Of the three or four best Old Music groups in the world – and here I’m thinking of the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir, the Freiburger Barockorchester, the Monteverdi Choir – I think the Bach Collegium Japan consistently creates the most personal, intimate musical experiences. Of course, this I glean only from recordings and videos, but frankly, it’s even harder to make that quality come across on recorded media.
Posts By: willcwhite
Norman Ludwin: Scape-grace
In a few days’ time I will conduct a concert featuring the first movement of Giovanni Bottesini’s second concerto for double bass and orchestra, which truth be told is not much of a piece, but it’s better not to mention it since bass players have so little anyway.
This piece, I’ve come to find out, does not exist in an orchestral form handed down by the composer – if there ever was an original orchestration, it has been lost. All that remains to posterity is a piano transcription (which may or may not actually be from the composer’s pen).
It would seem there are as many arrangements of this piece as there are recordings, however, the only arrangement I was able to come by was written by a bassist/orchestrator named Norman Ludwin.
Mr. Ludwin’s biography indicates that he is currently employed as an orchestration teacher. If this piece were a freshman orchestration assignment, I would give it an F. Not one chord is voiced correctly, nor is there any attempt made at logical voice leading. Bars have been copied and pasted willy-nilly between parts with no regard to register or playability. Enharmonic spellings are but a sick joke.
One such page of this drivel with my extensive corrections
How many ways can I dis-repudiate this mingle-mangle of an orchestration? It is a hack-job by a scape-grace. It is the work of an author who could not tell a perfect fifth from a pig squeal, nor an E-flat from an earring. It is slap-dashery of the highest order.
A glance at his biography tells us that Mr. Ludwin, after a long career as a professional bassist, decided to return to school to better his skills as a composer/orchestrator in 2003, finally earning a doctorate in the field in 2007. His imdb profile profile even indicates that he worked as an orchestrator on two superb film scores (John Carter and Super 8, both by the brilliant Michael Giacchino) (though, on films with Music Departments dozens-strong, who knows exactly what that means.)
Here I am even willing to give Mr. Ludwin the benefit of the doubt: perhaps this arrangement represents an effort made prior to his advanced education. But if this be the case, the only honorable thing is for Mr. Ludwin to remove such an offensive work from his catalogue until he brings it up to his current standards. I would not want to be judged professionally on work that I found sub-par, and have gone to strenuous lengths to improve my earlier works. It is up to Mr. Ludwin to do the same.
Until that day may come, I offer two challenges:
1) I hereby offer my services as an arranger free of charge to anyone who would like an original orchestration of the Bottesini bass concerto, if only in the hopes of siphoning away funds from this street mountebank.
2) Should Mr. Ludwin choose to defend his work, he will have to do so on the field of honor, for I hereby challenge him to a duel, with pistols, at dawn on a day of his choosing. I do so in defense of the dignity of the musical arts.
Introducing: Cinderella
Well, I finally did it, I finally made a recording of my children’s piece-cum-viola concerto “Cinderella Goes to Music School”, the proper title of which is really “The Viola Concerto OR Cinderella Goes to Music School” (ala G&S). I’m super proud of this project, and I hope you’ll all enjoy it greatly:
This piece was SO MUCH FUN and SO MUCH WORK at every stage of its development. It started with an idea – that I would write an original piece for my annual children’s concert at the Pierre Monteux School in Hancock, ME. But what would the piece/story be about? My inspiration came from Pedro Almodóvar: so many of this master’s films are about filmmakers making films, so why not write a piece of music about musicians making music?
The idea of transforming Cinderella into a story about a young girl violist came to me in the shower one morning in a fit of inspiration. I leapt out of the tub, threw on some clothes and scribbled down the basic plot and character outline in about 20 minutes.
