Why Unsung?

[saxtromba]

Scrolling through various discussions, I came across the claim that Joachim Raff was not merely a better composer than Brahms, but made him look like "a lumbering dolt".  Clearly this is not a majority opinion, but forget for a moment whether or not you agree with it and think about the further question it raises if you assume that it's correct, the question which is the thread title.

There are composers who are considered to be among the greats, whose body of work provides touchstones against which to measure the work of other composers.  These composers are, by and large, the "sung" composers.  Brahms is generally accepted as belonging to this category.  So if we assume that Raff is a greater composer than Brahms, this raises the question as to why Raff is pretty much unsung and Brahms is not (for comparison: there are currently more recordings of any one of Brahms's symphonies than all of Raff's music put together).  It can't simply be that Brahms had the press on his side and Raff did not; even a quick glance at reviews from the 19th c. shows that Brahms faced much opposition and Raff was, if anything, more popular.  Nor can it be pure obstinacy on the part of conductors; many are the composers who have fallen from favor despite the best efforts of partisans on the podium.  If it's record sales, then why is Raff so much less sellable than Brahms?  What, then, are the reasons?

Then extend the question (after all, not everyone takes Raff to be better than Brahms).  Why do certain composers (whose worth you would be willing to defend) fall out of the repertoire while others go on and on?  Is it purely random?  On the face of it, this seems improbable, but maybe there's some evidence to support it.  If you met a person who knew nothing of serious Western music who asked who was worth hearing and why, and who was not and why not, how would you answer?

[Alan Howe]

Scrolling through various discussions, I came across the claim that Joachim Raff was not merely a better composer than Brahms, but made him look like "a lumbering dolt". 

Before proceeding with the discussion, which is a very important one, I want to address the question of misquotation (or quotation out of context, etc.), since I am the source of the comment cited above. What I actually said was:

<<But Raff's a different matter: I've come to believe that Symphonies 2, 3, 4 and 5 are masterpieces, and that his chamber music is stuffed full of them. The two Piano Quartets and the 1st String Quartet are just three examples. Why? It's that ability to write utterly memorable music, perfectly attuned to the genre involved, and characterised by a Schwung (for want of a better word) that makes, say, Brahms seem a lumbering dolt by comparison.>>

In other words, it was the sheer dynamism of Raff's music - in particular of the three chamber works mentioned - that in my view can make Brahms seem pretty dull by comparison. Emphasize 'seem'. It's just an impression one has from Raff's music. But I don't recall saying that Raff was a better composer than Brahms. In fact I believe that Brahms was the greater composer - Raff's output was certainly far more variable - but that, at his best, Raff's music is fully equal in quality to that of Brahms.

So, let's avoid misquoting each other, please. Now on with the debate...

[mbhaub]

I used to wrestle with this question all the time, especially after having read Einstein's "Greatness in Music" and Pleasant's "The Agony of Modern Music". And the winnowing out of music in the repertoire is continuing: Franck's d-minor for example is definitely losing ground. Scheherazade, too, I fear. So why do some things keep going, such as Brahms symphonies? I don't think it can be quantified. BUt as a player (Brahms First today, contrabassoon) when you play a "great" work, you just know it. You feel it in every cell of your body. When I play the great scores of Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky (yes!), Dvorak, Elgar and the rest, you just know in your gut that it is a masterwork. When you play lesser music (Grand Canyon Suite for example) no matter how much the audience may like it, you just don't get that same feeling. You know instinctively that however clever the score is, it's no masterpiece. And here's something to consider: any musician you talk to will agree on this (well, most of them). It effects conductors even more I suspect. For years I couldn't take a liking to Mozart. But when I played the 40th (even the 2nd bassoon part) it all made sense - it's a titanic work.
I don't mean to say that I disapprove of, or ignore, the lesser composers. At home, I rarely listen to Beethoven, Brahms, or Tchaikovsky. I listen to lots of other stuff that you don't hear in the concert hall, and I know lots of music that is enjoyable, moving, thrilling, and worth a person's time. But concert promoters and recording companies (the large ones) have to sell tickets/CDs to stay in business, and they know they can sell a new set of Mahler symphonies much easier than the complete works of Pancho Vladigerov. And related, a conductor has to sell a concert - and the low-information concert goers is more likely to want to hear the Beethoven 5th rather than the Raff 5th.

