'll find there are tons of recordings, including Pierre Hantaï and Bob van Asperen. I'm keen on Joseph Payne too, on organ on Naxos and on Vox, and on harpsichord for BIS.


So you know it already. Which of Payne's 3 recordings do you find the most interesting?



Mandryka said:


> ....Byrd's Walsingham Variations by Berben, because it's also a bit unexpectedly spiky and intense.


I is *Bull's* Walsingham variations.


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

premont said:


> So you know it already. Which of Payne's 3 recordings do you find the most interesting?


Vox. I'm glad to have it on organ. I like the tuning of the Vox organ. I like the spaciousness of the performance, the way the harmonies make it intense, and the way he punctuates it with registration changes.

Just in case clavichorder is following this, the Vox is on spotify, but it is tagged just "In nomine." The CD is called Music From The Fitzwilliam Virginal Book (great ironic name since there's not a virginal in earshot!)



premont said:


> I is *Bull's* Walsingham variations.


My bad


----------



## Richannes Wrahms (Jan 6, 2014)

The piece is entirely built on a single 'formula' (idea which would obsess the composer as much as any idea of ultimate unity to any other composer) that came out of a melody as explained by the composer here. Stockhausen, unlike Boulez and others, seems to find it important to make the compositional process audible.

It has an electronic component whose practical purpose (I presume) is to change the timbre of the pianos in order to make an hour plus work tolerable, for that it also has wood block and chromatic crotales; it sometimes makes the piano sound like gamelan.

It has moments of frantic speed and expanses of meditative slowness. Some parts are just bizarre. Can be compared to non-electronic works such as Berio's Linea where the sound of the pianos is expanded with vibraphone and marimba, or Boulez's Sur Incises (probably the ne plus ultra) which adds harps and more metal percussion.


----------



## isorhythm (Jan 2, 2015)

Richannes Wrahms said:


> The piece is entirely built on a single 'formula' (idea which would obsess the composer as much as any idea of ultimate unity to any other composer) that came out of a melody as explained by the composer here. Stockhausen, unlike Boulez and others, seems to find it important to make the compositional process audible.
> 
> It has an electronic component whose practical purpose (I presume) is to change the timbre of the pianos in order to make an hour plus work tolerable, for that it also has wood block and chromatic crotales; it sometimes makes the piano sound like gamelan.
> 
> It has moments of frantic speed and expanses of meditative slowness. Some parts are just bizarre. Can be compared to non-electronic works such as Berio's Linea where the sound of the pianos is expanded with vibraphone and marimba, or Boulez's Sur Incises (probably the ne plus ultra) which adds harps and more metal percussion.


Ah, I've been obsessed with this piece for the last week!

I believe the ring modulator is tuned to the "tonic" pitch of each section so that the piano tones are more altered the more dissonant they are - but I'm not sure.

There are parts of this piece that sound to me almost Romantic in their expressiveness - is this all in my head or does anyone else agree? Next time I get a chance I can try to identify some of the parts.

A lot of it reminds me of Messiaen a little.

The compositional structure also anticipates _Music for 18 Musicians_, though Reich's model was Perotin's organum based on chant, and I have no idea if Stockhausen was familiar with that or cared about it.


----------



## clavichorder (May 2, 2011)

Mandryka said:


> These big pieces of imitative counterpoint for keyboard that were so fashionable in the 16th and 15th century. What I search for is a sense of breaking free from the rails at the climactic end. I sometimes wonder if there's a religious reason for their popularity - a theological meaning to do with God's order and man's freedom.


I agree with this very much, and this is unwittingly what drew me to these pieces in the first place. The restrictive imitative counterpoint and simple melodic line builds momentum and a listener who follows this progress is bound to feel a rush when the increasing complexity gives way to rapid passages and freedom from the initially 'humble beginnings'.

I do like the Walsingham Variations as well, but it is a much bigger piece than the ones we've mentioned so far, ultimately bigger in effect but the pace requires a different set of initial expectations(which only grow as the piece progresses).


----------



## Mandryka (Feb 22, 2013)

isorhythm said:


> Ah, I've been obsessed with this piece for the last week!
> 
> I believe the ring modulator is tuned to the "tonic" pitch of each section so that the piano tones are more altered the more dissonant they are - but I'm not sure.
> 
> ...