Since then, this piece has undergone many, many phases of development: after the initial composition of the script and the music, I took it to Maine, where I workshopped it with friends and colleagues last summer, and we gave the premiere. This past spring, I revised it for a different conductor/violist combo who were both involved in the original production for a performance in Cleveland. And just this past month I hired a bunch of random (and, dare I say, randomly excellent!) musicians to lay it down on the recording. Voiceover work followed (my favorite part – these are all the roles I was born to play!) and, finally, assembling the finished package with my trusted engineer Rick Andress. The final stage is heading back to the score itself – re-tooling the printed score and parts to match the many collaborative changes made over a year and a half of working.
I think the recording turned out great, and I hope that violists play it, musicians enjoy it, and most importantly, kids hear it. I dedicate it to the many “Cinderellas” both male and female I’ve known over the years – hard working violists who just don’t get the credit they deserve. The initial conception for this piece really goes back to the very hot summer of 2007, when I did little else but sit around my Chicago apartment and write beginnings to about 30 different versions of a viola concerto, all in the tief ernst, Ligeterian mode that I was into then. I’m so glad that the piece came out fun instead. Sharp-eared listeners might even hear a taste or two of Ligeti in this score.
On Minor Works
I’ve been thinking about two majorly large works over the past few weeks, Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis and 9th Symphony, gargantutrons which naturally lend themselves to wide-ranging analyses of their composer’s thoughts and philosophy. But at the same time, I myself was composing what is undeniably a minor work, a short anthem for four-part choir with piano, written for a church choir of about a dozen volunteer singers. I’m as prone to dreams of grandiosity as any other composer, but composing a little thing like this is undeniably fun, and it’s got me thinking that we too often overlook the little gems from composers far greater than myself.
Composing anything, be it a piece of music, a work of fiction, a painting on canvass, is really all about setting up a set of rules and then playing by them (or not). Every piece is a game. For example, in this little anthem I just finished the guidelines were: the text (chosen by the church), the number of voice parts (4), the ranges of the singers (amateur-level), the rehearsal time (not much), and the pianist’s capability (virtuosic). So right off the bat, there’s a balancing between a relatively simple choral part against a freewheeling piano part. With only four voice parts in the choir, every chord has to be voiced just so, or the ear will immediately catch the problem. The architecture of the piece has to be planned very carefully, since melodic highs can’t really be all that high. Not to mention, the text has to be understandable, and, ideally, expressively musicalized.
But now back to Beethoven, and these two enormous pieces which took him a combined 6 years to compose (or, really, a lifetime if you consider that in the ninth, he used melodies sketched as early as the 1790’s.) The 9th symphony is probably the single most effective piece ever written for a large concert hall with a huge audience. Listening to the “Ode to Joy”, that great paen to human brotherhood, it’s impossible not to to feel like everyone listening in the hall with you is your sibling.
But here’s a little something for you: did you know that Schiller’s poem “An die Freude” had already been set to music numerous times before Beethoven got around to it, including by one Franz Schubert?
Schiller’s poem was an example of the geselliges Lied (social song), a poem the author expected to be set to music and sung by groups of friends with glasses in hand. And you’ve got to admit, Schubert’s setting captures that blustery spirit in a way that Beethoven’s lofty, grandiose music doesn’t quite. Beethoven left out some lines such as
Freude trinken alle Wesen
An den Brüsten der Natur,
Alle Guten, all Bösen,
Folgen ihrer Rosenspur
(Joy all creatures drink at the breast of Nature, All that’s good, all that’s dumb, follow her rose-petaled path) – lines that look a lot better through rosy-petaled beer goggles at the pub.
Composers often use a smaller works the breeding grounds for larger ones, but it’s a mistake to view them as just so many little experiments. Just as often, a composer may have been working on something big, and found that a certain piece of material, though charming of its own accord, just didn’t fit right in context. Sometimes these musical cuttings can find their rightful home replanted in a little ditty somewhere down the line. Just because a melody is used in a song instead of a symphony doesn’t make it any less beautiful.