[Alan Howe]

I agree - sort of. And yet, and yet...so often we accept as great only the music which we are told is great. What we frequently lack is the opportunity to make up our minds for ourselves. After years of listening to a wide range of music I am convinced (a) that there is a very large amount of fine unsung music out there and that (b) some of that music is fully equal in quality to that of the recognised great composers. Unfortunately, there isn't (yet) a consensus concerning this music - and that's where the fight to get them recognised begins...

[thalbergmad]

so often we accept as great only the music which we are told is great. What we frequently lack is the opportunity to make up our minds for ourselves.

This is certainly true in my case. When I was reasonably serious about my piano studies back in the 70's, it was a diet of Beethoven, Bach & Brahms and maybe a couple of others. The local record shops had not a great deal more to offer by way of recordings and even less so with sheet music.

It was not until the internet age that I really began to experiment for myself and I started to present my piano teacher with works by Woelfl, Thalberg, Friedman, Eberl and a myriad of others. I was also stunned to find out that Czerny wrote more than just exercises. Now, when libraries around the World are freely digitalizing their archives and one only has to press a button on a PC to have a choice of thousands of different recordings, the opportunities are endless.

There must be a host of reasons why some composers are neglected and others seem to have their place cemented in the regular repertoire, but I don't think that the quality of the music plays a major part.

Thal

[Balapoel]

I will second Alan's post. I find the same 'gut' reaction to masterpieces that was mentioned before, however I find this response for sungs AND unsungs. The most recent one was my response to Goldenweiser's Piano Trio in e minor. I find I have to return to listen to it again and again - and the feeling doesn't change. It just seems 'right' - every note placed where it has to be.

I do believe if the concert-going public had more information, we would have more variety in concerts. I think just tossing a lot of the serial, atonal 'hey look, I can make all the notes inverted and forming the first 3 stanzas of paradise lost...' junk to make room for new discoveries...

Of course, that's not going to happen. Oh well.

[Gauk]

There are really two main issues here. Firstly, how does a composer, starting out unknown, become elevated to the canon? Secondly, how does a composer who is part of the canon fall from grace and become obscure to later generations? There is perhaps also a third question as to how a fallen composer regains his rightful place.

Really, it has to be examined in the context of musical history as a whole, and not just the chunk from 1818-1918. Many interesting cases fall outside the romantic category. But Raff is a particularly interesting example (Spohr is another) of a composer whose star in his lifetime was extremely high, and whose place in the canon seemed secure, yet collapsed to the extent that his name is virtually unknown today except to specialists.

The question that perhaps has to be asked, is what would it take to reintroduce Raff into the standard repertoire? Does it just take a champion, as Mendelssohn was to Bach? Or are there other issues?

In many cases, of course, composers are obscure today because they never made it into the big time to start off with, and again there may be a multiplicity of reasons for this.

[eschiss1]

I'd keep all the "serial, atonal junk" you refer to and get rid of everything Andrew Lloyd Webber's written, but you're right, Balapoel, you can't have everything and certainly neither can I...

[saxtromba]

Well, I do fail to see that I've misquoted anyone. 

But Raff's a different matter: I've come to believe that Symphonies 2, 3, 4 and 5 are masterpieces, and that his chamber music is stuffed full of them. The two Piano Quartets and the 1st String Quartet are just three examples. Why? It's that ability to write utterly memorable music, perfectly attuned to the genre involved, and characterised by a Schwung (for want of a better word) that makes, say, Brahms seem a lumbering dolt by comparison.

Raff wrote at least four symphonies which are "masterpieces"; Brahms, by definition, could not have written more.  Raff's music is "utterly memorable," and "perfectly attuned to the genre involved"; it is difficult to see how anyone else's music could be better than "utterly memorable" or "perfectly attuned" to its context.  If this doesn't make Raff at least comparable to Brahms, what would?