This talk of Mantra prompted me to listen to this outstanding and provocative recording


----------



## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

Michael Finnissy- Piano Concerto 4






For solo piano. Not sure when this was written, but I think it's post-2000.

This is actually a purely solo piano piece. It has huge virtuosity. Out of the virtuous texture, I hear hierarchies of melodies, yes, like one would hear in Bach's and Chopin's preludes with their pianistic counterpoint. But this has much greater density and contrast of both individual lines and total textures. This piece displays a great combination of both chordal color writing, linear writing, and pianistic pedal textures.


----------



## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

I want to periodically revive this thread, because this is good stuff.

Voloko Gorlinsky- Ultimate Granular Paradise






For ensemble: Flute, Clarinet bass, Trombone, Piano / Electronics, Percussion, Cello, Metal sheet. Composed in 2008.

Extended techniques push the instruments in this small ensemble to their limits. I hear the sounds in this piece as being on the edge between pitch and noise. Each instrument comes in as a point beginning in time, and then sustained. The periodic undulations of the pitch/noise sounds create a rhythm (!), where these rhythms are in a kind of rhythmic dissonance with each other.

I am personally very interested in music that creates a "grammar" out of the intersection of pitch, noise, oscillation, randomness, and rhythm. Just as Bach and Webern had their grammar, so does Gorlinsky. This is great music! It achieves a combination of disparateness and organicness, and just feels right to me.


----------



## vallaths (Jan 13, 2016)

I have recent come across an almost complete collection of William Byrd's (1539-1623) music. One of the greatest composers of the late Renaissance much of his complex, beautiful polyphonic keyboard music clearly sets the the stage for the coming baroque style and complexity. The piece I will post though (one I could find on youtube) is a great trumpeting brass piece which I feel more belongs to the past.






I cold imagine this trumpeting in the Elizabethan courts of old England, I feel its a beautiful window into that time and in it you can see what would develop and change in the coming Baroque era.


----------



## Xenakiboy (May 8, 2016)

vallaths said:


> I have recent come across an almost complete collection of William Byrd's (1539-1623) music. One of the greatest composers of the late Renaissance much of his complex, beautiful polyphonic keyboard music clearly sets the the stage for the coming baroque style and complexity. The piece I will post though (one I could find on youtube) is a great trumpeting brass piece which I feel more belongs to the past.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


I was listening to his music about two weeks ago and thought it was very good!


----------



## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

Giorgio Netti, Rinascere sirena (2003/2004), per violino, viola e violoncello






Normally I don't like music based on glissando (James Tenney, some of Penderecki and Xenakis) because the shower of glissandos are merely an effect in themselves and don't carry any syntactic weight, but this tight string trio is different. The chordal/overpressure sonorites in one string instrument are slowly and subtly changed over time while the other strings have their own melodic action. The effect achieved, to me, is a kind of counterpoint! Not the Bach-fugal counterpoint, more of a simpler Fuxian kind of counterpoint. Of course, the sonic effect isn't that of singers chanting Kyrie Elison on a modal scale, but a slowly changing contemporary string trio sound texture.

Highly recommended.


----------



## SeptimalTritone (Jul 7, 2014)

Helmut Lachenmann - Ausklang (for piano and orchestra) (1984/85)






This piece is for piano soloist and orchestra, but it is not a piano concerto in style. The main function of the orchestra is to echo the piano as an extension of its sound, although in places of higher dramatic tension the orchestra takes a life of its own.

The form of this piece is very blended and free, and yet there are recalls and recollections and similarities between different parts. Basically, there is alternation between focus on point note textures, chordal mass textures, and unpitched sound. At certain points in the piece, focus and attention is given towards one type of texture more than the other.


----------



## aleazk (Sep 30, 2011)

_In seculum_ from Bamberg Codex (instrumental version):






Vocal version:






Check: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hocket

Ligeti: Hamburg Concerto






The orchestra has four natural horns. In the second section of the third movement (



), these horns play a hocket.

-----------------

Brian Ferneyhough - Time and Motion Study II (for cello and electronics)






Brian Ferneyhough - No time (at all) (for two guitars)






Belle, bonne, sage, by Baude Cordier:






That heart is the actual score of that piece. Composers from the ars subtilior period share some characteristics with modern composers like Ferneyhough regarding the conception of rhythm and its notation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_subtilior#Notational_characteristics


----------

