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Quote of the Day: The Silence of Music
“The silence must be longer. This music is about the silence. The sounds are there to surround the silence.” ― Arvo Pärt, Estonian composer
From his youth, Arvo Pärt was a gifted composer, starting by mimicking the neo-classicists before following the trend of modernist atonality. While the tastemakers insisted this was the proper path, Pärt was disappointed with his output and music itself.
He turned his back on modernity and retreated to an Orthodox monastery where he practiced silence for several years. When he emerged, everything was different. He discovered that music doesn’t arise from avant-garde cacophony but from silence.
When a conductor was rushing through one of his works, trying to fill every gap with notes, Pärt corrected him. “The silence must be longer. This music is about the silence. The sounds are there to surround the silence.”
The conductor was baffled, asking, “Exactly how many beats? What do you do during the silence?”
Pärt’s response: “You don’t do anything. You wait. God does it.”
In the above piece, “Te Deum,” you need the relative quiet of the first several minutes to experience the release that hits at 5:35.
Without a measure of silence, music is often just noise.
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I find the variations of sounds and styles fascinating. Different cultures and eras seem to calibrate their ears.
I wonder if the purity of octaves and fifths are more universal?
I also remember a workshop in Vienna where a tuning variant demonstrated on a harpsichord that did not use equal temperament. Distant tonal centers really were raucous and jarring, even unpleasant, making more respite with the return to the tonal home.
I do wonder what sensations and awareness we have lost with equal temperament…the roughest edges are removed.
What is it that makes the harmonics of Russian choral music sound distinctive? Is it that different chords (so to speak) are used, or that the voices are tuned a little differently. If I knew how to explain this better, I probably wouldn’t need to ask. I’ve tried googling on the topic, to no avail.
My first guess is that Russian music centers more on the modalities favored in the East, as compared to the West.
Byzantine?
I will never attempt to mathematically explain it. My ear and heart do just fine, even though I know the math of it is foundational.
Russian choral music includes a wider spread of notes. For example, in Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture, the beginning Russian chorus (seldom sung in modern performances) has extremely low notes for the Bass singers. This is especially true in Chesnokov’s Salvation is Created, written for 8 parts, where the Soprano 1’s and Tenor 1’s go to high A in sections, and it includes a very low D doubled in the Bass 2:
I looked for some versions that include the chorus, and found that when Russians are doing it, it sounds more Russian. It’s a small sample, and I won’t rule out the possibility that the Russian choirs have more of the deeper voices. One of the non-Russian choirs was composed of younger people from Japan, and their version sounded very non-Russian.
Old recordings from the Soviet days don’t seem to have the choral part. Maybe they weren’t crazy about the religious language and reference to the czar. But again, it’s a small sample.
Our Philharmonic Chorus director said “it’s due to cigarettes and vodka.” ;-)
Mathieu (he of the Harmonic Experience I recommended earlier) encourages every musician, no matter how “nonsinger”, to first practice singing non-equally-tempered intervals above a drone, in order to really learn tonality, before becoming too adept at equal-temperament tricks. As he describes it, equal temperament and atonality go together.
I was lucky enough to land in college choirs performing much music for unaccompanied voice, often practiced without the support of a piano. Not being tempted to adjust to a piano’s equal temperament opened up a different world, not always “rougher”, but more “directed”. After college, singing in what was a more prestigious, but considerably more keyboard-reliant choir, was something of a letdown where tuning was concerned. Maybe average intonation is better in “keyboard choir” — maybe — but “keyboard choir” struggles to approach those unforgettable moments of outstanding intonation.
In addition to wide vocal spacing, at least in some pieces, tricks like a soprano line doubling the tenors an octave up, while other voices fill in more independently, are also used — here’s an example:
In (American) shape-note singing, I sometimes get the feeling the upper voice is “singing the overtones” — and similarly for Russian choral music. Trying less hard to avoid parallel 5ths and octaves (shape-note harmonies don’t even try) may understandably lead to that feeling, since octaves and fifths are the lowest partials in the overtone series.
Men and treble voices singing together in octave “unison” isn’t uncommon in Western choral music, but I think having some men and treble parts sing together like that, while the other parts do something more independent, is rather more unusual in common-practice Western choral music.
The all-men’s arrangement of Chesnokov’s Salvation is Created is also electrifying even though it perforce cannot have as wide a difference between the lowest and highest parts.
Those dratted augmented-sixth chords! I’ve never easily remembered that’s what they’re called, rather than “those things with the regular leading tone and the lowered-second leading tone from the top”.
Heck, I recently glanced at a sketch of a fugal passage I wrote about a year ago and saw I’d marked the entrances VPhryg and VPhryg/iv — and I’m not sure why! Oh, looking at the notes it’s clear enough I chose a certain “wound up” modulation as the point of departure, but I wouldn’t remember it was called VPhryg without looking it up.
Which illustrates what I mean about the correct terminology not really being a means by which musical pedants torture musicians — I know it’s not, even if my own recall of the terminology is poor enough I still sometimes feel as if it is!
I’m genuinely curious what you mean by this, overall, as well as in the specific context of whether a collection of pitches ought to be considered a German sixth or a dominant seventh. I had never thought about distinguishing the culture of a progression from the theory of it before.
Some of the difference in the Russian and Japanese performance of Russian choral music might be small nuances in pronunciation of vowels?
Native vs non native speakers?
I came across this today, entirely separate from this conversation
https://www.cymascope.com/cymamobile/gallery3.html
Very interesting.
I tell myself that I can sometimes detect differences in vowel pronunciation, but I might be fooling myself, too.
In following up on some of the links presented here, I’ve learned a new word for those super-deep bass voices: oktavist. I wonder how much smoking and vodka it took to get their voices that low.
And head colds…
I hate how the extra notes get stuck in your teeth.
The art has reasons which reason does not know?
Notes of rest are the best.
Reminds me of Tuva throat singing, where, with years of training, a singer can produce an overtone, thereby singing two tones at once. For reasons no one understands, Tuvan throat singers don’t live as long as other men of the same ethnicity who don’t do it.