Chicago Symphony Extras: Missa Solemnis
The Dedicatee
In many ways, we who enjoy the music of Beethoven’s late period owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to an otherwise insubstantial member of the minor nobility. As the sixteenth child of the Emporor Leopold II, Archduke Rudolf of Austria could be pretty well certain that he was not going to inherit his father’s title, land, or fortune; as such, he did what so many younger sons of the nobility did and went into the priesthood, becoming archbishop (and then Cardinal) of Olmütz in 1819.
Rudolf seemingly got a pretty sweet deal, because while his older brother went down in history for losing his empire to Napoleon, Rudolf began studying piano and composition with the most famous composer in Europe, Ludwig van Beethoven.
Though Beethoven complained about his obligation to give the Archduke daily lessons (sometimes lasting more than two hours), the two grew to be friends at a time when Beethoven needed friends most. Napoleon’s wars had caused many of Beethoven’s most reliable patrons to abandon imperial Vienna for fear of losing their heads. Beethoven had insulted, cheated, or otherwise alienated the majority of the princely families who remained in their Austrian palaces.
The Lawsuit
It wasn’t just other people’s families who Beethoven alienated. The death of Beethoven’s younger brother Kaspar in 1815 precipitated the ugliest, most productivity-stifling event in his life: the fearsome custody battle he waged against his sister-in-law Johanna for the guardianship of his nephew, Karl.
The five years he spent engaged in litigation revealed the ugliest, least redeemable sides of Beethoven’s personality. In the days leading up to his brother’s death from tuberculosis, Beethoven strong-armed his brother into granting him sole custody of the child on multiple occasions, only to have his brother revert his will back to co-guardianship between Beethoven and Johanna in moments of lucidity.
Beethoven’s initial reaction to his brother’s death was to accuse his sister-in-law of murder by poisoning. When this turned out to be a dead end, he began the battle for sole custody of Karl. He won decisive early victories against his sister-in-law in the Landsrecht, the court of the nobility. Beethoven’s fates reversed in 1818 when he accidentally let slip in the course of a deposition that the “van” in his Dutch surname was not equivalent to the Germanic “von” which automatically conferred nobility. As such, his case was sent down to commoner’s court, which was much more sympathetic to Johanna van Beethoven’s cause.
Though Beethoven finally won custody over Karl, his insane, possessive love took a perilous evinced itself again a few years later when the teenage boy attempted to take his own life with a pistol on a high hill overlooking Beethoven’s summer home.
The Second Mass
Though he sometimes played around with themes for decades before turning them into full pieces, the four years it took Beethoven to complete the Missa Solemnis (1819 – 1823) represented the longest sustained period of work Beethoven spent on any single composition. Strangely for a composer who often went back and forth between projects, Beethoven did not work on individual movements and sections simultaneously; he composed it from beginning to end, beginning with the Kyrie and ending with the Agnus Dei.
This was in fact Beethoven’s second setting of the traditional Latin mass text, having written his first in 1807, the lesser known Mass in C. Aside from obvious stylistic differences, the main difference between the two works is length: whereas the Mass in C clocks in at a respectable 45 minutes, performances of the the Missa Solemnis usually last about twice as long.
As such, Beethoven languished considerable attention on every word and phrase of the Latin text. [N.B. the “Kyrie” is the only part of the Roman mass not in Latin; it’s in Greek.] Let’s take as an example his setting of the phrase qui sedes ad dexteram patris (“who sits at the right hand of the father”). Here’s how Beethoven set it in the earlier Mass in C:
And here it is magnified in every dimension in the Missa Solemnis:
The Difficulties
Beethoven rarely took into account the technical limits of the musicians he was writing for. He was as difficult and irascible a composer as he was a human being, especially when it came to writing for singers. The Missa Solemnis is arguably the most daunting challenge in the choral repertoire. It’s not exactly easy for the soloists or the orchestra either.
Here is an excellent performance of the Gloria given by the august London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus under Sir Colin Davis. It’s high order music-making, but you’ll still hear the sopranos straining, the orchestra struggling, and the soloists straying from their ideals of intonation. And yet the overall effect is, well, glorious: