Superfreax of Music
by modern living editor Jason Capodimonte
You may have noticed that an earlier series of articles by Sean McGarrell about music has vanished from the site. The series was too well-intentioned for the likes of people around here, it seems, including their author, Mr. McGarrell, who left here one day muttering about people doing trips on him and has never been seen or heard from since.
The point of the series seems to have been to promote serious appreciation of music, so you can imagine how that went over around NIH. In contemporary Canada, serious is a synonym for solemn and pointless. We at NIH certainly believe in pointlessness, but we see no point to being solemn about it. How the series got approved is one of those mysteries or conundrums or whatever.
Mr. Mcgarrell did things like describe how you could enjoy the Guillaume de Machaut's Notre Dame Mass as a masterly exercise in counterpoint. Well, sure – you can certainly enjoy the Notre Dame Mass as a masterly exercise in counterpoint. But to do that you have to have studied counterpoint, eh?. The problem is that not only have most of us never studied counterpoint, we have no bloody interest in studying counterpoint.
At bottom there is no formal way to evaluate music. Guillaume's masterly counterpoint is intrinsically no more valuable than inept counterpoint. If you are a musician, then, knowledge of counterpoint may give you interesting and challenging things to accomplish. Then you'll love counterpoint. Most of us are not musicians, though. Counterpoint shmounterpoint. It's all the same to us, eh?
I enjoy the Notre Dame Mass quite effectively despite having little knowledge of counterpoint other than how to spell it. Why is that? Because the Notre Dame Mass is freaky.
When you listen to the Kyrie of the Notre Dame Mass, it's impossible to figure out what was going through buddy's mind when he came up with it. It is completely wacked out. All them high male voices leaping up and down singing a single syllable over a couple or three dozen notes – you don't hear that on the radio. It is pointless, but exciting. You don't hear exciting music much on the radio, either.
The history of music is the history of the superfreaks of music. Consider Monteverdi. When he first tried to conduct his composition Tancredi and Clorinda, the musicians refused to play it. Why? Because it was too freaky, man. What Monteverdi had done was invent the device of repeated notes on the same pitch. He used it to create tension and excitement, just as it's used in movie music today. But he freaked out his fellow musicians. It was exciting.
And eventually people copied him, and the repeated note became a commonplace in the musical idiom. In jazz, the original beboppers almost induced strokes among jazz critics and audiences with their wild new music, but today bop and its offspring hard bop are the kind of music people think of when they think of jazz. The original rock and rollers scared people into thinking civilization was collapsing, but today their music seems quaint.
A composition which must have freaked out its listeners when it was first played is Spem in alium, a choral piece by Thomas Tallis. It has forty parts. Hello? Did you hear me? Forty parts! It's written in forty parts. Some of the harmonies are just a wee bit scary, too, and it builds in a big freaking crescendo to a fortissimo finish which is then snapped off like the light in the bathroom. It's exciting.
The excitement of freaky music comes from exceptional artistry, but we don't have to understand the artistry to appreciate it, just as we don't have to understand how the CN Tower was built to appreciate the view from the top. We may not understand anything about counterpoint and harmony, but Guillaume, Monteverdi, and Tallis did,and that's how they got their music to be exciting. They also wrote music which wasn't exciting, but are any of us interested in boring music? Do we listen to music to be bored? I'm afraid too many teachers of music appreciation would like us to.
We may find the superfreak in any branch of music. Polka – Walter Ostanec. Bluegrass – the Stanley Brothers. Jazz – Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Jackie McLean, Oscar Peterson, and many, many more.
And of course Julian Bream's Dances of Dowland, the funkiest lute album ever recorded.
[Okay, that's enough. You get the point, right? I won't recommend recorded versions of most of these selections because most of the issues in my collection are so old the prices are in sesterces. However, to listen to Spem in alium get your hands on the King's College, Cambridge CD (Great Choral Classics from King's, London 289 452 949-2)]Superfreax of Music © John FitzGerald, 2001, 2007
Click the banner or click here for ACTUAL ANALYSIS
Reviews | Home