And in fact the point is precisely that: either there are composers who produced a significant number of works which deserve entry into the canon who are less well regarded (unsung) than they deserve to be, or there are not.  No composer produced nothing but unalloyed masterpieces, so the fact that a prolific composer's catalog is more variable than that of a less prolific composer doesn't strike me as especially relevant.  But that's really not the focus here.  The question is why certain composers are consistently canonical and others are not, regardless of their initial popularity.  Bach was canonical very soon after his death (Mendelssohn's famous "resurrection" of Bach really refers more to his popularity among the concert-going public than anything else; all the major composers after Bach and before Mendelssohn's 1830 concerts (Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, etc.) knew, respected, and learned from his work.  The same is not true of, say (so as to avoid this whole Raff thing, which was merely a starting point), Meyerbeer (whose mother was "the second woman in history to see her son accepted as divine," according to Heine) or Hummel, both of whom were popular and respected in their lifetimes.

So it isn't simply that people were told that Brahms is great and Hummel is not; there was a time when people were told something quite different (e.g.. Philip Hale's notorious suggestion that concert halls have signs saying "Exit in case of Brahms").  Despite this, some composers last and others do not.  If it's just a matter of personal taste, as some have suggested, then the whole idea of giving reasons for inviting non-canonical composers into, or least near to, the canon falls apart.  Since the vigor of various opinions here implies that people quite believe that certain composers are unjustly neglected, this further implies that there must be some set of criteria by which the justice of this or that composer's historical assessment can be measured.  It seems to be that memorability of tunes and appropriateness of scoring, for example, are quite plausible contenders for elements in that list.  Once we start providing these elements, we can then apply them to discussion of specific works, and on a larger scale, composers in order to make arguments for a critical and historical reassessment.

[Gauk]

...  it is difficult to see how anyone else's music could be better than "utterly memorable" or "perfectly attuned" to its context.  If this doesn't make Raff at least comparable to Brahms, what would?

Well, to be honest, Khachaturian's ballet scores are both utterly memorable and perfectly attuned to their context. What they lack is profundity.

[eschiss1]

The very few composers I count as first tier had a good deal more relative consistency of quality in their output, for what it's worth; the occasional dud, no doubt- there's a limited number of times I really want to listen to that long aria in Bach's BWV No.3 (though most of the cantatas I've heard are wonderful) and I won't go to great lengths to defend certain Beethoven works (though even there, I very much enjoyed a cantata he wrote around the time of sym.8 whose publication he himself delayed, I think, to the point that it shows up as his Op.136... (The Glorious Moment (Eyeblink)). But both composers, and Haydn, Mozart and Brahms (about whom I can't help thinking that the lumbering dolt was probably the conductors/tradition more than the composer, but...) - have entire rafts of works one rarely hears that seem to make them several unsung composers in their own selves* (Haydn's operas, the Bach cantatas, lesser organ works, whathave, Brahms' whole vocal and choral output (save his once very well-known German Requiem which no one would describe as unsung ), etc., ...) with, again a relative consistency I don't yet feel I can come to expect from Raff (e.g.) and the larger part of his output (mostly brief piano works, numerically speaking, in his case) for all that I think very well indeed of the -best- of the works of these composers, am (I think) no hypocrite in wishing to hear more of them and in having made some efforts to promote some works by some of them.

(In re Brahms, actually, hearing his Zigeunerlieder back in a concert in my pre-freshman orientation days of college ('87) was a revelation and change... I admit I had no idea he could write music like that either, then...)

*I figured that a Paradise Lost reference deserved another tangential Milton one (The mind is its own place, and...)

[X. Trapnel]

Fluctuations in reputation have as much to do with extra-musical issues, social, cultural, and political, as they do with the intrinsic quality of a composer's work. Likewise critical opinion is heavily influenced by the economics of performance such that one composer's victory becomes another's defeat, particularly as classical music becomes more culturally marginalized.

