Tag: Alex Ross

Having installed Idagio, the all classical music app suggested by Alex Ross this week in his review of Apple Music Classical, I then turned to his book “The Rest is Noise” (2007) to search for some 20th Century music to test Idagio’s functions. I alighted on Schoenberg. I like “Twelve-Tone” music because it ignores mood. One of the features of Idagio that’s somewhat annoying is its suggestion that classical music can somehow be explained by moods, evoke mood, or dispel mood. Maybe it can and does, but the Idagio feature labeled “Play My Mood” asks the musician to be a magician. I’m reminded of the first stanza of Wallace Stevens’s “The Man with a Blue Guitar” (1937):

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play, you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”

By eliminating the listener’s expectations, Twelve-Tone music replaces mood with something new. It sends the elevator you might be riding through the roof. Somehow, I’m not sure if I found it first in Idagio or “The Rest is Music,” I was suddenly listening to Schoenberg’s “String Trio” op. 45 (1946). Alex Ross gives it this analysis:

“The score is full of distortion and noise, with the players asked to execute such eerie [pun intended?] effects as sul ponticello (bowing the strings at the bridge) and col legno (bowing or tapping the strings with the wood of the bow). Yet the contrasting lyrical episodes radiate nostalgia for the former tonal world. By his own testimony [was he on trial?], Schoenberg was depicting in musical terms a severe asthma attack he experienced in the summer of 1946, during which his pulse temporarily stopped and he was given an injection to the heart. Some passages represented the injections, he said, others the male nurse who treated him. The composer Allen Shawn, in a book about Schoenberg, notes that the String Trio is a kind of fantastic autobiography, ‘as if in his delirium he had reviewed his life.’ The ending is soft and wistful.”

324

One problem with that analysis is that Ross has already mentioned “Scott Bradley’s inventive scores for Tom and Jerry cartoons in the forties, notably Puttin’ on the Dog and The Cat That Hated People” (324). Schoenberg’s attempts to introduce Twelve-Tone music into movies, Ross explains, came to disappointment, but then it was found to work well in cartoons. I then looked for “The Cat That Hated People” in Idagio. Not there. So I tried YouTube, and there it is, a classic from 1948:

If you listen to only the music, separate the music from the cartoon, you’ll have the necessary introduction to Schoenberg’s “String Trio” of 1946. If you still don’t get it, just remember it has something to do with cats:

XXV

He held the world upon his nose
And this-a-way he gave a fling.

His robes and symbols, ai-yi-yi –
And that-a-way he twirled the thing.

Sombre as fir-trees, liquid cats
Moved in the grass without a sound.

They did not know the grass went round.
The cats had cats and the grass turned gray

And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way:
The grass turned green and the grass turned gray.

And the nose is eternal, that-a-way.
Things as they were, things as they are,

Things as they will be by and by . . .
A fat thumb beats out ai-yi-yi.

Wallace Stevens, “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Stanza XXV of XXXIII