[Alan Howe]

If this doesn't make Raff at least comparable to Brahms, what would?

That was my point, but only in respect of certain works by Raff who was a much more inconsistent composer than Brahms. The misquote - or shall we say, false conclusion drawn - was that I thought that Raff was the better composer. Mind you, I personally believe that the first movement of Raff 4 is as exciting as anything written by Brahms (if not more so) - and again, it's to do with the sheer dynamism of the music. In the case of Raff, then, I am simply baffled by his disappearance from the repertoire (from the point of view of its quality). Plainly, Toscanini agreed...

[eschiss1]

Well, Toscanini, and several of his well-known contemporaries (Stokowski, others), seem to have been willing to include people who even then were no longer (or had ever really been?) repertoire material - though "people say" that Toscanini's reasons for including so much Martucci, e.g., in his concerts had more to do with nationalism (I'd like to think that the quality of Martucci's music, inconsistent though I admit that is, too, had a look-in also...)

[Josh]

"you just know in your gut that it is a masterwork" - mbhaub

But I listen to pieces that seem virtually universally deemed masterworks and don't know it in my gut at all; often, quite the opposite impression.  With some universally-acclaimed masterpieces which I could name, I experience outright revulsion.  Then I might listen to a piece that is generally considered "lesser music ... [which] no matter how much the audience may like it, you just don't get that same feeling", but I do get that feeling on some of those very pieces that you probably mean.  I feel that sensation - and I think I do know what you mean by it.

Part of me thinks that the "canon" is often imposed from on high by respected authorities.  I've experienced many direct, personal insults just by questioning in the politest possible way the rigidity of this "canon" (and on at least one occasion received something flat-out shocking).  A great many people will know in advance that they won't feel a work is great simply because it's not established as such.  I'd probably say this is a majority of music-listeners, at some level they absolutely will pre-judge to some extent.  Professional reviewers simply can't even review a CD lesser-known music without including at least some kind of negative statement, some kind of qualifier to let the reader know that the reviewer is well aware that this isn't "great" music.  And the sad part is, those particular elements of the reviews could very well have been written in advance by most of these reviewers, they were going to say it no matter, and they don't listen in a "pure" state.

Another part of me thinks that certain components of taste in many areas just happen to be more widely shared among Humans, especially those within the same upbringing.  Speaking of taste, there are certain foods, for example, that you could test out on all the population of western Europe, and probably come up with fairly consistent results in which people thought was better or worse.  Leaving nutrition out of it, speaking purely about flavour, most would agree that a fine-dining restaurant's version of, say, a burger tastes better than a fast food chain's rendition.  There's no objective reason that it tastes better, it's just that probably most people in a given group are very innately similar to each other when it comes to taste.

This might hold true for music, also.  The composers widely considered Great might just have been those who happened to be most capable of manipulating the most widely common, widely shared similar innate taste in the widest number of Humans.  Those who feel very strongly that certain masterpieces are not masterful at all, or that certain "second-rate" works are indeed Great with a capital G, might be a bit "off", maybe even something genetic.

I can only say that if I ever say that I find a piece to be truly great, I honestly, deep down, and with 100% conviction feel that that is the case, the exact same that someone else does when talking about how Beethoven's Symphony #5 is Great (I agree with that one, by the way).  But it's - and this is very important - not objective.  There's nothing objective whatsoever in saying one thing is better than another.  Any measure of quality is subjective, simply because it's impossible to prove mathematically or scientifically that one thing is superior to another.  You can't prove concepts like good&bad, better&worse, because by their very nature they are absolutely not objective by any means.

And by the way, with complete sincerity I will state here, flat out, that I feel and find Raff to be Great, and Brahms to not be.  I can't help it.  I don't wish to think it (or not to), I don't plan it, and am not saying it to try to make some point or to try to be different: it just is.  I don't know why, or how this happened.  I didn't study on it, plan for it, wish for it, or want it to happen, it's just how their musics play out in my brain and how my emotions and intellect react in general to each.  Although try to take away my Brahms Op.25 Piano Quartet from my collection and we'll have a huge problem.